Future Tech on Technabob...

If there’s one thing I can say about the Japanese, it’s that they’re weird. Now if there are two things I can say about the Japanese, then I say they’re weird and they’re quick to embrace technology. Case in point: beginning this June, Aoyama Gakuin University in Sagamihara city will…

Almost a week ago, Kotaku’s Brian Crecente wrote an article regarding the re-emergence of video game peripherals, spurred on by the success of Guitar Hero, Rock Band…, and of course the Wii. In the article, Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter was quoted as saying, “I think the

Last October, Pattie Maes had the idea of making a gesture-controlled interface similar to what was in the movie Minority Report…. But unlike the interface in the movie, which was projected onto a screen and was thus stationary, Maes wanted a cheaper and portable equivalent. One that people could

MIT engineers Joe Paradiso and Yasuhiro Ono want to patent what they’re calling “Distributed Acoustic Conversation Shielding”. Yup, it’s like Get Smart’s… Cone of Silence, except that it actually works. I hope. Paradiso and Ono’s acoustic shielding makes use of a network of transducers – speakers and sensors – that

When I came across this design for a retro-futuristic Chevy Camaro (aka the Steampunk Kamaro), I nearly lost my mind.

Then I realized that it wasn’t real, and only a graphic rendering by artist John ‘Jazz’ Vernon. Damn you and your photo-realistic rendering skills! My only hope is that since…

Positioning Animals Worldwide, Inc. (PAW) and the American Kennel Club will soon be offering a high-tech way of keeping track of your pet dogs. The service is called SpotLight, and it combines Assisted GPS technology along with round-the-clock service to ensure that pet owners can track  – and recover –…

As much as I dig my iPhone and HP Touchsmart touchscreens, there’s something that I still miss about actually feeling buttons under my fingertips. And while I’ve gotten pretty good at typing without even looking at the screen anymore, I’ll never achieve the kind of touch typing speed I’ve hit…

Researchers at North Carolina State University have invented a machine that can keep an animal heart functional even after it has been removed from its body. Freaky. Andrew Richards, a Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering, designed the “dynamic heart system”, which “pumps fluid through a pig heart so that it…

Panasonic demoed their own robot floor cleaner at the Tokyo Fiber Senseware exhibition in Milan. It’s called the “fukitorimushi” (wipe-up bug), although if you ask me “Creepy Pillow” would be a better name for it. The high-tech pillow cleaner detects dust and dirt using “blue-white light” and then cleans ‘em…

The folks at The Boy Genius Report have a couple of screens from an iPhone debugging menu, and their Apple insider is telling them that the evidence points to a built-in magnetometer for the next hardware revision of the wildly successful device.

As we all know, a magnetometer tells you…