Students from the Swiss university EPFL have developed a smart bra designed to detect breast cancer in its earliest stages. They believe it's the first piece of clothing that can be used for cancer prevention. They even claim that it's comfor...
While most levitation is achieved with magnets, it’s also possible to suspend small objects in air using sound waves. Thanks to engineer Asier Marzo, you can even create your own acoustic levitator, which can float lightweight objects like water droplets, styrofoam beads, and even insects.
The system uses a 3D printed rig that holds two opposing grids filled with 36 tiny ultrasonic transducers each. An Arduino Nano, a power supply, and a motor drive board control the transducers, which basically push and pull on small objects you place in their path, holding them in mid-air. Levitation is achieved by pushing air out of both top and bottom transducers, which apply an equivalent amount of pressure from above and below the objects.
Asier describes the highlights of the build in the video below:
Neat, eh? Now if you’re ready to build your own acoustic levitator, check out the full build log over on Instructables. There’s a great article on the physics behind acoustic levitation over on How Stuff Works too.
Back in 2013 we saw an old piano that was turned into a controller for Doom. The Sound Fighter project had a similar goal – play Street Fighter Alpha 3 on pianos. But whereas the Doom hack simply mapped controller buttons to piano keys, Sound Fighter mapped certain moves to chords.
Software engineers Cyril and Eric of Foobarflies built the musical arcade machine. Each Sound Fighter piano has 20 piezoelectric sensors, a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino Uno and custom PCBs mediating the input from the sensors. Cyril and Eric chose to use a PlayStation 2 for Sound Fighter because they saw a number of PS2 hacks that were similar to what they wanted to do.
With the console chosen, Cyril and Eric settled on Street Fighter Alpha 3 as their game. At this point their pianos are PS2 controllers and can work with any PS2 game. But Cyril and Eric wanted their Street Fighter matches to require piano playing skills, so instead of a simple 1:1 button mapping, they mapped certain moves to chords, like so:
The ultimate goal was for skilled pianists to instantly become skilled Street Fighter players on the Sound Fighter. Even though the project is far from that point, it’s already functional and funny. Here’s the concept video for Sound Fighter:
It’s quite obvious that parts of the video were edited in, as evidenced by Ken’s multiple costume changes. But Cyril and Eric did get Sound Fighter in working order and even had people try it at the reopening of an old museum in Paris.
You can download Sound Fighter’s firmware on Cyril’s GitHub page. You should also check out Cyril and Eric’s comprehensive and humorous build log on their website.
Apple is catching a lot of flak lately for its bending smartphone. This device developed by Microsoft Research and the University of Applied Sciences in Austria on the other hand is meant to bend. It’s called FlexSense, and it opens up more intuitive ways of interacting with electronic devices.
FlexSense is a self-contained device made of a thin and transparent sheet onto which 16 piezoelectric sensors have been printed. The researchers created two algorithms to measure and reconstruct the bending of the sheet using the sensors. They then gave potential applications of FlexSense, such as switching between two different layers of an image, hiding information, mimicking a flip book and controlling a video game character. You can skip to 2:03 in the video below to see all of the demos:
Bend your browser to the Association for Computing Machinery’s Digital Library to read the full paper on FlexSense.
Until now, touchscreen device makers still have not properly addressed their products’ lack of tactile feedback. If Microsoft senior researcher Hong Tan her way, in the future touchscreen-equipped devices will let us feel clicks and more. Hong recently presented concepts for adding haptic feedback to touchscreens as well as thin electronic devices such as keyboards.
In a brief article and a YouTube video, Hong and Microsoft Research shared two of the methods that she and her colleagues came up with to introduce haptic feedback. The first method involves the use of piezoelectric actuators to emulate key clicks. The actuators can be installed on touchscreens or thin keyboards such as Microsoft’s Touch Cover for the Surface Pro. The actuators cause the touched area to bend ever so slightly when pressed, creating a sensation that confirms to the user that he pressed a key.
The second method is electrovibration, which is “alternating voltage applied to the glass surface” of a device. It can induce a sticky or rough sensation on smooth glass.
