Technabob » mit

MIT Student Constructs Mario Kart Racer, Cafeteria Runs out of Bananas

Conner Flynn — Mon, 14 May 2012 14:00:06 +0000

Charles Guan, an MIT grad student, has created a working replica of the vehicles from Super Mario Kart. It is powered by four motors attached to the wheels and can reach speeds upwards of 26 mph. It can also do some crazy turns when the driver leans into the curves.

Even more amazing than the kart itself is how quickly he made the thing. He fabricated it in just three weeks. The vehicle, called the “Chibikart,” is built to be as lightweight as possible. The frame is just 30-inches long and 18-inches wide. Check it out in action in the video clip below:

So, how did he make it so fast? Guan installed a 32-volt battery and electrical system along with an e-bike controller from China to run the power plant of the vehicle. Installed underneath the seat, this drives each of the electrical motors installed in the four small wheels. Sweet. Now he needs to build more and hold Mario Kart races once a year.

[via Kotaku via Geek]

Swÿp: Cross Device Drag-and-Drop

Lambert Varias — Tue, 08 May 2012 15:00:20 +0000

If you’ve seen The Avengers or the previous Iron Man movies, you’ve probably been wowed by the computer interface that Tony Stark and his colleagues use, where they send data to by physically sliding or swiping screens to each other. Natan Linder and Alexander List have captured some of that marvelous magic with their app.

The app is called Swÿp. I guess Swipr and Swipestagram were taken. It’s made for iOS devices and is as easy to use as most of Apple’s gestures. Simply swipe the icon of the file you want to transfer from the source to the target.

Both devices are not hacked or modified in any way save for the installation of the app. The trick is that the swipe is actually broken down to two parts: swiping out tells Swÿp that you want to send a file, and swiping in means that you want Swÿp to receive a file. What isn’t clear to me is if both devices already have to have Swÿp up and running or if Swÿp can autorun on the receiver’s end when it detects an incoming file transfer.

Linder and List have a guide and resources for developers here. If only it was this easy to transfer files to and from iOS devices to computers. For the love of convenience, please let this be the future of syncing.

[MIT Media Lab via Fast Co. Design]

MIT Media Lab Makes OLED Display Cubes: No Cenobites in Sight (Yet)

Range — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 21:00:18 +0000

For some reason, whenever I see small, interesting cube-like devices, I think of the puzzle cube in Hellraiser, which is also knowns as a Lemarchand’s box. However unlike those, these ones developed by the MIT Media Lab allow you to visualize something on each of the six screens, one on each side, not open a door to Hell!

They have been developed by Pol Pla i Conesa of MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Group. Each cube is assembled from a set of six 128×128 OLED displays powered by their own microcontroller, capable of showing video, images or other visualizations.

Conesa thinks that the cubes could be used in tasks where different sets of information about a large collection of objects need to be rapidly accessed. On a larger scale, the cubes could be assembled into larger ad hoc displays, each of them functioning as a pixel.

Here’s some video footage from the guys over at Engadget showing off the prototype and some potential applications:

[via Engadget via designboom]

MIT Students Play Tetris on a Building

Conner Flynn — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:00:48 +0000

Remember way back when Tetris was first released? We had to play on small TVs. Eventually we were able to play on larger HDTVs, but it turned out that a 60″ flat screen still isn’t big enough for some people. That’s why some students from MIT decided to play a game of the arcade and console classic using an entire building as a display. It’s not the first time this has been done, but it’s always fun to see an entire building used to play a game.

They turned the outside of MIT’s Green Building into a super-size Tetris screen and then proceeded to move, rotate, and drop all of the familiar blocks, but there was a unique twist as the player progressed through the levels. When the player hit the second level, the blocks became more pale in color, making it more difficult to to see.

The third level made the colors on the screen shift, making it even more difficult. The people inside of the building now know what it feels like to be inside of a video game.

[Bostinno via Hack A Day via Geekosystem]

MIT Camera Can See Around Corners with Frickin’ Lasers

Shane McGlaun — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:00:49 +0000

If you take anything and tell me it uses laser beams, you have my attention. MIT has a very cool new camera that they’ve been working on it uses lasers to allow it to take photos of what’s going on around the corner. It’s an impressive technology, and the way the camera is able to do this is by using extremely fast laser pulses bounced off of its subject.

