Quantum PI's nanoTrek sensors pick up vibration and motion your Wiimote could never dream of
By Paul Miller 
posted May 1st 2009 9:52AM
posted May 1st 2009 9:52AM
[Via The Inquirer]
posted May 1st 2009 9:52AM
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now lets get it into some consoles!!!!
Apple is going to sue, since it innovated the word "Nano"
artificial skin for robot has come.
Look man, quantum tunneling is all fine. As long as you don't cross the tunnels. You never want to cross the tunnels.
This is what I need. My motion detection is terrible. It takes a big movement to set it off. An ant crawling on the floor wont set it off and that's a good thing. I know you can adjust the sensitivity of these things. Everything keeps getting better and better. What's next, Bluetooth 3.0?
One problem with the chip in the Wii remote is the maximum acceleration it can register, which is less than you can generate. Seems to me that making a really tiny measuring thingy, while it might be great for increasing accuracy for small measurements, isn't necessarily going to increase the maximum range. I'm not an expert or anything, maybe this is wrong.
And don't worry, I'm sure they will come out with a Super Monkey Ball Motion Plus before then...
It's actually pretty clever. They seem to be using some kind of squishy material between Silicon wafers which can cause the alignment of the wires to change, changing the tunneling probability.
My Wiimote doesn't dream
Quantum Tunnelling is perfectly safe and occurs all the time in everything. Basically, in classical physics, things can be kept in place by potentials they don't have the energy to overcome (i.e. you are kept on the surface of the Earth by the gravitational potential of the Earth and you not having the energy to overcome it, protons/neutrons kept in the nucleus because of the extraordinary energy they'd need to escape...etc).
That doesn't happen, though. Protons and neutrons can leave the nucleus (for example in alpha decay) without needing to overcome the potential holding them in place. It's almost like they "tunnel" through the potential barrier. It was an explained yet mysterious phenomenon until quantum physics, which explained mathematically that there was never zero chance of the particle not emerging on the other side of the barrier, no matter how large the potential barrier holding it in place.
In fact, all electronics use this. For example, if you have a thin layer of oxide on the surface of your material, that would represent a barrier to electrons trying to get through. Thanks to quantum tunnelling, they can make it through. For example, ohmic contacts that connect the raw silicon of a transistor to the copper cables uses tunnelling.