cement

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  • Richard Lai/Engadget

    Watch the OnePlus 7 Pro's pop-up camera lift 49 pounds of cement

    by 
    Christine Fisher
    Christine Fisher
    05.14.2019

    If you can get your hands on the OnePlus 7 Pro -- one of two flagship phones released today -- one of the first things you'll notice is that it's done away with the front-facing notch camera. Instead, OnePlus opted for a pop-up camera. And to prove just how durable it is, the company released a video of the camera lifting a 49.2-pound block of cement.

  • Cyber-concrete gives walls a voice

    by 
    Conrad Quilty-Harper
    Conrad Quilty-Harper
    12.18.2006

    Technology makes for strange bedfellows: that's the lesson to be learnt from the partnership of YRP Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory with the Sumitomo Osaka Cement company. The two groups have developed what they call "cyber-concrete," which is basically a lumpy soup of regular cement and RFID tags with durable coatings. The tags hold basic information about when, where, and how each part of the concrete was manufactured, allowing safety inspection teams and concerned residents alike to check how stable their building is. To aid this process, the researchers have developed a special reader that can convert this information into speech when placed on a correctly tagged wall -- so much for "the walls have ears," now they eat pollution, display images, and speak. Sumitomo is to start testing the RFID concrete soup this month, and is aiming to make it available to large construction companies in the spring of 2007. What with a recent scandal rocking the Japanese construction scene, it sounds as if this clever concrete can't come soon enough. Just as long as it's not too clever -- lets just say that we know we're bad at darts, and that we don't need no screaming walls to tell us.

  • Innovation Lab busts out pixel-infused concrete display

    by 
    Darren Murph
    Darren Murph
    11.10.2006

    Companies have been lighting up (and drawing attention to) simple brick walls for some time now, and while hitting up a game of Tetris is indeed novel, we're thinking the real profit resides in lightweight screens we use in front projection. This rock-hard display consists of not-so-average concrete with "embedded optical fibers, arranged as pixels, capable of transmitting natural as well as artificial light." When light is projected from the rear, the pixels illuminate to display imagery, which could certainly transform a vanilla office building into an ad-filled poster board. While we're not sure when we can expect these things to start popping up around here, Innovation Lab claims that orders are already backing up, and of course, there's always the live action video after the break to tide you over for now....[Via We Make Money Not Art, thanks Naser A]