Hyundai IT is reportedly showing off this 70-inch multitouch table at the Korea Electronics Show this week, only in concept form.

There’s no technical specs apart from the fact that it’s “HD”, Hyundai is apparently saying that you’ll be able to use the display either as a Surface-like multitouch table or as a TV, it isnt clear yet if that means it will actually tilt up. the table apparently doesn’t function as a phone. stay posted, Hyundai should release more on this concet once the Electronics Show is in full swing.

Source: Engadget

This 3D rendering concept was created by Billy May, as part of Mozilla’s “Open Web Concept Phone” project, I have to say it looks stunning. The case is such a great design, with its sleek upward curve given the impression of a wedge that could fit right into your hand, the concept video gives us a peek at some of the specs we could expect.

• 8 Megapixel Camera
• Dual Side Pico Projectors 45 Lumens @960×600
• Wireless Charging
• Embedded Bluetooth IR/Dongle – Headset
• 3.5mm Audi Jack
• Mini USB Connection
• OS: Android

The bluetooth dongle should act as both a bluetooth headset and a controller for the phone. The onboard pico projectors will let you display a virtual keyboard on a tabletop if you need to start typing.

I could imagine sitting in a coffee shop, cappuccino in hand with this pointed at the wall watching some tvcatchup or reading some comics..

If this concept could see its way onto the market, it could take the phone industry in a whole new ball game…

Does Mozilla have plans to produce a mobile phone?
No. Mozilla has no plans to build this or any phone.

The Projected keyboard

The Docking Station/Mount

When I turned 9 years old, Short Circuit was released in the US, shortly after its release  my family sat down to watch it on a fresh new pirate beta-max video; thanks go to our well connected sources working in the shipyards…

To my amazement.. I was watching this out of control robot; who was supposed to be  “Alive”… Now I wasn’t stupid; I knew it was a film(as a boy i loved movies and was fascinated how they were made.. bugged the hell out my dad!!), but in the back of my mind I knew after watching the film over 100 times, I wanted one of those robots, or ‘A robot’ and thought to myself….

“I cannie wait for the future.”
“Well have all these mad robots flying us aboot, way big lasers on em..“

Very similar to what I though the future would look like.

So I made one, Which just happened to be made from a few old broken tanks, old meccano set and all the electrical toys you could find…, if they weren’t broke give me 5 mins and they’d be ripped to fuck… that was the main source for battery packs, lights and wires!

That was all well and good when I was 9…, but that was 23 years ago! now im sitting here at 32 wondering were the Hell is all the robots of the future?  this is the future.. Isn’t it? looking at the modern technology now-a-days and how far we & technology has evolved over the last 2 decades bringing new innovations and inventions to the world everyday..

I’d like a revolutionary new robot,
packed to the rafters with amazing kick ass, out of the world features,
but its not going to happen…

Clark Boyd over at the BBC wrote an interesting article back in April – Robots of the future unveiled One thing that grabbed my attention was the tag line.

Experts predict that an aging world population and continuing global military conflicts will be the two main drivers of robot design and function in the coming years.

So basically, will we start seeing Iron man, GI-Joe looking prototype robot suits in the coming years, were a person can wear a robot like a piece of clothing?

Man I sure hope so!! but I also think to myself… Not in this Life time? But what if?

With the recently released video of Toyota’s humanoid robot which reminds  more and more like the robot from I-Robot, which runs to fetch the woman’s inhaler.

This brings a new lease of life for the robot industry with cutting edge tech loaded to the gunnels with fancy bits and bobs, but!! were will it be in another 29 years? will I have the house trained bicentennial man? I doubt it! but im sure there’s plenty of smart people out there willing to try!

Id like my futuristic robot now please along with flying cars, intergalactic travel ports with multi-raced species

We all know that’s a good few years away yet….

how long do you think it will be? Do you think we’ll see it in this life time?

The Festival tent of the future

The Tent Concept harnesses solar energy by using photovoltaic fabric around the top of the tent. This power is then channelled down to a wireless charging pouch where you can place your phone and other similar gadgets to keep charged. The fabric that captures the energy also moves to match the direction of the sun to harness it’s rays at all times of the day.

As well as capturing energy and allowing gadgets to be charged, the Solar Tent also has glo-clacton technology by allowing users to SMS their tent which in turn, makes the tent start to glow should you loose it in a field at night or in a busy camping location. RFID technology is also used in the tent.

A wireless control hub sits at the centre of the system that shows what kind of energy is being generated and consumed. Information is displayed on a flexible touchscreen LCD display. The screen also provides a method to communicate back with the system in a way that allows you to set what the desired tend temperature is. When the temperature drops below a predefined value a heating element is switched on.

The development of photovoltaic fabric will revolutionise festival tent design, in working with Orange we have created a vision for a solar tent that we believe is a great glimpse of what’s to come.

No problem finding your tent at night

from gadgetvenue

Kawasaki’s 1400 GTR is already a high tech smorgasbord with variable valve timing, keyless ignition and tyre pressure sensors but the next-generation GTR will wrest outright motorcycle technology leadership from BMW, Honda and Yamaha. Heading the technological onslaught comes a system that until now has been in the preserve of only the world’s most expensive cars; night vision.