MIT announced back in 2010 that it was developing the special camera that would use light echoes to see around corners. It took two years and the researchers are now showing off the camera in action. The camera fires 50 individual femtosecond laser pulses in a burst at 60 different times at various spots on a wall. The imaging sensor then picks up the light assets reflected back to the camera and uses complicated algorithms to piece together an image of what’s going on around the corner.

It’s easy to see practical military and police applications for such a camera. However, it currently takes several minutes for the image sensor to piece the image together, and the image isn’t exactly accurate as of yet. The MIT researchers hope to cut that to 10 seconds to make it usable in the real world. Ten seconds is still a long time and things around the corner can change significantly and 10 seconds making me think that the camera needs to get down into the one to second range for most practical applications.

[via Scientific American via PetaPixel]

MIT Charm School Teaches Social Skills, Street Smarts: Not Sure if This is the Hardest or Easiest Course for MIT Students

Lambert Varias — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:00:56 +0000

MIT is famous for attracting and nurturing some of the brightest minds in the world. But you know what they say, nobody’s perfect. You may be able to code a social network, but find it hard to talk to people in real life. But whether the nerd stereotype holds true for MIT’s students or not, it’s still amusing to hear that its Student Life Division is offering honorary Charm Degrees, which involves taking 15-minute classes about social skills and other practical knowledge.

To give you an idea of what the degree offers, here are some of the class titles: How to Make Small Talk: Small Talk Leads to Big Talk, Networking with Grace and Charm, Dress with Success:Maintaining a Professional Wardrobe after the Interview, Say What?!?! Tops for Effective Communication and Accepting that Most People Don’t Understand Quantum Physics Jokes. Just kidding guys.

A student earns a charm credit for each class he attends and will be conferred with a bachelor’s, master’s or doctoral degree in Charm depending on the number of charm credits they earn. In other words, all you have to do is show up for a 15-minute class and you can get a degree, a condition that no doubt millions of kids wish would apply to normal degrees as well.

MIT students who think that they are already charming ~~are wrong~~ won’t automatically qualify for the degrees – they still have to attend the classes. MIT students, practice smiling and giving firm handshakes and head to your school’s website to learn more about the Charm School.

[via HLN via Geekologie]

Minecraft.Print(): From Virtual 3D to Actual 3D

Lambert Varias — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:00:08 +0000

It’s still not in it’s final form, but even if it evolves significantly I’m pretty sure that Minecraft will stick to it’s roots – it’s a basic CAD (Computer Aided Design) program. A CAD program with monsters. Now, thanks to two MIT researchers, Minecraft players can have 3D models of their in-game creations, just like CAD users can make prototypes of their designs.

Cody Sumter and Jason Boggess of the MIT Human Dynamics research group call their creation Minecraft.Print(). It’s a Python script that takes a marked Minecraft creation and outputs an .STL file, which you can then turn into an actual object using a 3D printer. Watch the video below to see how to tag an object for printing and to see a sample print:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Yeah, it’s not a 1:1 scale model. I’m as disappointed as you are; I was fantasizing being able to walk on the stairs of Escher’s Relativity. Still, I imagine it would be quite thrilling for many Minecraft users to see their creations actually turned into an object.

Check out the Minecraft.Print() website to download the script and to check out more sample printed objects.

[via MIT Media Lab via Hack N Mod]

MIT Engineer Develops Glasses that Read Facial Expressions

Shane McGlaun — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 19:57:48 +0000

I have watched the show Lie to Me and I really like it. It’s cool that the character is supposed to be able to tell when someone is lying just by their facial expressions. I wish I could do that sometimes, it would make life much easier. An engineer at MIT named Rosalind Picard has developed a cool set of glasses that claims to be able to read expressions and tell the wearer what the person they are talking to is thinking.

The glasses have a small camera in them that reads the face of the other person and looks at 24 different feature points. The points are then fed into a database to determine what the person is thinking or feeling between six states including thinking, agreeing, concentrating, interested, confused, and disagreeing.

The software portion was developed by Rana el Kaliouby. The pair claims that the average person could determine what a real person was thinking by looking at facial expressions 54% of the time and the glasses got it right 64% of the time.

