future on technabob...

How many times have you had to get your lazy ass off of the couch to get up and change the channel because the batteries in your remote died. Well thanks to some fine high-tech minds, someday you may never need to worry about changing the batteries in your remote again.

This unassuming looking prototype…

As we look for more ways to generate energy-efficient light, we’ve seen a gradual move away from the warm glow of incandescent light, to the ugly pinkish hues of CFL, to the strange blueish-white point-source light produced by LEDs. And frankly, none of those are nearly as cool as what awaits us in our futures…

In a recent article in The Sun, famous inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil makes a lot of bold claims about our future, saying that by 2029 humans will be able to halt and even reverse the effects of aging. and then we’ll live forever, with the help of Hideo Kojima’s favorite plot device: nanomachines. Kurzweil,…

Microsoft’s “top research and strategy officer” Craig Mundie demoed various flashy & functional future tech that the company believes will be an integral part of the future desktop computing experience. Mundie’s demo included “hologram-like videoconferencing, a virtual digital assistant, and multiple surface computers, along with voice-, touch- and gesture-recognition technology.” Where’s the visual & olfactory…

DARPA’s Self-Explanation Learning Framework (SELF) program “seeks to construct systems that can participate in their own construction.” Imagine a robot helping build itself. Who or what runs DARPA these days? Are there still humans in there? Things are moving too fast folks. Let’s look at the matchup for a sec: Human fetus – looks cute/scary/funny,…

In a breakthrough that will undoubtedly lead to more expensive LCD TV models that people like me can only dream and write about, electronics giant Sharp has developed a 5-primary-color LCD display that will supposedly lead to more lifelike images. Apparently, the traditional 3-color (red, green and blue) setup has some trouble recreating certain colors…

Asimov concocted the Three Laws of Robotics in 1942 and built many of his stories around these rules. While Asimov benefited greatly from those rules as an artistic concept, giving him ideas to explore, in the future our lives may really depend on robot ethics.  Fortunately, a computer science professor at Georgia Tech named Ronald…

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 walk around with, projecting stuff all…

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 on a traditional keyboard. So…

Filmmaker Rob Spence lost his eye when he was 11 years old. He was playing with a shotgun back in his grandfather’s farm in Ireland when it backfired. Now he and his partners in the Eyeborg Project want to “transform his loss into a superhuman strength” for art’s sake. Spence wants to install a video…

When I was a kid, I really wanted to be Marvin the Martin. No, not because of his stylish scrub-brush headgear or his oversize clown shoes. Nope, it was the awesome destructive power of his ACME Ray Gun that I envied.

Now, thanks to sculptor Andy Hill of Electro Art Works, you can own your…

Honda’s hand-shaking, stair-climbing, head-bowing, face-not having robot ASIMO has been exposed to Gigantor rays and has been blown up to 12 times it’s size. But don’t expect any Double Blizzards coming out of it: Robert over at GeekAlerts says that Gigantor ASIMO “will be completed with natural materials like lettuce seed, rice, carnations and strawflower.”…