POINT-AIM-SHOOT-WE KNOW YOUR NAME BECAUSE OF YOUR SKIN TYPE ETC

Online shopping and advertising already do it, take information based on the pages or products that a person had looked at and provide advertisements, or links to other products that may also interest that person.

In just a few years shops could use facial recognition technology to do the same.

A Perth professor is working on research that he hopes could play a role in creating this technology.

Associate Professor Ajmal Mian from the University of Western Australia first became interested in facial recognition technology when doing his PHD which he completed in 2006.

Since then he has continued to research how to use satellite technology to identify facial features that lie under the skin.

It is believed that a dot-sized part of a face may soon be all that is needed to identify a person.

Professor Mian said by incorporating numerous images of a person from different angles into a system, these could possibly be used to later identify that person by just a small section of their face.

He said while facial recognition technology was not new, being able to identify someone from just a small part of their face meant recognition could be done faster and easier.

“To be more useful it has to not be intrusive, so you don’t need to come in contact with it like fingerprinting and the ultimate is to do it without people noticing it’s happening, without them having to stop and look at a camera,” Professor Mian said.

“I am trying to dig out more accurate techniques and find different algorithms to be able to identify people more easily.”

He said a shop may use the technology to maintain a customer database.

“We know security cameras are there but if shops say you need to get fingerprinted, people are not going to want to do that,” Professor Mian said.

He said the technology may not necessarily associate people by their names.

“They may group you by different charts, they don’t necessarily have to attach a name to it, each time you come in they see what you buy, if customer A buys item such-and-such they are most likely to buy item such-and-such, like on Amazon,” he said.

Mr Mian said it was up to marketing staff as to how the information was used.

He said multi-spectral imaging can be used to measure light reflected off a face at hundreds of discrete wavelengths in the visible spectrum and beyond.

This meant that the technology being worked on would be able to recognise a person despite their different facial expressions.

Professor Mian said his research may also be able to detect people who have used cosmetic surgery to alter their looks.

He said he did not expect the technology to be expensive once created.

“Once the algorithm is developed it won’t be expensive, it is the research which is the expensive part, all you will need is a few cameras.”

“It’ll start up in shops that spend a lot of money on customer care and marketing and others will follow.”

He admitted that there would be some concerns about privacy.

“There’s always a concern about security and privacy and there’s always a trade off, it will be a discussion of topic forever,” Professor Mian said.

He said the kind of facial recognition technology he envisioned could be used in security and if used at airports could greatly improve the identification process at the immigration sections of airports.

Professor Mian was also looking into the possibility of applying it to psychology and also identifying whether people had certain syndromes.

Associate Professor Mian is the only West Australian to have won the Australasian Distinguished Dissertation Award from The Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia.

He has also won two prestigious national fellowships: the Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Australian Research Fellowship.

Check this out here as MakerBot unveils its new 3D printer, the Replicator

The folks at MakerBot Industries have not exactly been resting on their laurels since causing a stir at CES last year with the Thing-o-Matic 3D printer. Even though the original small object creation device would still see the jaws of most people dropping in wonder, the company has now unveiled a new model at CES 2012 called the Replicator that is not only capable of fabricating much bigger objects than its predecessor, but can also do so in two colors at the same time.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

HOME BREWED BEER IN RECORD TIME WITH THIS MACHINE

Home beer-brewing is sort of like writing a novel – although you might like the idea of having done it, the thought of all the work involved in doing it can be off-putting. If the PR materials are to be believed, however, the WilliamsWarn brewing machine could make the process a lot easier … and quicker. Unlike the four weeks required by most home brewing systems, it can reportedly produce beer in just seven days.

The WilliamsWarn was created by New Zealand “beer-thinkers” Ian Williams and Anders Warn, and was released in that country this April. The duo claim that it addresses 12 of the key challenges thwarting many home brewers, including the carbonation process, temperature control, and clarification.

Kind of like a Mr. Coffee (perhaps they should have called it “Mr. Beer”), the machine reportedly incorporates all the hardware needed for brewing. This includes a stainless steel pressure vessel with carbonation level control, and systems to control factors such as clarification, sediment removal, temperature, and gas dispensation. Last, but certainly not least, it also features a draft dispense mechanism, for pouring out a glass of the chilled “commercial quality” finished product.

