JapanScienceAndTechnologyAgency
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Lighty paints real lighting Photoshop-style, minus the overdone lens flare (video)
It's not hard to find smart lightbulbs that bow to our every whim. Creating a well-coordinated light scheme can be difficult without tweaking elements one by one, however, which makes the Japan Science and Technology Agency's Lighty project that much more elegant. The approach lets would-be interior coordinators paint degrees of light and shadow through an app, much as they would create a magnum opus in Photoshop or a similar image editor. Its robotic lighting system sorts out the rest: a GPU-assisted computer steers a grid of gimbal-mounted lightbulbs until their positions and intensity match the effect produced on the screen. While Lighty currently exists just as a scale model, the developers plan to work with life-sized rooms, and potentially large halls, from now on. We're all for the newfound creativity in our lighting, as long as we can't mess it up with a Gaussian Blur filter.
Shader Printer uses heat-sensitive 'paint' that can be erased with low temperatures (hands-on video)
Lovin' the bold look of those new Nikes? If you're up to date on the athletic shoe scene, you may notice that sneaker designs can give way long before your soles do. A new decaling technique could enable you to "erase" labels and other artworks overnight without a trace, however, letting you change up your wardrobe without shelling out more cash. A prototype device, called Shader Printer, uses a laser to heat (at 50 degrees Celsius, 120 degrees Fahrenheit) a surface coated with a bi-stable color-changing material. When the laser reaches the "ink," it creates a visible design, that can then be removed by leaving the object in a -10 degree Celsius (14 degree Fahrenheit) freezer overnight. The laser and freezer simply apply standard heat and cold, so you could theoretically add and remove designs using any source. For the purposes of a SIGGRAPH demo, the team, which includes members from the Japan Science and Technology Agency, Keio University, the University of Tokyo and MIT, used a hair dryer to apply heat to a coated plastic doll in only a few seconds -- that source doesn't exactly offer the precision of a laser, but it works much more quickly. Then, they sprayed the surface with -50-degree Celsius (-58 Fahrenheit) compressed air, which burned off the rather sloppy pattern in a flash. There were much more attractive prints on hand as well, including an iPhone cover and a sneaker with the SIGGRAPH logo, along with a similar plastic doll with clearly defined eyes. We also had a chance to peek at the custom laser rig, which currently takes about 10 minutes to apply a small design, but could be much quicker in the future with a higher-powered laser on board. The hair dryer / canned air combo offers a much more efficient way of demoing the tech, however, as you'll see in our hands-on video after the break.
Beam-switching endows electron microscopes with 3D, added gross-out
Having haunted our curtailed childhoods with tiny, disgusting horrors, the scanning electron microscope is about to get a new lease of life in 3D. Researchers in Japan have figured out how to deflect the electron beam rapidly to give two slightly shifted views, so real-time 3D images can now been scoped on a monitor without even the need for eye-wear. Current gear can only muster flat images, so it's always been painfully slow for scientists to extract convexity and other details from objects. Though the 3D-version is lower-res than the old way, at least now all those slimy mandibles and egg sacs will be right there in your face. Nice.
Self-aware headphones switch channels depending on which ear they're in (video)
Life is fraught: social interaction, inflation and fashion all conspire to ruin your day. Even the simple act of firing up your PMP can send you to the floor in tears if you discover your earbuds are in the wrong way, forever ruining the beautiful stereo trickery of The White Album. Fortunately, Japan's Science and Technology Agency has beavered away at this most first-world of problems with its Universal Earphones Project. One earpiece holds a proximity sensor, which if it's pointing at your ear, pumps out the left-channel, if it's facing away from you, it pumps out the right channel (pictured). It's also capable of working out if you've shared your sounds with a friend and will push out a mono mix to both headphones -- so neither of you miss out on the other half. Amazing to think all of the money and manpower that went into a solution to save you having to read the letters "L" and "R" and making a decision for yourself. After the break we've got a video explaining it, just be warned that the narrator is synthesized, it's not a serial killer.
