A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience
Designers are now employing built-in cameras and microphones to enable TVs to recognize your gestures, spoken instructions, and even individual faces.
For over 60 years the TV remote control has been a centerpiece of living rooms and the focus of family squabbles. But its age is showing — and new technologies built into the next generation of TVs may replace the old clicker.
‘Blackberry thumb’
Tennis elbow, writer’s block and even athlete’s foot are problems than can cause considerable discomfort and more than a little embarrassment. Adding to the list of potential health hazards, the widespread use of hand-held devices at work has spawned a new condition.
The Motor-Driven Ice Cream Scooper is a hand-held motor driven device intended to permit the user to not only handle frozen ice cream, but to simultaneously form attractive spheres. Perfect for the lazy multi-tasker, Patent# US 6840754 is one of those things that upon reflection, everyone can surely live without. It comes equipped with a half circle-shaped arc at the end of a tube, in which claws shaped as half-circles are inserted. The claws slide and upon command embed into the frozen the ice cream, their continuous rotation forming a sphere. (If you prefer another geometric shape, forget about it. Not possible.)
Ultrasound machines can cost $20,000 or more and weigh 30 pounds, but not George K. Lewis’s ultrasound device. Lewis’s portable therapeutic ultrasound machine cost him about $150 to make — 80 percent of which was spent on the battery — it fits in the palm of his hand, and it can help treat cancer and relieve arthritis… among other things.
Continue reading… ““Groundbreaking” Portable Therapeutic Ultrasound System”
This portable hand-held scanning translator can scan a word or a full line of text and give you an immediate translation, even idioms and phrases.
Satellite broadcaster Dish Network Corp. will test technology for digital satellite TV broadcasts to hand-held devices this summer in concert with Alcatel-Lucent.
Continue reading… “Dish Network to Test Satellite TV Delivery to Hand-Held Devices”
Juniper Research forecasts that by 2013, worldwide mobile advertising spending will reach almost $7.6 billion, up from just over $1 billion in 2008.
Text message advertising currently accounts for the largest share of mobile advertising with $335 million spent in 2008, but as mobile TV services proliferate, SMS advertising spending will rise to only $2.5 billion by 2012.