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HP Labs builds a glasses-free, portable 3D display with wide viewing angles (video)
Typical attempts at a glasses-free 3D display have trouble with viewing angles; we're all too familiar with having to sit in a sweet spot to get the effect. HP Labs might have just solved this last problem with a prototype 3D LCD that would better accommodate the real world. The display's backlight has nanopatterned grooves that send blue, green and red in multiple directions, letting the LCD show only the light that would be seen from a given viewpoint. Those positions are set in stone, but they're both abundant (200 for photos, 64 for video) and can spread across a wide 180-degree viewing arc. At a thickness of as little as half a millimeter, a production LCD could easily be thin enough for a mobile device, too. The catch isn't so much the screen as the content. Producers need an image for every possible viewpoint, which could create a fair share of logistical problems: even though footage wouldn't necessarily require 200 cameras, it could limit fully immersive 3D to computer-generated visuals or else consume a massive amount of bandwidth. If those are the biggest barriers, though, we're still that much closer to the holographic smartphone we've always wanted.
HP Labs teams up with Hynix to manufacture memristors, plans assault on flash memory in 2013
The memristor's come a long way since being hypothesized back in 1971. If you ask HP Labs, the history of this particular memory technology didn't hit its next milestone for almost four decades, when the company produced the very first memory resistor chip. Just last month, the Labs group proved its little transistor could handle logic and data storage, and as of today, the company's announcing a joint development agreement with Hynix Semiconductor, with a goal of bringing these chips to the market -- and rendering flash memory obsolete. That challenge against flash (not a very popular naming convention these days, it seems) was thrown down by HP Labs Senior Fellow Stan Williams, who posits that the memristor is "an universal memory that over a sufficient amount of time will replace flash, DRAM, magnetic hard disks, and possibly even SRAM." But onto the immediate, albeit aspirational goal (i.e. not a commitment, which he stressed on multiple occasions): Williams hopes to see the transistors in consumer products by this time 2013, for approximately the price of what flash memory will be selling for at the time but with "at least twice the bit capacity." He also claims a much smaller power requirement of "at least a factor of 10" and an even faster operation speed, in addition to previously-discussed advantages like read / write endurance. With Hynix on board, the goal is to make these "drop-in replacements" for flash memory, whereby the same protocols and even the same connectors will work just fine. For HP, however, Williams says there'll be an initial competitive advantage for the company due to its comfort level with memristors' unique properties, but that other companies will be encouraged to license the technology and experiment with new possibilities in hardware design. Williams wouldn't give any specific product examples where we might initially see the memristor, except to repeat that it'll be anywhere and everywhere flash memory is. Fighting words, indeed. We normally don't get excited about minute hardware components -- not often, at least -- but we gotta say, the seeds of the future look mighty interesting. Can't wait to see what germinates. Highlights from our talk with Williams after the break. %Gallery-100780%
HP developing wrist PC for military, finally putting that flexible display to good use
Looks like that flexible plastic display Hewlett-Packard has been talking up since 2008 is finally ready to hit the big time. According to Carl Taussig, director of information surfaces at HP Labs, the company is developing a wrist PC at the behest of the US military. Behind the display, a thin strip of metal-coated plastic (merely 50 microns thick) is printed with transistors for, you know, displaying stuff. The thing will be solar powered and, like the display, the solar panels will also be printed, using a technology called PowerFilm. With any luck a prototype should be ready within a year. Now, can we get a PIP Boy already?