I’d still rather have something like Tactus’ retractable keys for typing. But as Microsoft said in its article, electrovibration may prove very helpful in a wide variety of situations, not just in using mobile devices.
The thinner our devices become, the less room there is for speakers and other thicker components. Kyocera has a solution, however: it just modified its Smart Sonic Receiver conduction technology for use with conventional, over-the-air audio. The company's new Smart Sonic Sound device still relies on a piezoelectric actuator, but vibrates against a film to generate as much volume as a regular speaker in a far thinner (under 1.5mm thick) design. The new speaker might even sound better than its traditional counterparts. It delivers full volume and quality in a 180-degree listening arc, and it's responsive enough to recreate very subtle noises. Smart Sonic Sound is already shipping in LG's 55-inch curved OLED TV, and Kyocera expects it to reach laptops, tablets and other devices where interior space is valuable.
Update: Our colleagues at Engadget Japanese have posted their first-hand look at Kyocera's speaker technology, complete with a gallery of live photos; we've posted two of them here.
The verdict's still out on whether or not androids dream of electric sheep. But their ability to feel? Well, that's about to approach levels of human sensitivity. We're of course talking about the sense of touch, not emotions. And thanks to work out of Georgia Tech, tactile sensitivity for robotics, more secure e-signatures and general human-machine interaction is about to get a great 'ol boost. Through the use of thousands of piezotronic transistors (i.e., grouped vertical zinc oxide nanowires) known as "taxels," a three-person team led by Prof. Zhong Lin Wang has devised a way to translate motion into electronic signals. In other words, you're looking at a future in which robotic hands interpret the nuances of a surface or gripped object akin to a human fingertip and artificial skin senses touch similar to the way tiny hairs on an arm do.
What's more, the tech has use outside of robotics and can even be levereged for more secure e-signature verification based on speed and pressure of a user's handwriting. And the best part? These sensors can be manufactured on transparent and flexible substrates like the one pictured above, which allows for various real-world applications -- just use your imagination. Pretty soon, even robots will have the pleasure of enjoying the touch... the feel of cotton and maybe even hum that jingle to themselves, too.
Kyocera's Smart Sonic receiver and tissue conduction technology have been around for some time, but this year at MWC, we had another chance to test it out. In case you didn't know, the receiver's a ceramic piezoelectric actuator that takes the place of a phone's speaker to let listeners hear phone calls in even the loudest environments. We got to test it out with a Kyocera Torque, and well... trust us, you'll want to see (and hear) the results in the video after the break.
While there's been no shortage of rollable displays, rollable speakers are rare -- the softness needed for a bendy design is the very thing that would usually neuter the sound. Fujifilm's new Beat diaphragm manages to reconcile those seemingly conflicting requirements. The surface depends on a polymer that stays soft when the surface is being curled or folded, but hardens when subjected to the 20Hz to 20kHz audio range we'd expect from a speaker. Piezoelectric ceramics, in turn, provide the sound itself. The Beat system doesn't have any known customers, but Fujifilm has already shown some creative possibilities such as a folding fan speaker or the portable, retractable unit shown above. If we ever see the day when we tuck a set of speakers into our pockets as neatly as we do our phones, we'll know who to thank.
Cooling fans are the bane of many a laptop user's existence. The tiny things are often over-taxed right out of the box and, after a year or two worth of dust and detritus gets in them, they complain more and more loudly. As much as we hate them, engineers hate them more, as they take up precious space beneath the keyboard and draw precious juice from the battery. GE has a better solution, so-called dual piezo cooling jets. They're just 1mm thick, could consume a fraction of the power of a fan and contain no moving parts -- at least, not in the traditional sense. As a demo of their potential, GE created a prototype Core i7-powered laptop, cooled only by these jets. Click on through for our impressions.
Students from the Swiss university EPFL have developed a smart bra designed to detect breast cancer in its earliest stages. They believe it's the first piece of clothing that can be used for cancer prevention. They even claim that it's comfor...