[via CNET]

Iron Man Origami Defeats Whiplash with Paper Cuts

Range — Sun, 22 May 2011 12:53:11 +0000

Brian Chan has made a few impressive origami, including an Iron Man mask and a sort of Iron Man action figure that’s completely made out of paper. Brian is an MIT staffer, but after having a look at the plans he’s got on his website, it makes me wonder if you need a degree from MIT to be able to duplicate these.

The only origami I ever made were paper cranes, and they were pretty simple. That’s the opposite of Brian’s Iron Man, which looks insanely complicated. Still, the end result is pretty awesome. Naturally, Brian used the appropriately gold and red paper so that his Iron Man looks the part.

I wonder if he’ll tackle War Machine next. I could see kids playing with these origami, so you could replace some action figures with these ones made out of paper, but good luck trying to fold it the right way. It’s probably going to take some trial and error to get this done…

[via Make:]

Solar-Powered Lounge Chairs: You Chill While Your Gadgets Recharge

Range — Thu, 05 May 2011 17:12:28 +0000

Chilling in the yard while your gadgets are recharging sounds like a good way to spend the summer. That’s why I like these new chairs called SOFT Rockers. They have a 35-watt solar panel that charges a built-in battery which will juice up your gadgets.

You can access the power via the built-in USB ports. The power can be used to light-up the inside of the chair, to give you light while you are reading or browsing when the sun goes down. Created by architecture professor Sheila Kennedy and a team of students at MIT, the SOFT Rocker can also capture the kinetic energy from your rocking motions, to add even more power to the chair.

The SOFT Rockers can be found at Killian Court, at MIT until the end of the week if you want to try them out.

[Arts at MIT via DVice]

Junkyard Jumbotron Turns Random Displays into One Big Screen

Technabob — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 02:26:24 +0000

It’s not like I haven’t seen matrix displays before, but this is definitely a unique spin on the concept. Developed by Rick Borovoy, Ph. D. and Brian Knep of the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, Junkyard Jumbotron lets you combine a number of internet-connected screens together to create one big matrixed image.

The way the system works, you place all of your devices into proximity with one another, then surf to a special website URL, which displays a visual marker on each screen. You then take a photo of the devices relationship, and upload it to the Junkyard Jumbotron web site. Once processed, the system slices up the image and properly aligns the pieces. Once loaded, you can even load up another part of the app to manipulate the image across all displays. It doesn’t matter if you mix smartphones with laptops with tablets with internet TVs. As long as the devices can surf the web, they can participate.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Borovoy and Knep developed the system while exploring ways to improve interaction and community between device users. I would have liked it just as much if they made it just because it was cool. You can make your own Junkyard Jumbotron now by heading over to the beta site. Feel free to post back any cool displays matrices you manage to create.

[via Colosssal]

M1 Mobile Manipulator Robot: The Real Johnny 5

Range — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 14:10:05 +0000

The M1 Mobile Manipulator robot is made by Meka Robotics, a San Francisco company which got started by MIT roboticists. The robot plans to be worth more than the sum of its parts and it slightly reminds me of Johnny 5 from Short Circuit.

The M1 has an omni-directional base, optional heads, hands, and sensors – all designed to help an operator or application remotely manipulate stuff. Later this year, Meka will even release a modular head with a Microsoft Kinect sensor.

M1′s torso is height-adjustable, and the whole robot measures about 50 inches tall but weighs 364 pounds.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The final price point for M1 will vary, but costs will start out at pricey $340,000 (USD).

[via GetRobo[JP] & IEEE Automaton via PlasticPals]

Kinect Minority Report Hack: Fingers Detected!

Technabob — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 04:36:59 +0000

Engineers from MIT CSAIL have figured out out how to get the Xbox 360 Kinect to not just sense larger body movements, but to actually detect individual fingertips in mid-air.

They used the data points to replicate a rudimentary version of the gesture interfaces seen in Minority Report – sans gloves, of course.The guys used something called the Point Cloud Library from Willow Garage’s open source robotic control package ROS.

Here’s a video of the hack in action:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

One can only hope that some games start to surface that take advantage of individual finger movements. I could see this coming in handy for puzzle games, and maybe something like the part of Bioshock where you hack into the security system – this would be a much cooler way to test your dexterity. Also, for virtual porn.

