As we announced in our previous article we’re going to write about another digital “mirror” that offers us an opportunity to try out different patterns of the clothes you wear. Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut (HHI) have developed a magic mirror that takes the stress out of trying on new clothes. You… »

Augmented reality (AR) technologies, which superimpose information from computers on real fields of view in real time, began to be actually used in Japan. Furutani-sangyou Co Ltd (page available in Japanese) will test their Magical Mirror which does not use magic or even AR technologies in a precise sense. It takes an image of a… »

Most of current touch screen displays uses capacitive sensing, where the proximity of a finger disrupts the electrical connection between sensors in the screen. A competing approach, which uses embedded optical sensors to track the movement of the user’s fingers, is just now coming to market. The researchers at MIT’s Media Lab went a step… »

Tabletop computers based on diffuse illumination can track markers placed on the table’s surface. We demonstrate how to do the same with objects arranged in a three-dimensional structure without modifying the table. We already wrote about tabletop interfaces, as well as the interface with multiple sources of information able to operate in 3D, but this… »

You might have tried to balance a ping-pong ball floating above your mouth or you might have seen a demo in a classroom or science museum where a jet of compressed air keeps a ball floating above the ground, seemingly defying gravity. A pair of grad students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have… »

The need to reduce carbon emissions and keep costs down increases the importance of renewable energy for most governments and the tech industry. With that in mind, investments are being made in the popular green energy sectors such as wind, solar, and wave energy. However, our footsteps utilize and channel kinetic energy too, and an… »

The idea of space-based harvesting of solar power has been around since the 1970s, and now California utility Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) wants to bring the concept to its realization. A few days ago state regulators approved PG&E’s request to buy electricity from an orbiting solar power plant – if the company designing the… »

Heat shields are an important part of any space vehicle that re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere. The next generation of heat shields made to protect astronauts and payloads on their re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere may use superconducting magnets to deflect the plasma that forms in front of spacecraft as they travel at high speeds in… »