Top 5 Concepts

Monday 28 September

Watched the Top 5 on this weeks ‘Gadget Show’? Find out more about the conceptual ideas that will shape the future in tech.

Number 5: Bendy Screens. Bendy screens have been made possible by a variety of emerging technologies, including E-Ink and, in particular. OLED. Organic Light Emitting Diodes are lighter, thinner and more flexible than normal LED’s, which means they can be printed onto a flexible – rather than rigid – base.

The Flexible Display Centre, in association with Universal Display Corporation have recently unveiled a new method of manufacturing Flexible OLED displays that could make mass production possible in just a few years. http://flexdisplay.asu.edu

Samsung, amongst others, unveiled a working flexible-OLED prototype this year.

Nokia and Cambridge University have envisioned Morph, a device that combines OLED and nano-technology to create a smartphone that you can literally wrap around your wrist.

www.nokia.com

Microsoft predict that we’ll be reading bendy screen e-newspapers as part of their Office Labs: Vision 2019 presentation.

www.officelabs.com

Number 4: Energy Bracelet The Energy Bracelet concept – an entrant in this year’s James Dyson Design Awards – is a design for a portable charger for your phone and mp3 player. It straps to your wrist and uses the difference in temperature between your body and the world around you to generate voltage.

Concept by: Mathieu Servais, Camille Lefer, Clément Faydi & Mickaël Denié

www.yankodesign.com

Number 3: Spatial Computing Spatial computing will liberate the computing experience from the mouse and screen and incorporate digital information into the world around us.

G-Speak, developed by Oblong Industries, is quite literally the ‘Minority Report’ interface brought to life – in fact one of the developers worked as a science advisor on the very same film. With g-speak, every digital object you interact with has a real-world spatial identity and position. You can literally pick up objects and place them on a table, throw them across the room, or even onto your laptop. http://oblong.com/

Sixth Sense, developed by Pranav Mistry at the MIT Media Lab in the USA, is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with it.

http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/

Number 2: The Podcar The Podcar – also known as Personal Rapid Transport, or PRT – belongs to a transport system where all the cars are replaced by automated electric vehicles. You just hop in, pick your destination, and the Podcar’s on-board computer does the driving.

Trials of the UK’s first – the ULTRA PRT system – will start soon at Heathrow Airport.

http://www.atsltd.co.uk/

But whilst this system will be restricted to the terminals, future Podcar networks could cover entire towns and cities.

http://www.taxi2000.com/

http://www.vectusprt.com/

Number 1: Brain Computer Interfacing (BCI) Brain computer interfacing is a method of communicating between the human mind and machine. One of the most popular methods of implementing BCI at the moment is via the use of a non invasive EEG scanner that you wear on your head. BCI has the potential to totally change the way we view technology – with fantastic future applications ranging from medical to transport to how we interact with gadgetry in general.

Toyota have developed a Mind Controlled Wheelchair that uses EEG signals to move the user forward, left and right and can update within 125 milliseconds.

www.riken.go.jp

The Multimodal Brain Orchestra saw its debut in Prague in April of this year. Using technology developed in the Synthetic Perceptive Emotive and Cognitive Systems (SPECS) laboratory at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the ‘performers’ play musical instruments through BCI technology alone.

www.specs.upf.edu

The Emotive EPOC Headset is a sophisticated gaming peripheral that allows complete control of a game through thought alone

www.emotiv.com

The Robot Suit HAL – or Hybrid Assistive Limb – uses sensors on the skin to amplify the electrical signals sent to the muscles from the brain … and turns them into power-assisted robotic movements!

www.cyberdyne.jp