Kawasaki has developed its own infra-red night vision technology, giving riders a view beyond the range of the bike’s conventional headlights, and is racing to get it ready for use on production bikes with few or no changes to the basic design of the bikes themselves – allowing it to be fitted as an option or even as an aftermarket upgrade. And detailed drawings of the design clearly reveal that the GTR is being used as the guinea pig for Kawasaki’s night vision, in line with its role as the firm’s technology leader.

So, how does it work? The answer lies in a pair of infra-red cameras mounted behind clear lenses set into the front of the bike’s rear-view mirrors. Picking out images even in pitch darkness, these work together like a pair of eyes to give a stereoscopic view to the bike’s on-board computer – allowing it to judge how far away objects are and alert the rider if there’s anything in his path that’s beyond the reach of the conventional headlights.

One of the cameras also provides an image to be displayed on an LCD screen set into the bike’s instrument panel.

It might sound like sci-fi, but similar systems are already being offered in high-end cars like the most expensive Mercedes and BMW machines, with Kawasaki’s system being close in concept to BMW’s design. The camera’s used by Kawasaki are long-wave “far infra-red” cameras, which pick up their images based on heat rather than light, so the system is ideal for highlighting people or animals in the road but can’t identify objects that are no hotter than the background. Alternatives like the Mercedes system, use short-wave “near infra-red” technology working like military systems by combining an invisible infra-red light with an infra-red camera, giving the green-tinged view that we’ve all come to associate with night-vision thanks to Hollywood depictions of such systems and showing the entire scene ahead rather than only revealing heat sources.

Using far infra-red makes sense on a bike, where space is at a premium, as it needs no extra lights – the cameras alone can pick up heat 300 meters or more ahead of the bike, well beyond the range of even high-beam headlights.

1 for me please :)

The cave(iCube)is comprised of three white walls and a floor, all about 10 x 10 in size. Onto each surface is projected a high-resolution, stereoscopic image. A viewer stands in the room wearing polarized 3D glasses – like you might use in a 3D movie – with small markers that stick out a bit from the frames.

The markers are illuminated by IR LED floodlights located on the perimeter of the room, and IR-sensitive cameras use those positions to determine the precise location of each eye within the room. From those positions, stereo images for each projector are calculated and rendered on the fly, and the result is absolutely amazing.

Just one shot of Resident Evil 5, and quite possibly a spare pair of shorts will be needed once you see the video…

I can just imagine a good few years down the road, the games room in anyones house, will no longer have pool tables, Darts, 2 LCD screens hooked up to a couple of 360′s, or even pinball machines, but it will all be replaced with this star trek, holodeck looking room which you can go in stick on a pair of glasses and start going nuts, too bad I’ll have a zimmer frame by then, or maybe not?

How does a small gang of lightly armed Somali pirates hijack a modern cargo ship?

Speed and weaponry, mainly. Modern pirates, whether off the coast of Somalia or in the crowded shipping lanes of southeast Asia, typically use fast speedboats to zoom up to the sterns of slow-moving cargo ships. They then toss grappling hooks up to the rails and climb up ropes to clamber on deck.

Pirates are generally armed with assault rifles and, increasingly, rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Modern ships’ crews are usually unarmed for a number of reasons, among them laws that prevent armed vessels from docking in the ports of many countries.

“The maritime unions, shipping companies and the International Maritime Organization all agree that ship’s crews should not be armed,” says Capt. George Quick, vice president of the International Organization of Masters, Mates and Pilots, based in Linthicum, Md. “It would only escalate the situation The [Somali] pirates are pretty well funded, and they’d just get bigger weapons.”

Modern ships also don’t need many people to sail them — the 500-foot, 17,000-ton Maersk Alabama has a total of 20 crewmembers, including the captain. Hence it’s pretty easy for pirates with AK-47s to boss them around, provided they can find all the crewmembers.

So if the cargo ships can’t fire back, how can they defend themselves against pirates?
A number of non-lethal solutions have been suggested and tried, some low-tech, some practically science fiction.

Fire hoses.

The simplest way to repel boarders is to train high-pressure hoses on them.
Spraying them straight down the sides of the ship at bad guys trying to climb aboard usually works. But there’s a catch — if there’s more baddies standing in the speedboats aiming guns at the crew, then you have to give up.

“Some companies encourage the use of fire hoses, but even that’s controversial,” says Quick. “When you’ve got a boatload of guys with AK-47s pointed at your crew, it’s not really a fair fight.”

Remote-controlled fire hoses

To get around that logistical problem, several companies market high-pressure water cannons that can wash pirates overboard without exposing anyone to enemy fire.

Molotov cocktails.

If ships’ crews aren’t given weapons, they can always make their own. In December, Somali pirates shadowed the Zhenhua 4, a Chinese cargo ship, for days, giving its crew ample time to prepare a stockpile of Molotov cocktails using empty beer bottles.

The baddies got on board, but the crew used the homemade bombs and fire hoses to fend them off for six hours, enough time for Malaysian Navy helicopters to show up and scare the pirates away.