HP data center fueled by hopes, dreams and... cow dung
We've seen data centers use excess heat for greener purposes, but how's about injecting a little green into the other side of that equation? HP Labs is on that very wavelength, going so far as to publish details on how these centers could be partially powered by none other than cow manure. Yeah, cowpies. The essential thought process went a little something like this: "Data centers need a lot of energy. Dairy farms create a lot of methane. Let's make it happen." Purportedly, 10,000 dairy cows could "fulfill the power requirements of a 1-megawatt data center -- the equivalent of a medium-sized data center -- with power left over to support other needs on the farm," and heat generated by the data center could "be used to increase the efficiency of the anaerobic digestion of animal waste." The stomach-twisting details can be found beyond the break, but we can't be held responsible for any images you conjure up. Remember -- once your third eye sees it, you can't un-see it. [Thanks, Bob]
HP touts memristor development, bleak future for transistors
Silicon transistors are the stuff all our dreams of android sheep are made of, but there will ultimately be a limit to how many of them you can squish together inside a processing chip. The progressive avoidance of physical limitations by moving to yet more minuscule dimensions is admirable, but some folks at HP seem to believe the answer lies in a whole different technology. The company has been talking to the New York Times about its memristor (memory resistor) development, which promises to perform both data processing and storage tasks (even without an electrical charge), while also being capable of stacking in a three-dimensional array that would allow for vast scaling potential down the line. Promises for the future include a three nanometer memristor that can switch on and off in a nanosecond, as well as a 20GB per square centimeter memory density that we might expect to arrive within three years. If we believe the dudes in the white coats, that is. The important thing is that memristor-based storage has already been tested to successfully perform "hundreds of thousands" of read and write operations without failing, so the potential is indeed there. Now we just need a bit of luck and a smidgen of patience.
HP Slate teases us with another video appearance
The HP Slate -- has there ever been a more iconic, more groundbreaking, more life-altering device? Oh, there has? Well anyway, HP CTO Phil McKinney has been friendly enough to share some of the history behind the development of his company's newly announced tablet, which is set for a release at some point later this year. Starting with e-reader prototypes five years ago, he tells us, HP steadily built up an idea of the sort of "rich media experience" modern consumers are lusting after. It's only now, however, in a "perfect storm" of innovation, that HP finds itself capable of pairing the right hardware with the mainstream-friendly price point it was shooting for. Join us after the break for the full dose of education on this multitouch Windows 7 machine.
HP and ASU demo bendable, unbreakable electronic displays
Well, what do you know? Nearly four years after Arizona State University opened its very own flexible display center comes this, a prototype device that's purportedly easy to manufactur, easy on the environment and practically as strong as Thor. HP and ASU have teamed up to demonstrate the fresh e-displays, which are constructed almost entirely of plastic and consume far less power than traditional computer monitors. The "unbreakable displays" were crafted using self-aligned imprint lithography (SAIL) technology invented in HP Labs, and while we'd love to see this in a pliable laptop at CES 2009, we suspect it'll be a few years yet before these slither out to the commercial realm.Update: HP Labs pinged us with this tidbit on the image above. "This image from the Flexible Display Center at ASU represents what the flexible display, a paper-like computer display made entirely of plastic, could look like in the future."
HP Labs and mobile phones: coloring people beautiful
Mobiles can do just about anything these days -- and oh! do we love it -- but fashion and color choice advice was apparently lacking. HP Lab's new software "Color Match mobile service" has come to the rescue armed with color wheels and image processing software, to save society from the perils of mismatched make-up. Users of the system simply snap a photo of themselves holding a special color chart up to their face, fire it off as an MMS to an image processing server that will clean up the pic and reply by SMS with some color choices that will suit their skin tone. Pretty handy business all around and if you are a color-challenged fella, there is hope this idea will be extended to help you pick out just the right tie for that troublesome outfit.
HP's Retail Store Assistant: a wallet's worst enemy
Fellas, if you thought Ralph Lauren's literal window shopping contraption was your wallet's arch-rival, we've got some unfortunate news, and for the ladies (or guys) who just love to spend it up, HP's about to become your very best friend. The clever gurus at HP Labs have developed a marketer's dream tool that enables customers to enter a retail store, swipe a card, and instantly receive a printout (shown after the jump) that includes "a personalized shopping list, relevant coupons, notice of associated store discounts or sales, and even a map to where the items can be found in the store." The inaccurately named Retail Store Assistant (we were thinking more along the lines of Wallet Depleter) is currently in the "experimental" stage, and would include an in-store kiosk which customers could access via a loyalty card or by inputting their phone number. Of course, this isn't the first stab we've seen at retailers using previous history to target consumers, but the team behind this apparatus insists that it will be much more effective than the typical junk mail that barely graces our eyes before hitting the trash. Best Worst of all, the system will reportedly be available even on the web, meaning that those with an urge to shop can log on during the waning hours of the workday and plan out their shopping spree for maximum efficiency. Oh, the humanity.