Users spend about 90 minutes cleaning and sterilizing the system, and adding supplied ingredients at the beginning of the process. After that, minimal input is required until a week later, at which point 23 liters (6 U.S. gallons) of beer should be ready for drinking. Part of the reason that it’s able to make beer so quickly is the fact that the carbonation and fermentation processes take place simultaneously. The clarification process is also said to take no more than one day.

The WilliamsWarn brewing machine is currently only available in New Zealand, although its makers hope to expand to the Australian and American markets soon. It sells for NZ$5,660 (US$4,577), plus NZ$39.50 (US$32) for the ingredients for each batch of beer.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Soon we may be able to power our iPads, iPhones and other portable electronics with just the tap of our finger.

That’s because researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne have for the first time discovered how they can use piezoelectric thin films to turn mechanical pressure into electricity.

Lead co-author of the findings at RMIT, Dr Madhu Bhaskaran, said the university’s research combined the potential of piezoelectrics – materials capable of converting pressure into electrical energy – and the cornerstone of microchip manufacturing, thin film technology.

Dr Madhu Bhaskaran.

“The power of piezoelectrics could be integrated into running shoes to charge mobile phones, enable laptops to be powered through typing or even used to convert blood pressure into a power source for pacemakers – essentially creating an everlasting battery,” Dr Bhaskaran said.

The Australian Research Council-funded study assessed the energy generation capabilities of piezoelectric thin films at the nanoscale, for the first time precisely measuring the level of electrical voltage and current – and therefore, power – that could be generated.

“The next key challenge will be amplifying the electrical energy generated by the piezoelectric materials to enable them to be integrated into low-cost, compact structures,” Dr Bhaskaran said.

A club in London has used piezoelectricity to generate about 60 per cent of the energy needed to run the club. It requires people to dance on its dance floor to generate electricity.

Solve the world’s energy problems?

Piezoelectric thin films were “never going to be something that’s going to save the energy problems of the world”, Dr Bhaskaran told Fairfax Media, publisher of this website.

This was because the amount of electricity generated from the pressure would not be enough to power anything other than something that “runs off a couple of batteries”, Dr Bhaskaran said.

In about five or six years we would begin to see the first devices integrating piezoelectrics, she said.

Dr Bhaskaran co-authored the study with Dr Sharath Sriram, within RMIT’s Microplatforms Research Group, which is led by Professor Arnan Mitchell. The pair collaborated with Australian National University’s Dr Simon Ruffell on the research.

The study was published in materials science journal Advanced Functional Materials.

SILVER PEN TO BE USED TO BUILD CONDUCTIVE CIRCUITS

People have been using pens to jot down their thoughts for thousands of years but now engineers at the University of Illinois have developed a silver-inked rollerball pen that allows users to jot down electrical circuits and interconnects on paper, wood and other surfaces. Looking just like a regular ballpoint pen, the pen’s ink consists of a solution of real silver that dries to leave electrically conductive silver pathways. These pathways maintain their conductivity through multiple bends and folds of the paper, enabling users to personally fabricate low-cost, flexible and disposable electronic devices.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Inhaling alcohol instead of drinking it

A new way of consuming alcohol that offers an immediate hit with no hangover the next day has been introduced in the United Kingdom.The new method is known asAWOL, an acronym for ‘Alcohol With Out Liquid’, and could become a hit in the global club scene due to the euphoric ‘high’ created when alcohol is vaporised, mixed with oxygen and inhaled. Billed at launch as the ‘ultimate party toy’, AWOL machines serve bar customers via tubes and could be seen as a modern version of the ‘Nargile’ or ‘Hookah’ water-pipe which originated in India and became an important part of society in Turkey and Middle Eastern countries in the 17th century, eventually becoming the height of fashion at sheik Western society parties during the late 19th and early 20th century.

Like the Hookah, the AWOL machine has a central body and a number of tubes running from it.The user chooses which spirit will be used and the spirit is loaded into a diffuser capsule in the machine. The oxygen bubbles are then passed through the capsule, absorbing the alcohol, before being inhaled through a tube. The resultant cloudy alcohol vapour is then inhaled from the end of the tube via a device akin to an asthma inhaler.

Once inhaled, the alcoholic gas goes straight into the bloodstream to give an instant ‘hit’. The potent combination of oxygen and alcohol creates a feeling of well-being which intensifies the longer the vapour is inhaled.This high-tech 21st century ‘Hookah’ is the brainchild of 30 year old UK entrepreneur Dominic Simler, and has a patent pending.