Quick advises against such heroics, however.

“Standard maritime doctrine is that crews should not resist once boarders are on deck,” he says. “The [Somali] pirates are really just after the ransom money, so it’s best to keep things as calm as possible.”

Sonic weapons.

In November 2005, the cruise ship Seabourn Spirit in the western Indian Ocean fended off pirate speedboats, partly by blasting them with an long range acoustic device (LRAD), which is designed to cause painful level of sound up to 300 meters away. (The Seabourn Spirit also ran over one of the speedboats.)

That, ahem, sounded great at the time, but a similar use of an LRAD three years later didn’t stop a chemical tanker from being seized by more Somali pirates. The bad guys may have figured out that earplugs or blast muffs greatly reduce the LRAD’s effectiveness as a weapon.

Slippery foam.

Boat decks are wet places. Somali pirates are often barefoot. Hence the need for what the acronym-happy Marine Corps calls its Mobility Denial System (MDS), also known as Non-Lethal Slippery Foam (NLSF) or Anti-Traction Material (ATM).

Basically, it’s water, drilling-mud additive (used for boreholes) and a flocculent, an electrically charged suspension of solids that makes liquids even more slippery. No one’s actually deployed this stuff yet, but a few serious squirts would send pirates sliding around helplessly like happy penguins on an ice floe.

Rubber bullets.

Riot police typically fire non-lethal projectiles from real guns, which wouldn’t be allowed on many ships. But high-powered air guns could fire plastic or rubber bullets almost as easily, causing pain if not serious injury to boarders hit in the torso or limbs. Head shots could cause injury or even death, however, and there’s always the chance they could be used in a mutiny.

Electric fencing. At least one company sells a high-voltage fence that sticks horizontally outward from a ship’s sides, zapping any would-be boarders like so many wayward cattle.

“Only a few [ships have that] so far,” says Quick. “I don’t know if it’s worked or not. In the long run, nothing will against a persistent group of pirates.”

Nets.

In the same way that police lay out nail strips to stop speeding cars, ships could launch small nets into the water to entangle the propellers of the pirate speedboats. The Coast Guard and the Dept. of Defense are testing these by dropping these from helicopters, but it’s possible smaller versions could be launched from the stern of a cargo ship using the sort of catapults that launch clay pigeons in skeet shooting.

Blinding weapons.

Airline pilots already deal with jokers who shine laser pointers into the cockpits of landing planes. Pirates might have to face the Dazzle Gun, a futuristic-looking laser rifle designed by the Air Force that temporarily blinds adversaries who get too close to bases and personnel.

The pain ray.

The Air Force had fun a couple of year ago bringing reporters to a test facility at Moody Air Force base in Georgia and zapping them with the Active Denial System, a truck-mounted weapon that focuses a tight beam of electromagnetic waves on your skin.

Basically, it’s like sticking your hand in a microwave oven. It’s nonlethal and very painful. There’s a smaller version as well that’s effective up to 500 yards, which might work against pirates coming up to a ship.

Quick, however, feels that nothing can really stop the pirates short of a naval engagement.

“It’s not really up to the ship owners or crews to solve the pirate problem,” he says. “It’s a governmental issue. It’s why navies were formed in the first place.“

If you can’t be doing with upgrading your body one bit at a time then the robot suit HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb – not to be confused with the homicidal computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey) will do the job in a single, step-motored reboot.

HAL’s inventor Yoshiyuki Sankai reckons the suit can, “multiply human strength by a factor of two to ten”. It also makes you look like a gladiator from Tron.

To me it looks like a new improved upgrade to ripleys powerloader, from the film aliens, with a new over hall, looking very compact easy to use and move about, i wouldn’t mind being a tester for any other projects they have going!!

Link: Cyber Dyne

hit more for the video

Few people are fooled into thinking she’s real but it was made to be life-like to put people’s mind at ease. The Repliee R-1 robot blinks, stands, and wears clothes. The robot will be used for the elderly and the disabled and the article says it will also fetch objects. The Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL) suit has 50 sensors and a series of motors to help disabled people move better. The newly developed robogirl is named Repliee R-1. Its sensors and motors combine to help Repliee R-1 move like a human more than any robot ever created.

This new Robot paves the way for future technology’s to work on the new silicone skin outer body, bringing the reality of future machines being more and more human like…

i can envision the Cylon take-over coming soon.

Around the V4 engine, Glinik has designed a fluid shape that may appear more futuristic in its styling than inspired by current roadcar designs, but certainly catches your attention. Glinik has even planned out the theoretical controls, which blend elements from an F-16 fighter jet (more common in his home country than Ferraris, anyway) and the Scuderia’s high-tech Formula One steering wheel, supplemented by a weatherproof touch-screen LCD atop the fuel tank.

Onetime Ferrari designer Frank Stephenson, now at arch-rival McLaren, was quoted as saying that the closest the average person will get to owning a Ferrari would be a Ducati. True as that may be, what you see here may be the most well thought-out and enticing application of the Ferrari ethos to two-wheeled motoring we’ve seen yet. Follow the link for more information, and check out the images in the gallery below for a closer look.