Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Friday, March 23, 2007

Experimental Touchscreen Makes iPhone Look Like a Toy

The main draw of Apple's iPhone is its touchscreen interface, which can respond to two points of contact. What if you could have a touchscreen with an infinite number of points of contact? What would that do for computing as we know it? How would that change life as we know it? These are but a few questions raised by the ongoing research of Jeff Han, whose work at NYU might not only make him YouTube rich, but might put him in the same category as the Edisons and Farnsworths of the world.

Han has already sold a screen to one of the branches of the military. Companies are already developing rival technologies to prevent Han from cornering the market. And to top it all off, a video of Han feeling up his screen for the cheering mob. – Nicholas Deleon

Flexible Battery Charges in a Minute, Lasts for 1,000 Recharges

Polymer%20Batt.jpg

Scientists at Japan's Waseda University have developed a new new polymer-based battery, which not only charges in less than a minute, but also lasts for up to 1,000 recharges. The cool thing about the superthin (200nm-thick to be exact) battery is that unlike previous polymer-based batteries, this one won't won't self-discharge. All we need to do now is get it inside our favorite kit. – Louis Ramirez

Flexible See-through Battery Power [GizMag]

prediction: Wii will win (beat MS's XBox and Sony's PS3)

it's already doing breakout sales and kickin' PS3 and XBox butt. This is one of a steady stream of "mods" that I've seen and is another case example of "open source" involving the community of users by allowing them to build-upon, rather than being proprietary and restrictive. This happened for Palm when they allowed the community to develop apps for the Palm OS. bravo for the "small guy" (nintendo) -Augustine Wii Loop Machine utilizes Wiimote to manipulate beats

Posted Mar 23rd 2007 8:12AM by Darren Murph Filed under: Gaming, Portable Audio

It takes a certain level of determination and creativity to shun the smorgasbord of other music-related Wii mods already out there, and to be quite honest, the Wii Loop Machine does a fair job of putting the other alternatives to shame. Taking full advantage of the Wiimote's ability to be used at will with a Bluetooth receiver and the right coding, the music manipulation software allows beat lovers to scroll through loops, twist up the jams, drop the bass, toss in a delay, and pretty much hack up the tunes at will with a combination of button mashes and Wiimote slinging. Currently, the software is only compatible with OS X, but the creator is definitely interested in your contact information if you can port this stuff over on the Windows side of life. So if you've already got a home-based studio set up, and your Mac just isn't getting enough love, be sure to hit the read link and check out the deets, or click on through if you're yearning for lesson in geekified mixing. [Via Joystiq, thanks Andy]