If you’re interested in giving this a shot for yourself, you’ll need to grab the ROS Kinect code here, and MIT’s code here. I’m not sure exactly what else you need to do to make it all work though, so install at your own risk.

Proverbial Wallet Gets Harder to Open as You Run Out of Green

Shane McGlaun — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 17:30:06 +0000

I found out the hard way in college that you could use your debit card to get money even if you are out of cash. Most banks will let you go over what you have in the account in an effort to “help you” and gather overdraft fees at the same time. A new wallet concept from geeks at MIT could help you keep your spending in order. The “Mother Bear” wallet tracks how much loot you have in the bank, and the closer you get to broke the harder it is to open.

I wonder if it snaps closed on your fingers like a clam when you run out of money completely. These Proverbial Wallet concepts from the team of Henry Holtzman, John Kestner, Daniel Leithinger, Emily Tow, Danny Bankman, Jaekyung Jung at MIT Media Lab actually come in three versions, including “Bumblebee” – that vibrates when your bank processes a transaction, and a “Peacock” one that expands and contracts based on your bank balance – puffing up like a peacock “to attract potential mates.”

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The hard to open design of the Mother Bear wallet can be mapped out to a monthly budget. This would be a great way to let kids know how much they have to spend. Hell, I wish I could remotely lock down my wife’s wallet once she spends too much.

[via designboom]

Hackers + Mit + the Tardis: the Doctor is in!

Range — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:44:32 +0000

A bunch of hackers and pranksters managed to plant a TARDIS on the top of Building 7 at MIT. Now that’s a great prank, if I’ve ever seen one! I like how unobtrusive this hack is. From a distance, you really need to squint to see that it’s the venerable old TARDIS that’s sitting right there.

MIT is a great place for geeks of all kinds, so this Doctor Who tribute should fit right in. That being said, it makes you wonder how they are able to do these crazy pranks between all their educatin’ and learnin’.

It’s just the latest in the great tradition of MIT hacks and pranks. You can see a whole history of other fun pranks on the campus website.

[via Wired]

Mit’S Mebot is Telepresence at Its Best?

Range — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:35:27 +0000

Telepresence is going to be huge someday. It looks like MIT’s MeBot is the latest in telepresence robotics, which allows you to feel more like the person you are talking to is in the same room as you – assuming the person on the other end of the line looks like a robot.

The beauty of telepresence systems is that they allow people to be in different locations and appear as they are in the same room. Although this would probably work best with holograms, the MeBot is something simpler that uses a small robot to embody the persona of the remote caller.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The cute robot wears a video screen “head” which displays the face of its operator. There are two small articulating arms and a sort of neck. The robot can also move around on a flat surface.

It’s an interesting idea, but I wonder if the MeBot would ever really catch on. It all seems a little weird to me.

[MIT via Hizook via PlasticPals]

The Copenhagen Wheel, Making Your Biking Trip Smarter and Easier

P. Blandino — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 01:53:54 +0000

This week, MIT unveiled the Copenhagen Wheel at the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change in Denmark. The wheel works with the power of you – every time you brake while biking, it charges the wheel’s internal battery for use later on your trip. That way, you won’t need to charge your wheel before any trip. The wheel will sense when you’re having trouble peddling up a hill, and turn on the internal motor to give you boost and make it an easier climb. The wheel can also make you go faster when traveling on flat surfaces. It’s not a motor that will move the bike for you, its a wheel to assist your current biking stamina.

But wait, there’s more! With your iPhone’s Bluetooth you can connect to the wheels sensors with an iPhone app. The App will tell you your speed, direction, and distance traveled and will pull data from the Internet to inform you of traffic conditions, and even the smog levels around you. That’s a big plus if your already an avid biker and like to keep track of your daily trips.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The Copenhagen Wheel is currently expected to be available some time next year with an estimated price range of $500 and $1,000 (USD).

[via Cnet]

Clearview: One Software to Fix Them All

Lambert Varias — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:45:53 +0000

Ah, software problems. We’ve all experienced them in varying degrees – sometimes it’s just a stupid online video that won’t load, and sometimes the operating system itself gives up. Now imagine a future where programs can still be compromised, or attacked, but will no longer crash or hang. A group of MIT researchers, led by Martin Rinard and Michael Ernst, are working to make that future possible. They’re working on ClearView, a program designed to fix other programs. According to the Technology Review‘s Erica Naone, ClearView doesn’t fiddle with a program’s source code; instead it “monitors the behavior of a binary: the form the program takes in order to execute instructions on a computer’s hardware.”

