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Category: computing – Page 733

We Were Really Overdue For Laser Jackets

Depending on who you talk to, everything is either fine, or we’re living in an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia in which we forgot to drench everything in colored neon lighting. There’s little to be done about the digital surveillance panopticon that stalks our every move, but as far as the aesthetic goes, [abetusk] is bringing the goods. The latest is a laser jacket, to give you that 2087 look in 2019.

The build starts with a leather jacket, which is festooned with 128 individual red laser diodes. These are ganged up in groups of 4, and controlled with 32 individual PWM channels using two PCA9685 controllers. An Arduino Nano acts as the brains of the operation, receiving input from a joystick and a microphone. This allows the user to control lighting effects and set the jacket to respond to sounds and music.

[abetusk] does a great job of conveying the tricks needed to successfully pull this off. The instructions should allow any curious maker to replicate the build at home, and code is available on Github to help run the show. There’s lots of detail on proper enclosures, connectors, and cabling techniques to avoid the wearer inadvertently pulling everything to bits when wearing the garment to the club. Remember, there’s nothing more punk than educating your friends.

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Color-Changing “Smart Thread” Turns Fabric into a Computerized Display

But who would wear clothes that double as a computer display? And why? And how would people respond to computerized clothes? The team explored these questions in in-depth research sessions with seventeen people, including five fashion designers.

At first the participants were put off by thinking of Ebb as another computer screen. “I don’t want to wear a screen,” said one participant. “There’s enough glare in my life as it is,” said another. The idea made them recall past experiences of light-emitting clothing: “blinking Christmas sweaters, children’s sneakers that lit up when they walked, or light-up visors they might get at carnivals and amusement parks.”

But Ebb isn’t a light-up screen; it’s just fabric that changes color. Feeling the fabric samples changed their responses. One participant said that the fabric “seems a lot more tactile and something like cloth rather than plasticky… I think it’s just more intimate and easier to like.”

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S-money: Ultra-secure form of virtual money proposed

A new type of money that allows users to make decisions based on information arriving at different locations and times, and that could also protect against attacks from quantum computers, has been proposed by a researcher at the University of Cambridge.

The , dubbed ‘S–’, could ensure completely unforgeable and secure authentication, and allow faster and more flexible responses than any existing financial technology, harnessing the combined power of quantum theory and relativity. In fact, it could conceivably make it possible to conduct commerce across the Solar System and beyond, without long time lags, although commerce on a galactic scale is a fanciful notion at this point.

Researchers aim to begin testing its practicality on a smaller, Earth-bound scale later this year. S-money requires very fast computations, but may be feasible with current computing technology. Details are published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

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THIS is computer music: Ge Wang at TEDxStanford

Art for humanity via technology, for the music geek in you Enjoy:-)

Ge Wang is an assistant professor at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).
His research focuses on programming languages and interactive software design for computer music, mobile and social music, laptop orchestras and education at the intersection of computer science and music. Wang is the author of the ChucK audio programming language, as well as the founding director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) and the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO). He is also the co-founder of Smule (which makes social music making apps and has over 100 million users) and the designer of the iPhone’s Ocarina and Magic Piano.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

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The Much-Hyped, 18,000mAh Energizer Phone Flopped on Indiegogo

Mobile World Congress this past February included the unveiling of several notable smartphones like the Nokia 9 PureView and LG G8. However, one device got an inordinate amount of attention — the Energizer Power Max P18K Pop. Hiding behind that clunky name was a phone with a gigantic 18,000 mAh battery. This brick of a phone ended up on Indiegogo, and despite all the hype, it flopped. Hard. Of the anticipated $1.2 million, the phone only pulled in pre-orders worth $15,005 — just 1 percent of the required funding.

The Energizer Power Max P18K Pop is not actually a product of the battery manufacturer. The Energizer name is merely licensed by Avenir Telecom, a French manufacturer of phones, cables, and other accessories. It has produced other Energizer phones in the past, but none of them sparked the same combination of fascination and amusement.

The phone looked like a large aluminum power bank with a 6.2-inch screen on one side. The phone had almost no front-facing bezels thanks to the inclusion of a pop-up selfie camera. The phone parts of the device were competent if not particularly exciting. The P18K was supposed to have a MediaTek Helio P70, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and Android 9 Pie.

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We’ve found an icy new super-Earth that’s orbiting our closest single star

SpiNNaker was built under the leadership of Professor Steve Furber at The University of Manchester, a principal designer of two products that earned the Queen’s Award for Technology —the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor, and the BBC Microcomputer.

“The ultimate objective for the project has always been a million cores in a single computer for real time brain modelling applications, and we have now achieved it, which is fantastic.” — Professor Steve Furber, The University of Manchester

Inspired by the human brain, the SpiNNaker is capable of sending billions of small amounts of information simultaneously. The SpiNNaker has a staggering 1 million processors that are able to perform over 200 million actions per second.

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Quantum sensor for photons

A photodetector converts light into an electrical signal, causing the light to be lost. Researchers led by Tracy Northup at the University of Innsbruck have now built a quantum sensor that can measure light particles non-destructively. It can be used to further investigate the quantum properties of light.

Physicist Tracy Northup is currently researching the development of quantum internet at the University of Innsbruck. The American citizen builds interfaces with which can be transferred from matter to and vice versa. Over such interfaces, it is anticipated that quantum computers all over the world will be able to communicate with each other via fiber optic lines in the future. In their research, Northup and her team at the Department of Experimental Physics have now demonstrated a method with which visible light can be measured non-destructively. The development follows the work of Serge Haroche, who characterized the quantum properties of microwave fields with the help of neutral atoms in the 1990s and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2012.

In work led by postdoc Moonjoo Lee and Ph.D. student Konstantin Friebe, the researchers place an ionized calcium atom between two hollow mirrors through which visible laser light is guided. “The ion has only a weak influence on the light,” explains Tracy Northup. “Quantum measurements of the ion allow us to make statistical predictions about the number of light particles in the chamber.” The physicists were supported in their interpretation of the measurement results by the research group led by Helmut Ritsch, a Innsbruck quantum optician from the Department of Theoretical Physics. “One can speak in this context of a for light particles”, sums up Northup, who has held an Ingeborg Hochmair professorship at the University of Innsbruck since 2017. One application of the new method would be to generate special tailored light fields by feeding the measurement results back into the system via a feedback loop, thus establishing the desired states.

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