Do you enjoy gangs of tiny, spider-like robot insectoids swarming all over your house, car, or personage? If you answered "yes," you're going to love what BAE Systems is cooking up. The company recently received an infusion of $38 million from the US Army Research Lab to fund the Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) consortium; a team of scientists and researchers hell-bent on developing an "autonomous, multifunctional collection of miniature intelligence-gathering robots that can operate in places too inaccessible or dangerous for humans." Sure, that description (and accompanying photos, straight from BAE) does give you the impression that whoever came up with this really liked Minority Report, but won't it make you feel safer at night knowing a swarm of metallic spiders are looking out for you? No? Huh, weird.

[Via The Register]

What happens when you combine Sun's Small Programmable Object Technology with its Project Looking Glass 3D user interface environment, and add a glove with an accelerometer? Apparently, the second third attempt at the early 21st century's equivalent of Minority Report's glove based user interface, with a demo video showing an operator browsing a desktop using simply hand and finger motions. There's a pretty noticeable lag, the system still uses a mouse pointer, and the operator obviously has to stand dead still for it to work, but this is probably the closest anyone has come to emulating the geek dream that is the pre-crime memory navigator that Tom Cruise evangelized in the film. It's about time that someone figured out a system that could replace the humble mouse: unfortunately, this is only a baby step towards that goal.

[Via sLists; thanks, akhel]

Minority Report has proven itself to be a fairly prescient movie on more than one occasion and, as this latest development shows, it seems that researchers haven't mined those Dickian ideas dry just yet. While we've already seen some software that supposedly helped to predict future crimes, The Guardian is now reporting that a team of neuroscientists have brought pre-crime technology to a new, even creepier level, developing a brain scan that can purportedly read people's intentions before they act on them. It's apparently still a ways off from going into service, however, with tests of the technology currently centered around predicting a subject's response to a simple math question. Nonetheless, the researchers seem to be well aware of the technology's potentially more complex uses, and are calling for an ethical debate over its possible use in interrogation. On the flipside, they also see the technology eventually being used in some less ethically-challenging applications, such as helping people control artificial limbs or operate a computer simply by thinking about it.

Looks like Fraunhofer's researchers aren't the only Germans able to get in on the transparent OLED thing. It appears some researchers at the Technical University of Braunschweig are claiming to have developed a technique for embedding OLED pixels on layers of transparent TFTs, creating see-through displays that could be manufactured cheaply with flexible plastics capable of withstanding extreme temperatures. Apparently the transparent displays, which were up to (and over) twice the brightness of today's displays, should be ready to rock in two years -- just in time for us to renovate the Department Of Precrime set we use act out Minority Report in during our lunch hour. Is it now?