Technology & AI

Discover, October 8 2010.

Dudes: are you looking to get that Baywatch body without all the pumping of iron? All you need is a little “MovieReshape” and you can be virtually buff! Just don’t let anyone see you in person. MovieReshape is a program created by Christian Theobalt at the Max Plank Institute in Germany.

The program will digitally alter your appearance (including height, weight, and muscle tone) in any movie clip. Women can even get a digital boob job or liposuction to automatically enhance body size and shape on the fly. Earlier approaches to body manipulation on film required retouching of every frame, a very laborious process when you’re talking about 30 frames per second. Read More >

Discover, October 8 2010.

Hugging someone standing up. Going on a hike. Making eye contact with someone at their level, instead of always being looked down upon. These are simple things that people stuck in wheelchairs don’t have a chance to experience in daily life. 

Berkeley Bionics is giving those experiences back to paraplegics with the introduction of an exoskeleton suit called eLEGS–a battery powered, artificially intelligent, wearable outer skeleton that gives these people back their freedom. People wearing these devices won’t be a common sight just yet–a suit is currently priced at about $100,000 a pop, and they’ll only be available for use in clinics at first–but it’s an exciting step forward. Read More >

Discover, October 6 2010.

Who needs people to guard a nuclear weapons facility when you can build an autonomous robot to do it? Or, at least that’s what the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) was probably thinking when they ordered up three robo-tanks to take on the task of watching over the Nevada nuclear test site.

The first of the robots, named the Mobile Detection Assessment Response System (MDARS), just started working, according to Wired’s Danger Room, where we saw the story. Two more are scheduled to start their work in other remote locations on the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS, which is basically in the middle of the desert) within the next six months. Read More >

Discover, October 1 2010.

Google’s expansion of its Street View project to all seven continents has the sweet reward of allowing you to visit Antarctica while sitting on your couch in your leopard-print snuggie. (They also filled in the holes of Ireland and Brazil, but much as we love those countries, Antarctica is still more exciting.) Ed Parsons, Google’s geospatial technologist, told The Guardian that this feat was “hugely significant” to the Goog:

“One of the challenges we wanted to crack is to go to these remote places, and one of geo team at Google went to Antarctica so he took some kit and took some imagery. It’s called Street View, but there aren’t many streets in Antarctica,” he said. “This allows people to understand the contrast between New York Times Square and being on the edge of a glacier looking at penguins.” Read More >

Discover, September 29 2010.

It’s not in the eyes, the face, or fingerprints. For some researchers, the future of biometrics lies in the ear. Imagine walking into a store and instead of submitting to an iris scan, like in Minority Report, having the cameras scan your ear, noting its curves and wrinkles, to identify you.

Christopher Mims, blogging for Technology Review, reports that that day may come. What makes the human ear good for use as a biometric is its uniqueness, which does not change with age. But first the computer needs to be able to pick your ear out of the crowd, which–while easy for a human–is quite difficult for a computer. 

A team of researchers at the University of Southampton has developed a way(pdf) for a computer to recognize an ear with 99.6 percent accuracy. That’s right. It knows if an ear is an ear almost all the time. Of course, it has no idea whose ear it is. To “see” an ear, the algorithm uses a sophisticated image analysis approach, says Technology Review. Read More >

Discover, September 28 2010.

A human-powered monorail system called Shweeb won $1 million from Google’s 10^100 innovations contest. The company that manufactured the Shweeb is one of five to be awarded a total of $10 million from the competition. They will use the money to develop the Shweeb for use as a city commuter transport option. The Shweeb efficiently uses human power from a rider sitting in the recumbent seat, pedaling the bubble-shaped pod through the air. This vision for public transportation is a little out there, but the Shweeb has some promise, says Gearlog.

Like all truly forward thinking ideas, Shweeb seems completely nuts at first glance. As a tech blogger I’d love nothing more than to mock Google and it’s choice of Shweeb with its poor-man’s take on the Jetsonsopening sequence. But the more you read about it, the more Shweeb’s innovative take urban transport makes a whole lot of sense. Read More >

Discover, September 24 2010.

This little 6th generation iPod nano just wants to dance. Because that’s what its human programmed it to do.

Kazu Terasaki, also known as YouTube user PachimonDotCom, is a Japanese software engineer from Silicon Valley, CA who is addicted to making apple products walk around. He has been working on this project for years, hoping to create a robo-legs product that could give any gadget the ability to walk around, says a GetRobo post about Kazu’s walking objects project from 2008. Read More >

Discover, September 23 2010.

August 2nd marked the first human-powered flight of an ornithopter. Wait, a what? It’s pronounced awr-nuh-thop-ter, and it’s an aircraft propelled by flapping wings, like a bird. First sketched by Leonardo da Vinci in 1485, people have been trying to improve on his design–and build a working model–for centuries.

A group at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Aerospace Studies made their own design, and in August, they successfully flew the first human-powered ornithopter. The pilot, a PhD candidate named Todd Reichert, sat in a tiny cockpit pedaling furiously to make the wings gracefully flap. Reichert explained the world’s obsession with this strange machine: Read More >