ClearView makes a list of rules based on a program’s “normal” behavior. When something causes the program to deviate from those rules, ClearView “comes up with several potential patches designed to force the software to follow the violated rules… If additional rules are violated, or if a patch causes the system to crash, ClearView rejects it and tries another.” And it does all of that without any human intervention. As a test, ClearView was tasked to babysit Firefox while the browser was attacked via ten different methods. On average, ClearView came up with a patch within 5 minutes of exposure to an attack. How’s that for customer service. If you’re tired of having programs die on you, read the full article at Technology Review. It may just make your day.

[via Slashdot]

Quad-Rotor Autonomous Helicopter Eschews Gps in Favor of Lasers. Laz0rz!

Lambert Varias — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:30:18 +0000

Here’s another one of them MAVs that’ll soon be flying all over the place. A group of MIT students – Abe Bachrach, Anton de Winter, Ruije He, Garrett Hemann and Sam Prentice (I think I got +10 to my IQ after spelling their names) – developed an autonomous flight system that could sweep and analyze it’s environment in real-time. While a 10-year old human can also “analyze it’s environment in real time”, a 10-year old human can’t fly. Or use lasers to build maps. Thanks to the Bachrach et al, the robot in the picture can do both. It’s a quad-rotor helicopter packed with sensors and a laser. It’s specialty? The great indoors.

You see, it’s relatively easy (for nerds) to build a robot that can find its way to a target outdoors, thanks to the magic of GPS. But what if you want to search inside a building? GPS won’t help you there, believe me. I researched it extensively. If you don’t have a map of the building or whatever structure you’re infiltrating, you’re screwed. But more importantly, GPS receivers need a strong signal to work, something which you’ll have difficulty obtaining inside a building.

So the aforementioned MIT students came up with a laser scanner that sweeps the helicopter’s immediate area, and that along with some algorithm magic (yeah this is where I lose track of definitions) builds a corresponding rough three-dimensional map of the autonomous vehicle’s immediate environment, as shown in the image above. Now I need you to watch the video below and then answer one tiny question for me: when the narrator uses the word “we” and “us”, does he mean that they can control the robot remotely which means they can see the map that the laser sweep generates, or is the robot fully autonomous?

Maybe the chopper is the narrator, and it’s talking using lasers. I don’t know. I’m confused.

[via MIT Tech TV]

Sixthsense Wearable Gestural Interface: Microsoft Surface + Google in a Portable Package

Lambert Varias — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:29:31 +0000

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 over the place, and interacting with the surroundings as well. Maes contacted Pranav ‘Zombie’ Mistry, and the latter came up with a prototype in just 3 weeks.

As you can see, SixthSense is made up of a camera that tracks the color-marked fingers, and a projector to display whatever relevant information the system digs up. What’s not in the picture is of course the computer itself, in this case a “mobile computing device” installed with software that analyzes the gestures and the objects captured by the camera, so that it can respond and provide the appropriate information. What sort of information? Let’s start with a little trick: if Mistry traces a small circle on his wrist using his index finger, SixthSense will project a watch onto his wrist:

There are many other gestures that the system recognizes – drawing a magnifying glass projects a map application, while drawing the ‘@’ symbol lets the user check his/her email. SixthSense can also interact with everyday objects, like in the image below where it reveals that the flight which the user has a ticket to is delayed.

And here we see SixthSense providing Amazon’s rating for a book on the book’s cover itself:

SixthSense can also pull up video from the internet:

That right there is so awesome. SO AWESOME. As you can see, SixthSense is like a portable, more intuitive, multi-touch version of Google. As Pranav Mistry says on his website: “SixthSense frees information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer.”

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

And the best part? All this automagical stuff we’ve seen was achieved on a prototype that costs only $350 USD to build. There are netbooks that are more expensive than this system. If SixthSense becomes mass-produced or integrated into computing devices, I’d imagine prices will only go south of that figure. SixthSense really has the potential to make digital information as accessible as possible, the same way that cellular phones made communication instant and affordable.

[via Pop Sci]