TECH blog

SOLAR BAGS-the mobile power generators

noreply@blogger.com (kuhorj) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 15:51:00 +0000

Solar bags are mobile solar power generators designed to charge virtually all handheld electronics. For this there is a Powerful Solar Panel which is embedded in the outside of the bags This panels can generate power up to 14.7 watts, which is enough to fully charge a typical laptop from a day of direct sunlight All bags come with a battery pack which stores any surplus power generated, so it is available when you need it - not just when the sun is up. The battery packs can also be charged using the included AC travel charger or car charger All bags include standard adaptors for common cell phones and other handheld devices. The Generator also includes common laptop adaptors. The solar panels are lightweight, tough, waterproof solar panels. So it will be easy to carry it around. The main disadvantage is that if your laptop runs its batter down in say 4 hours, it will take about 12 hours minimum to recharge it, in bright sunlight. It would be beneficial to people who are out in the sticks somewhere far from civilization doing research.

RACETRACK-More Data in Smaller Space

noreply@blogger.com (kuhorj) — Fri, 23 May 2008 13:48:00 +0000

‘Racetrack’ is a new generation of memory technology which could begin to replace flash memory in three to five years, scientists say. The commercially available flash drives with multiple memory chips store up to 64 gigabytes of data. Capacity is expected to reach about 50 gigabytes on a single chip in the next half-decade.

Although flash drives can read data quickly, it is very slow at storing it. That has led the industry on a hysterical hunt for alternative storage technologies that might unseat flash.

The storage devices built on “Racetrack technology” will have the ability to store 100 times more data than is possible today, by consuming less power and generate much less heat, lightning fast boot times, low cost and unprecedented durability and stability. It shrank the mainframe computer to fit on the desktop, shrank it again to fit on our laps and again to fit into our shirt pockets.

IBM who is the real inventor of this technology says this technology could enable a handheld device such as an mp3 player to store around 500,000 songs or around 3,500 movies - 100 times more than is possible today. This data storage medium is based on spintronics-a phenomenon that uses quantum spin states of electrons and their charge to store data. Since racetrack memory has no moving parts, it has no wear-out mechanism and so can be rewritten endlessly without any wear and tear.

For nearly fifty years, scientists have explored the possibility of storing information inside the walls that exist between magnetic domains (called magnetic domain wall), but to date manipulating such walls has been too expensive and used significant power to generate the fields necessary to do so. In the paper describing their milestone, “Current Controlled Magnetic Domain-Wall Nanowire Shift Register,” Dr. Parkin(IBM research center) and his team describe how this long-standing obstacle can be overcome by taking advantage of the interaction of spin polarized current with magnetization in the domain walls; this results in a spin transfer torque on the domain wall, causing it to move. The use of spin momentum transfer considerably simplifies the memory device since the current is passed directly across the domain wall without the need for any additional field generators.

His idea is to stand billions of ultra fine wire loops around the edge of a silicon chip — hence the name racetrack — and use electric current to slide infinitesimally small magnets up and down along each of the wires to be read and written as digital ones and zeros.

Since the tiny magnetic domains have to travel only sub molecular distances, it is possible to read and write magnetic regions with different polarization as quickly as a single nanosecond — far faster than existing storage technologies.

WHOLE BODY GAMING

noreply@blogger.com (kuhorj) — Sat, 17 May 2008 04:30:00 +0000

Softkinetic, a company based in Belgium, is working to let video-game players use a wider range of more-natural movements to control the on-screen action. Softkinetic's software is meant to work with depth-sensing cameras, which can be used to determine a player's body position and motions. In this whole body gaming, there is no need to wear a special outfit.Designing programs that work with the cameras, however, is difficult: translating depth measurements into a map of a human figure, and determining what motions that figure is making, are computationally daunting tasks. This is where Softkinetic comes in.

Softkinetic's technology started out as research at the University of Brussels, in Belgium, aimed at exploring the user interfaces made possible by stereoscopic cameras, which sense depth by using two input sources, in much the way that the human brain perceives depth by comparing data from two eyes. The group created Softkinetic in mid-2007 and has adapted its research to work with newer depth-sensing cameras as well.

The new cameras sense depth by using infrared light in one of two ways. First, the camera might send out infrared light and receive the reflections of that light off objects in a room. The sending and receiving information can be compared to determine details of position and depth around the camera. Alternatively, the camera could project a grid of infrared light onto a room, and calculate the positions of objects based on how the grid is distorted.

Whatever the specific depth-sensing tactics of a given camera, Softkinetic aims at developing a software which is built to work with the four major depth-sensing cameras on the market, including the ZCam from 3DV Systems, With Softkinetic's software, game designers can avoid retooling their applications to work with each of those cameras.