“The vapour produces an instant ‘high’ with no hangover the next day,’ said Simler, who will market the machines to clubs and bars in the UK to provide ‘partygoers and hedonists with a radical new way to consume alcohol.”

The outcry by the British media has been predictably damning of the new device, with an article in the Sunday Times dated 15 February quoting the Chief executive of the UK Alcohol Advisory Service referring to AWOL as ‘solvent abuse for adults.’Professor Oliver James, the head of clinical medical sciences at Newcastle University in the UK was quoted in the article as saying, ‘by snorting the alcohol it can go directly into the brain without being filtered by the liver. What is getting into your brain could be the equivalent of many times more than by drinking it.’

Professor James has since stressed that the comments that he made to the Sunday Times were purely speculative and theoretical, that his statements were made without first seeing or trying AWOL and that he made it clear to the reporter that he has no previous professional experience or clinical evidence of alcohol being consumed via vapour.

Professor James has now agreed to carry out independent tests on AWOL and Simler is hoping that the tests will ‘remove any element of doubt regarding the safety of AWOL.’Until the results of the university tests on AWOL are available the company has advised all customers that the application should only be used to inhale alcohol vapour orally and not via the nose. Professor James has confirmed that AWOL is safe to be consumed in this manner.

The first venue to offer the AWOL experience is il Bordello, an exclusive members-only club built on a Dutch barge located in Bristol. Club proprietor Liz Lewitt has been ‘overwhelmed’ with bookings for AWOL – the shots are consumed at the rate of approximately one shot per hour (maximum) and cost UKP’6 a shot.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Sega’s Toylets give public toilet users

something to aim at in Japan

Most men at one time or another (hopefully when they were merely boys) have enjoyed a spot or two of “sword fighting” in school toilets – just to clear up any misconceptions members of the fairer sex may have about such activities, this involves the clashing of streams, not appendages. One of the unfortunate side effects of these duels can be fair degree of spray ending up where it isn’t supposed to, creating extra work for those whose job it is to keep such facilities clean. Now Sega is bringing restroom gaming into the 21st century with a video game that makes use of a pressure sensor built into the urinal to entice urinators to keep their pee on target.

The “Toylet” – its actual name – consists of a sensor in the bowl of the urinal that measures both the strength, length and location of the urine stream, and an LCD display located at head height. The four games on offer include “Milk from Nose”, which pits the player against the previous user in a competition for the strongest flow, “The North Wind and Her”, in which the user plays as the wind to lift up a woman’s skirt, “Graffiti Eraser” that sees the player try and clear a wall of graffiti on a wall with some high-pressure blasting and “Mannequin Pis” which tells you how much urine you’ve discharged. Players proud of the urinary achievements can even download their scores onto a flash drive.

While the comfort station consoles are designed to improve the aim of public toilet users by providing an incentive to stay on target, they could also provide Sega with an extra revenue “stream” through the displaying of advertisements on the console’s screen before the games.

Sega has installed the Toylets in four metro stations in – you guessed it – Tokyo, where they will be trialed until the end of January.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

3D telepresence of people

It may not be a jet powered car, but it’s definitely one we’ve seen in sci-fi movies before – the ability to converse with a life-size holographic image of another person in real time. 3d movies are just the start of it and ther’s more to come.

The futurists at IBM point to recent advances in 3D cameras and movies, predicting that holography chat (aka 3D telepresence) can’t be all that far behind. Already, the University of Arizona has unveiled a system that can transmit holographic images in near-real-time.

It is also predicted that 3D visualization could be applied to data, allowing researchers to “step inside” software programs (wasn’t that just in a movie?), computer models, or pretty much anything else that is limited by a simple 2D screen. IBM compares it to the way in which the Earth appears undistorted when we experience it first-hand in three dimensions, yet it appears pinched at the top and bottom when we see it on a two-dimensional world map.

Maybe travelling inside the blood vessels of the human body is not so silly after all.We will see….

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

High-tech gadgets

dressed up to look old

Clockwise from top left, the U.S.B typewriter, the Yeti THX-certified microphone, the BookBook MacBook Pro case, the Crosley portable U.S.B. turntable, the ThinkGeek Bluetooth handset and the Surround-sound X-Tube.

This has been a great year for the next new electronic thing. The iPad, new iPhone, the Nexus S, HTC Evo and other Android phones, the Kindle 3 and Microsoft’s Kinect caught the eye of consumers.

