Blue Is The New Red

Kent Displays (I've never heard of them either) have apparently been making cool and funky displays for a few years now and selling them to manufacturers but today it was announced that they've got two hot new technologies ready to rock your gadget world.

The first one is "a simple monochrome electronic writing tablet that consists of a pressure sensitive display (think next-generation Post-it note)". I can't quite picture how this works and the photo just looks like a bent LCD screen...

BUT!

The cool one is the funky colour changing electronic "skin". Named eGo it requires no power at all to maintain any colour already rendered on the surface. This means you can "display" whatever colour you'd like and it stays that way without using any more power until you switch it again. It would be handy for things like watches and phones (like in the photo) if you're a little fashion conscious. Or maybe it can be applied to your fingernails so you can be just like the secretary from The Fifth Element. Can you think of any other uses for it.

Carcade: Play As You Drive

Remember the good ol' days when you'd be driving along in the backseat of the family wagon on a hot day bored out of your brains. You'd have the window down and every now and again you'd stick your hand out into the oncoming wind just for something to do. My older brother took it one step further and would often "surf" a two-fingers hand-man on an icy-pole stick.

Well, some German students have taken this idea and made a video game out of it. Carcade is the name of it and using a webcam and laptop it scans the view out your car window. It then converts the view into a landscape for you to navigate your spaceship over as you pick up good stars and avoid bomb-stars.

Going by the video (below) it detects obstacles that are too big to fly over and gives you a portal of sorts so you don't come to a firey death. It even adjusts game play speed according to vehicle speed.

Check out the video to see what I'm rambling on about...

Audi Sees Red... and Amber and Green

Audi, those whacky Germans who like to build crazy fast station wagons, have announced some pretty cool tech coming our way some time in the near future.

The new tech, called Travolution, involves traffic lights but don't let that get you down as its ultimate goal is to save you some cash. As Autoblog puts it, "Travolution establishes a connection between a red light and a vehicle, so that as a specially equipped car moves toward a red light at an intersection, stop light gantries fitted with communications modules can let the car know when the light will turn green. The car then lets the driver know what speed he should maintain in order to pass through the intersection without having to brake for the light and then accelerate again. " Nice.

Unfortunately the traffic lights themselves need to be updated so it's quite a big buy-in for local governments but hopefully Audi have made Travolution an open standard so other manufacturers can get in on the action.

USB 3.0: More Details Than You'll Ever Need To Know

Are you sick of USB 2.0 yet? According to Wikipedia it was released over 8 years ago (April 2000). Of course there's always a lag period between when things are released and when they are freely and cheaply available to the masses but that can't have been more than a year.

Well, last week, Intel gave AMD, nVidia and others what they'd been hanging out for: 90% complete USB 3.0 controller specifications. Today Engadget is reporting on a detailed analysis of those specs by MaximumPC which tells you just what you'll be getting in your USB 3.0 kit.

"The highlights include assurance that USB 3.0 will be backwards-compatible with USB 2.0 and that it'll provide transfer rates up to ten times more than USB 2.0's 480Mbps limit (that's 4.8Gbps). Furthermore, we're told that uploads and downloads are kept on separate lanes, the cables are thicker, it will charge more devices more quickly, and it will be much more mindful of energy waste."

The bad news is that it's going to be backwards-compatible with USB 2.0... yes, that's bad news. It means we're still stuck with that rediculous rectangular plug. Seriously, who designed that thing? Make it an irregular shape so we don't have to go crawling under desks just to see if it's the right way round. I'm sure there's a "Murphy's Law" that dictates that you will always get the plug upside down on your first attempt, something similar to the butter-side-down Tumbling Toast theory.

Anyway, if we're lucky, by next year we'll be seeing some crazy 4.8Gbps transfer speeds from our portable devices... maybe a nice 512GB SSD or something.

Cool New "Nanoantenna" Material

I love reading stuff like this. It's super nerdy but has the potential to hugely change the way we do things. This new nanoantenna material developed by the DoE's Idaho National Laboratory grabs heat from anywhere and converts it to electricity. That's right, heat. So you could whack it in your uber crazy gaming rig to help with the cooling and at the same time gain a bonus source of power.

To quote Engadget, "The material, composed of tiny gold antennas set in polyethylene plastic is tuned to gather 80 percent of energy from infrared rays in its production version, and can gather energy from the sun, earth, or even your PC's warmth. The antennas can be tuned to different parts of the infrared spectrum, and the thin material can be sandwiched together to cover the full desired range. Unfortunately, the resulting current generated alternates at rates too high to be converted to DC with current technology -- new manufacturing processes will needed -- but once that problem is solved, nanoantennas should easily best solar cells in efficiency and production costs." Did you like their little "current" pun there?

MIT Working On "6-D" Display

The brains at MIT have created what they're calling a "4-D" display where a static image (in this case a brandy bottle) appears to cast shadows, show highlights and generally react to the light behind it. Make sure you check out the video to ensure you have even the slightest clue as to what is going on.

Great news for billboard-type advertisers and maybe the manufacturers of those LCD photo displays you see in homes these days. Not sure who else this may benefit but cool nonetheless.

Esquire E-Ink Edition

We've dreamed of full colour video magazine/newspaper covers in sci fi for decades now and even Harry Potter has magic covers on his biology text books but after reading this bit of info from Engadget the "fi" part can be dropped from "sci fi".

Using E-Ink (which is freaky when you see it in person) Esquire Magazine's September edition will have 100,000 copies printed with an E-Ink cover. Until 2009 the technology in use is exclusive to Esquire and the blinking "The 21st Century Begins Now" text will cease to blink after the battery runs out in 90 days.

E-Ink is currently available in a series of e-book readers and other devices like mobile phones and watches.

Not quite the full motion video I'd hoped for but definitely one step closer.