Lifeboat Foundation

Years ago while I was still in college, I was able to experience what it was like working hands on in operations and logistics in retail. And, one of the most frustrating points was having to step away and log things on a desktop or try to locate your scanner to scan things in. I thought how wonderful it would be to be able to scan in receivables with my eyes and how much faster logistics would be. Although this article is from November; it highlights how VR really does improve things for companies, employees, and the quicker turn around time to customers.

A VR supply chain allows manufacturers to design and architect in 3-D, evaluate designs and make critical decisions about new products and customer buying decisions.

A new version of Atlas, designed to operate outdoors and inside buildings. It is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated. It uses sensors in its body and legs to balance and LIDAR and stereo sensors in its head to avoid obstacles, assess the terrain and help with navigation. This version of Atlas is about 5’ 9” tall (about a head shorter than the DRC Atlas) and weighs 180 lbs.

Graphene is too delicate to be produced commercially, but it seem that scientists have now stumbled upon the correct method of tuning it.

Graphene has many extraordinary properties. It is carbon, but it comes in the form of a two-dimensional, atomic thick, honeycomb lattice.

Continue reading “Graphene May Soon be Produced Commercially, Thanks to a Chance Discovery” »

Sometimes, it seems like the tech world is inexorably bending towards a future full of curved devices. At MWC in Barcelona, we saw yet another prototype display, this time from English firm FlexEnable. Now, this isn’t a working device of any kind — it’s essentially just a screen running a demo — and neither is FlexEnable a consumer electronics company. But the firm says its technology is ready to go, and it’s apparently in talks with unnamed hardware partners who want to make this sort of device a reality. How long until we see fully-fledged wristbands like this on the market? Eighteen months is the optimistic guess from FlexEnable’s Paul Cain.

The prototype uses plastic transistors to achieve its flexibility, creating what the company calls OLCD (organic liquid crystal display) screens. FlexEnable says these can achieve the same resolutions as regular LCD using the same amount of power, but, of course, they have that added flexibility. These transistors can be wrapped around pretty much anything, and also have uses outside of display technology. FlexEnable was also showing off thin flexible fingerprint sensors, suggesting they could be wrapped around a door handle to add security without it being inconvenient to the user.

Continue reading “FlexEnable has created a screen you can wrap around your wrist” »

Your smartwatch screen may soon be rather more impressive: This 4.7-inch organic LCD display is flexible enough to wrap right around a wrist.

Produced by FlexEnable from the UK, the screen squeezes a full-color organic LCD onto a sheet that measures just one hundredth of an inch thick, which makes it highly conformable. The company claims that it can easily run vivid colour and smooth video content, which is a sight better than most wearables.

It’s not the first flexible display, of course. LG already has an 18-inch OLED panel that has enough flexibility to roll into a tube that’s an inch across. But this concept—which, sadly, is all it is right now—is the first large, conformable OLCD designed for wearables that we’ve seen.

Continue reading “This 4.7-Inch Organic LCD Wraps Right Around Your Wrist” »

UC Berkeley engineers, in collaboration with colleagues at Taiwan’s National Chiao Tung University, have developed a 3D printing process for creating basic electronic components, such as resistors, inductors, capacitors, and integrated wireless electrical sensing systems.

As a test, they printed a wireless “smart cap” for a milk carton that detected signs of spoilage using embedded sensors.

Plasmonics, the study of how electrons behave in a metal under an electromagnetic field, requires the use of specialty coherent light sources as a basic tool. Optical interferometry can potentially become more important in biomedicine if only the technology could be made more compact, practical, and proven useful.

Toward that end researchers at Brown University have developed a way of using plasmonics techniques without using a coherent light source at all. This allows optical interferometry at the nanoscale and should lead to new types of biomedical sensors that can do rapid wide spectrum analysis for a variety of markers.

Here’s more details about the technology from Brown University:

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Wireless Power Transmission Market reach $13.11 Billion by 2020. This is an area that I plan to keep a closer eye on especially since IEEE’s recent approved standards on sensors. I have a feeling that we could start seeing some major progress in this space.

DUBLIN, Jan. 27, 2016 /PR Newswire UK/ — Wireless Power Transmission Market (2015−2020) — Valued at $0.72 Billion in 2014 & Is Expected to Grow at a CAGR of 51.5%.

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Integrated circuits traditionally have been a domain reserved for electrons, which course through exquisitely tiny transistors, wires and other microscopic structures where the digital calculations and data processing that underlie so much of modern technology unfold. Increasingly, however, chip designers have been acting on a long-ripening vision of enlisting photons instead of, or in tandem with, electrons in the operation of microprocessors. Photons, for one, can serve as fast-as-light carriers of information between chips, overcoming digital traffic jams that at times put the brakes on electrons. Recently, DARPA-funded scientists designed and crafted a breakthrough microprocessor that combines many of the best traits of electrons and photons on a single chip. The result is a remarkable and elegant hybrid microtechnology that boggles the mind for the intricate complexity of its sub-Lilliputian architecture. To appreciate the engineering acumen involved in the development of this chip and its tens of millions of resident electronic and photonic components, DARPA has produced an annotated, graphical tour of the new chip’s innards. Check it out, and lose yourself in a world of highways, toll gates and traffic circles populated by some of the physical world’s smallest commuters.

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