But some people prefer their next new thing to look like an old thing. So what’s the appeal of the latest electronics wrapped in a retro design, like full-size jukeboxes that are really $US4000 iPod docks and manual typewriters reconfigured to work as USB keyboards? Has anyone ever said, “It’s a nice Ferrari, but it would be cooler if it looked like a covered wagon?”

There are theories: The throwback designs make challenging technology seem familiar. For the technically proficient, an old phone handset that connects to a cell phone seems comically ironic. Retro designs can also give a sense of permanence to disposable devices. Some of it is art.

An example of the phenomena is a manual typewriter refashioned as a computer keyboard. Jack Zylkin of Philadelphia made one as a novel way for people to sign in when visiting Hive76, a Philadelphia communal studio for electronics tinkerers. “I thought it would be kind of a lark,” he said. “I didn’t realise there was such demand for them.” Now he is turning out several typewriters a week, with a two- to three-week lead time for new orders.

Zylkin says he starts with a typewriter that has been refurbished by a retired Remington salesman, then wires it with a sensor board that recognizes when a key is pressed. It leads to a USB plug that makes the typewriter work like any computer keyboard. Even if the type bar doesn’t hit the platen, a computer will recognize the input, but if you bang the keys hard enough you can make an old-school hard copy on paper while a computer also records your keystrokes.

The typewriters sell for $US600 to $US900 at the website Etsy, although it is $US400 if you supply your own typewriter. If you are handy with a soldering iron, you can buy Zylkin’s do-it-yourself conversion kit for $US70.

A variation of this theme of fashioning the old into new relies on the smart design of the old Western Electric Bell telephones. Consider the handset. Unlike today’s telephone earpieces and cabled headphone and mic arrangements, the large handset put the speaker over the ear and the microphone next to the mouth so bystanders weren’t forced to listen to bellowed phone conversations.

The gadget purveyors ThinkGeek have taken that old handset and added Bluetooth so you can have some privacy while connected wirelessly to a mobile phone. The $US25 handset can transmit and receive at a distance of about 30 feet from your phone.

Crosley Radio has been making the old new again since the early 1980s when a group of investors bought a discarded radio brand and started cranking out replica radios. The company has replica Wurlitzer-style jukeboxes that play music from CDs or iPods. “What really rolls out the door is the turntables, that has been a runaway train,” said James P. LeMastus, president of Crosley.

The company has had a hit with the Crosley AV Room Portable USB turntable, made exclusively for the youth-oriented clothing chain Urban Outfitters.

The $US160 portable player has built-in speakers and an amp, and a USB connection so it can be used with a computer to turn songs on vinyl records into MP3s. The company makes about 25 styles of turntables, some with iPod docks and CD and cassette tape players and recorders. They can be found at stores including Restoration Hardware, Pottery Barn and online.

The Yeti from Blue Microphones may look like something from the golden age of radio, but it is the first THX-certified microphone, meaning it is capable of high-fidelity reproduction. While it looks as if it belongs on the desk of Walter Winchell, it has three built-in miniature mics that can capture sound three ways: from just in front of the mic, in stereo or from an entire room.

The Yeti works on PCs and Macs and requires no software drivers to work, although there is a free recording program for it in the iTunes store. Good enough to record your band’s demo, the $150 mic is also popular with podcasters and VoiP users who want to sound as smooth as Orson Wells.

The X-Tube looks like a vacuum tube from inside an old radio that would have broadcast Wells. It’s really a small processor that plugs into a computer through a USB connection to produce surround sound for headphones. The warm glow? A blue LED light.

The device processes DTS Surround Sensation software to alter the volume of certain frequencies and add delays to some sounds, all psychoacoustic tricks to fool the brain into perceiving sound as coming not just from left and right, but from the front and back as well. The device, which comes with over-the-ear headphones, isn’t easy to find in the United States, but can be ordered from Japan for about $US95.

Sometimes, retro designers cloak the electronics in something other than older electronics. Makers of laptop covers usually brag about the high-tech materials they use: high-impact plastics, advanced neoprenes or carbon fiber. Twelve South brags that its MacBook Pro and iPad cases use old-fashioned bookbinding technology. The covers are leather-bound and distressed to look like a collectible volume. The cases have a hard cover on top and bottom, with a zipper around the center to keep your computer secure.

The BookBook covers are priced at $US80 to $US100, depending on the size of your computer. The company says the covers disguise the device inside and could deter thieves — unless they know that many collectible books are worth far more than the next new thing.

The New York Times

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha