Senseg: Screens with a Feeling

Suppose when you touch the screen of your smartphone / laptop you would not only be touching it, the screen touches you back!

Touch screens are great and better than normal button-based interfaces but the touch screens in use today are in-capable of providing any kind of feedback to the user that the command has been received. if only touch screens could provide some sort of tactile feedback then the user could operate a screen on a much more interactive level.

Senseg, a company which has developed just the thing, they have come up with a transparent layer which can be put on top of any normal touch screen, the layer can mimic the surface feel from as smooth as silk to as rough as a rock. , they have already produced libraries for the popular mobile OS platforms and have a complete kit ready with electroncis and software API.

Getting tactile feedback from a screen will help in many areas including in-car screens, so the driver does not need to see the screen while operating it, and obviously in other areas as where the user needs better control of the touch interface and having a proper feel of where the touch is can be the difference that is needed on today’s screens.

The tactile screen works by creating a sort of electrostatic attraction field between the finger and the screen and the app-developer can manipulate the field at any part of the screen making variable surface feelings at different areas.
More details about the underlying technology in this product can be seen at: http://senseg.com/technology/senseg-technology

Website: http://www.senseg.com/

Soundcard Scope [Software]

Having an oscilloscope can save lots of time while working on an electronics project, but affording one seems a bit far fetched for a student when the scopes usually cost more than a couple hundred dollars. However there are a few alternatives that a studetn can use without having to spend too much.

Soundcard Scope is a software, free for non-commercial use which uses the soundcard of a computer and shows signals coming in from the soundcard as waves in a scope on the computer screen. The software has many features which make it quite useful and at par with expensive oscilloscopes. It can record a signal, show relevant measurements on screen.

Soundcard Scope Snapshot

However, the soundcard of computers cannot handle voltages above 0.7V (positive/negative) hence a voltage divider is needed to bring the input voltage level down and to be able to measure higher voltage levels. A 100k oscilloscope probe works best and gives better resolution though additional protection diodes are needed to protect the soundcard of computer.

Software: Soundcard Scope
Download Link: http://www.zeitnitz.eu/scope/scope_140.zip (version 1.4)
Software Website: http://www.zeitnitz.de/Christian/scope_en

Trillion FPS Camera

We have all seen the videos of Slow-mo guys and have awed over the ultra slow snaps of stuff getting burned/blown/shattered. Seriously, the shattering of a glowing light bulb and seeing it as it happens in ultra-slow-motion is very cool indeed, but the camera which MIT researchers recently came up with takes high frame per second photography to a whole new level.

I obviously cannot explain the new technology any better than those who have created it, so let’s hear it from them:

MIT researchers have built an ultra-super-fast-camera which can track a burst of light lighting up a scene and then fading away. The camera actually sees light moving but this is not your average point-and-shoot type camera, the whole thing costs upwards of US$250,000 and takes up a lot of space and the camera is able to capture only a very narrow image (one horizontal line in a whole image), so take actual pictures, the camera takes thousands/millions images of the same event happening over and over again and the lens assembly is moved a little bit each time to get the complete picture. Furthermore this limits this camera to events which can be easily and automatically repeated with precise timing. The camera also produces much noise in the output, but taking the image again and again gives enough data to get a proper reconstruction of the photons (light particles) moving in the scene.

Reconstruction of a Laser Pulse moving in a Scene with Crests of Photons shown

However, further improvements in such a technology will definitely pave the way for improvements in imaging systems, fault detectors, and maybe just maybe, someday this type of speed will fall down to the average consumer camera.

Source:
MIT News
(http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/trillion-fps-camera-1213.html)

Experiment Webpage:
Visualizing Photons in Motion at a Trillion Frames Per Second
(http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/)

Codecademy – Learn to Code, Literally

If you wish to learn how to program, the Internet is full of useful information, you can find books that teach you how to program, some even claim to do that in 24 hours however doubtful that may be, almost all the ways that you have tried uptill now take a sort of similar approach. First teach fundamental, then teach about the software which will be used as a coding, compiling mechanism then start again with the coding with variables, loops, functions, conditions and so on….

Codecademy (http://www.codecademy.com) takes a bit different approach and aims to make learning to program simple and fun.

“Coding is going to be the literacy of the 21st Century, and we think we have the easiest way to do it,” says co-founder Zach Sims.

When you go to the site, it gives you a big text-box in the front where it asks for your name and as soon as you do that the coding class has begun. Currently the site only teaches Javascript (a form of Java used on the web) but the courses are great for beginners as they are and if given enough time, one can easily learn basic programming skills from this website without needing any special software or being on a computer. The class is online, you can log-in from anywhere and use it when you have time.

Playing Back Brain Images

    The ability to record brain activity while seeing an image, and then play it back to reconstruct the image has been a matter of pure science fiction-until now. Scientists working at the University of California, Berkeley, have succeeded in recon­structing visual images after recording the brain activity of hu­man subjects watching movie trailers-they were able to see what the people's brains were seeing! 

   They used a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRl) scanner to record the flow of blood in certain parts of the brain. Using powerful computing techniques, it was possible to correlate the visual images with the corresponding brain activities. This al­lowed the images to be reconstructed. The researchers hope to eventually "read the thoughts" of patients in a coma or suffering from paralysis after a stroke. Researchers have now also succee­ded in reconstructing words spoken to persons by detecting the corresponding brain activity.