Interpreting data from different types of hardware isn't the toughest part that Softkinetic does. To classify the scene and how to find the player and remove the rest, and reconstruct the person's structure is the difficult part regarding the developing of software. The first half of that task involves filtering out a great deal of noise from the signal. For this it’s need to zoom in on the important thing i.e. the player, and not the person next to you sitting on the couch and making fun of you. Secondly, the software creates a 3-D volume from the fuzzy cloud of points the camera detects and identifies body parts important to an application. So instead of interacting directly with the depth map produced by the camera, designers get information from Softkinetic's software about which body parts are moving and how quickly. The company has also identified sets of gestures people commonly make when trying to control a program in a particular way.

It’s a really exciting thing for the field, and not just for gaming. For example: knowing a person's body position could help with applications such as health-care monitoring in the home, or other
applications in the field of ubiquitous computing.

AUGEMENTED REALITY

noreply@blogger.com (kuhorj) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:15:00 +0000

Augmented Reality on mobile phones!!!!!!!!!!!

What is augmented reality???

Augmented Reality (AR) is a variation of Virtual Environments (VE), or Virtual Reality as it is more commonly called. VE technologies completely immerse a user inside a synthetic environment. While immersed, the user cannot see the real World around him. In contrast, AR allows the user to see the real world, with virtual Objects superimposed upon or composited with the real world.Therefore, AR Supplements reality, rather than completely replacing it.

Applications???

Medical

Manufacturing and repair

Annotation and visualization

Robot path planning

Entertainment

Military

AR in mobiles

Research works has started to incorporate the technology in mobile phones has started from 2000 .extensive study has been going on in this field from 2003 to 2007.. From 2003-2007 the work was aimed at introducing Augmented Reality to mobile phones and PDAs. This has beenachieved by most of the mobile majors such as nokia.

How it works???

Last October, a team led by Markus Kähäri( project manager of nokia research center) unveiled a prototype of the system at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality. The team added a GPS sensor, a compass, and accelerometers to a Nokia smart phone. Using data from these sensors, the phone can calculate the location of just about any object its camera is aimed at. Each time the phone changes location, it retrieves the names and geographical coordinates of nearby landmarks from an external database. The user can then download additional information about a chosen location from the Web--say, the names of businesses in the Empire State Building, the cost of visiting the building's observatories,or hours and menus for its five eateries

Nokia researchers have begun working on real-time image-recognition algorithms as well; they hope the algorithms will eliminate the need for location sensors and improve their system's accuracy and reliability

A video of the same can be viewed in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_7Yy-zQiRo

GRID internet technology & Large Hadron Collider

noreply@blogger.com (kuhorj) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:59:00 +0000

Grid internet- The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the internet, is an upcoming technology will make internet 10,000 times faster The grid could also provide the power needed to send sophisticated images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

CERN is going to recreate the big bang to investigate how the universe began. For this they have made a machine called Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

The LHC is designed to collide two counter rotating beams of protons or heavy ions. Proton-proton collisions are foreseen at energy of 7 TeV per beam.

• The beams move around the LHC ring inside a continuous vacuum guided by magnets.
• The magnets are superconducting and are cooled by a huge cryogenics system. The cables conduct current without resistance in their superconducting state.
• The beams will be stored at high energy for hours. During this time collisions take place inside the four main LHC experiments.

It planned to circulate the first beams in May 2008. First collisions at high energy are expected mid-2008 with the first results from the experiments soon after. The grid will be turned on at the same time to store the information it generates, after scientists at Cern, based near Geneva, realised that this will produce enough data each year to fill 56 million CDs. The data cannot be stored locally. It needs a network capable of handling and analysing enormous amounts of data — which explains the need of a grid.

Grid is a service for sharing computer power and data storage capacity over the Internet.in this syatem the computers around the world are connected to act as a single, huge and super-powerful computer. One thing is to remember is that the computers may belong from different people and also from different institutions like companies universities hospitals individual users.

The Grid, thus, has been under construction for the past seven years. It is a kind of parallel internet, comprising 55,000 servers connected to each other using fibre-optic cables and modern routers. It is expected that the servers will be around 2 lakhs in numbers within 2 years.

Advantages of grid

You would no longer need to install the program on your machine. Instead, you could just ask the Grid to run it remotely on your colleague's computer. Or if your colleague's computer was busy, you could ask the Grid to copy the program to another computer that was sitting idle somewhere on the other side of the planet, and run your program there. And if you needed to analyse a lot of data from different computers all over the Globe, you could ask the Grid to do this. Again, the Grid could find out where the most convenient source of the data is without you specifying anything, and do the analysis on the data wherever it is.

And if you wanted to do this analysis interactively in collaboration with several colleagues around the world, the Grid would link your computers up so it felt like you were all on a local network. This would happen without you having to worry about lots of special passwords, the Grid could figure out who should be able to take part in this common activity.

The Grid is said to have the potential to offer everything from high density (HD) video telephony to the transmission of holographic images. Downloading music should not take more than 5 seconds. Experts say the Grid will also lead to ‘Cloud Computing’ — where users store all data online.