Electrical engineering researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a flexible, stretchable OLED that acts something like rubber, and does not tear or break when stretched. The material is produced by spraying a layer of carbon nanotubes with a fluoro-rubber compound, creating a rubbery, conducive material. The current, monochrome display prototype has a resolution of just 256 pixels, is 10-centimeters square, and can apparently be folded about 1,000 times with out falling apart, tearing, or imploding. The team is presenting its findings in the British science journal Nature Materials this month.

[Via Slashgear]

Sure, you may have your fancy vibrating controllers and liquid-injecting touch screens, but Takayuki Iwamoto wants you to play with the air. Iwamoto and some of his buddies at the University of Tokyo have come up with a way to use focused ultrasound to create manipulable virtual objects in space. Using multiple transducers, the "Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display" creates an acoustic radiation pressure field. Holding your hand in the field allows you to "feel" the object, manipulate it, and feel response. Right now, the system only creates a vertical field, but you had better bet that Iwamoto is working on that. As for suitable applications, interest has already been shown from both industrial and gaming developers. No word on the hentai industry taking note, but that can't be too far away. Check the video after the break to see this tech in action.

[Via BBC News]

The folks at the University of Tokyo have been trying to create more touchy, feely robots for what seems like ages, and they now look to have made some real progress with their so-called "e-skin," which promises to give robots a more human-like sense of touch. To do that, the researchers created a bendable rubber sheet filled with carbon nanotubes, which lets the "skin" conduct electricity even when it's stretched. When combined with sensors, that would let robots feel heat or pressure, which the researchers say is essential "as robots enter our everyday life." They also, not surprisingly, see a whole host of other applications for the technology, including on steering wheels that could judge whether people are fit to drive and in stretchable displays that could start out as a tiny sheet and be stretched to a larger size when you want to watch TV.

Yeah, we get it, flexible electronics -- sans application -- are about as exciting as the circuitry under your keyboard. But it's Friday, and this here story has real-live carbon nanotubes, so you know it's a winner. Takao Someya of the University of Tokyo has built for himself a stretchy, flexible conducting material using carbon nanotubes mixed with a polymer. The nanotubes are mixed into a compound called "bucky gel" to prevent clumping, and after some rubber-like flourinated copolymer is mixed in and it's all poured onto a glass plate, holes are punched in the material to better flexibility. Apparently it ends up looking a bit like a nylon stocking, but we won't hold that it against it, since it can be stretched up to 38%, while also managing to be 100 times more conductive than any other elastic material. The possibilities for such technology is pretty much endless, but we'd say "nylon stocking that is also, conveniently, a computer" is the first product category worth felling.

[Via I4U]

Now that just looks extra scrumptious, doesn't it? What you're peering at above is believed to be the world's tiniest ramen bowl, created by a clever bunch of scientists from the University of Tokyo. Reportedly, Masayuki Nakao and his students "used a carbon-based material to produce a noodle bowl with a diameter 1 / 25,000 of an inch in a project aimed at developing nanotube-processing technology." In other words, they carved a bowl out of nanotubes, which can now only be viewed through a microscope. Best of all, they didn't stop with just the dinnerware, as they managed to insert a number of inedible noodles to round things off -- each of which measured "one-12,500th of an inch in length with a thickness of one-1.25 millionth of an inch." Don't get any bright ideas here, McDonald's, ditching SuperSize was bad enough.

While perhaps some sort of tagging or RFID system could be more effective in this task, you're certainly never going to look as badass on the hunt for a flower pot as you will with these Smart Goggles. Being developed by researchers at the University of Tokyo, the video goggles are hooked up to a backpack computer and record whatever you see. The system can be trained to recognize particular items by name, using some fancy image recognition software, and is meant for people with memory problems or just really hard to find plants. You can even ask the system to play back some recent video of the object ("where did you see it last?") to help jog your memory or just bring back old times. Super-fine white coat not included.

[Via Daily Mail]

Though we've certainly seen robotic legs that like to get their jump on, a team of researchers at the University of Tokyo have assembled a new two-legged creature that can actually spring up about 50-centimeters on its own -- and land gracefully. The creation is part of a larger project aimed at creating humanoids with cat-like (or just human-like, really) reflexes that can better assist the elderly when used as caregivers. Moreover, this hopper relies on air-driven artificial muscles rather than electric motors, and while we're not sure it could hang with Ronaldinho, it can boot a fútbol when asked.

We've already seen molecular elevators, keypad locks, and even spiders, but a team of scientists at the University of Tokyo have now further expanded our pint-sized toolkit, crafting a pair of molecular scissors for those hard to reach places. Apparently, the scientists used rings of carbon and hydrogen for the blades, with a "chiral ferrocene" molecule supplying the pivot point, and couple of "phenylene groups" acting as handles -- all of which adds up to to a mere three nanometers in length. To manipulate the scissors, the scientists simply alternate between shining visible light and UV rays to open and close 'em. According to LiveScience, the team's now working on a slightly larger pair of clippers that can be operated remotely, potentially for use inside the human body -- which is only a somewhat less scary prospect than a swarm of nanobots being let loose for a little autonomous repair work.

If you've got a domesticated service bot around to flip your channels and chase away any uninvited intruders, there's not too much else a lonely, elderly individual needs from a fellow humanoid, but researchers at the University of Tokyo are crafting more lifelike and more agile servant bots nevertheless. In an effort to create a tactical team of droids ready and willing to serve the aging population of Japan, the team is working with Kawada Industries Inc. to create friendly robots that can assist folks with around the house chores such as pouring tea and cleaning the dishes. Several models were out and about during a recent demonstration, as one wheeled bot delivered beverages to its master, and other renditions responded to human movements and the bevy of sensors installed in the floor and sofa of a room. Essentially, the team is attempting to seamlessly integrate robotic life with our world, and they're already prepared to feel a lashing from privacy advocates who will protest the embedded camera systems that the robots feed off of. Still, we'd rather have a potentially Big Brother-equipped servant to make sure our favorite dramas get recorded than no one at all.

If you're someone who can easily read other people's emotions, then you probably won't be getting a SHOJI (Symbiotic Hosting Online Jog Instrument) anytime soon. For the rest of us, we'll have to rely on this latest invention from our friends at the University of Tokyo and GS Yuasa. The SHOJI apparently can sense the "mood" of a room by monitoring light levels, temperature, humidity, infrared, ultrasonic waves, the "presence and movement of people," (not unlike that Mitsubishi air conditioner we saw recently) body temperature, and "the nature of activity in the room," whatever that is. All of that data is then compiled and computed to output to an LED flask sort of thing which displays red for anger, blue for sadness, yellow for happiness and green for peace. Apparently Japanese managers and hospitals are willing to pay a hefty price for this privilege, given that it'll cost between ¥300,000 and ¥400,000 ($2,500 to $3,300) when its released in April 2007. Still, the SHOJI is no KotoHana flower, that's for sure.

While we're just getting used to dual-cores and have our eyes on those upcoming quad-core chips, Japanese computer scientists at the University of Tokyo have built a 500MHz 512-core math co-processor chip that can perform up to 512 billion floating-point operations per second. The Grape DR chip is designed to fit on a PCI-X card and act as a secondary chip for the main CPU. The project, which has been ongoing since 1989, expects to reach two petaflops (that's two quadrillion, or 2,000,000,000,000,000) floating-point operations per second sometime around 2008. No doubt that Intel, which is planning on an 80-core processor by 2011, is watching this research very very closely.

[Via Channel Register]