Posted in Computing, Devices, Quantification, tagged analysis, audio, class, course, easy, Education, learning, notes, recording, summarization on April 5, 2008 | No Comments »
How about an application that made reviewing what you learned in class easy?
People already record lectures for later review, but listening to a whole course worth of class might take way too long. Students need a way to summarize these audio recordings so that they can better focus their studies.
One technique would be to use [...]
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Posted in Art, Computing, Devices, tagged movies, technology, films, cinema, eye tracking, interactivity, home entertainment on April 1, 2008 | No Comments »
How about using eye tracking technology to enhance your home theatrical experience? If we use information about where a viewer’s eyes are focusing as an indicator of attention, we could shift the audio “focus” of a film in real-time. Since the projected media information would change from viewing to viewing based on what the user [...]
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Perhaps a weapon style to be used in some martial arts flick, perhaps just the fevered product of a dream of ninjas.
Chain-like weapons are interesting for their ability to provide the user extended reach, high speeds of impact, and entanglement of opponents. However, successful entanglement can require continued exertion from the wielder, as they must [...]
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I love popcorn as much as the next guy, but about nine centimeters into a three-liter bucket of buttery kernels, the magic starts to disappear. The boredom comes from one of two paradoxical feelings — an increased tolerance to the popcorn’s flavor or an overdose on the simple components of the flavor. Whether you need [...]
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Car drivers sometimes zone out, fall asleep, or get distracted. This leads to crashes. It would be a safety benefit if the car could sense when the person at the wheel is getting a bit out of touch with the road and help restore attentiveness.
On the sensory part of the problem, I recently came upon [...]
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I wonder how we could apply the microscopic innovation of ciliary locomotion to macro-scale problems? Cilia are those tiny tendrils on some bacteria that gyrate back and forth, propelling the cell in whatever direction it pleases. However, this mechanism is only feasible when the environment around the organism has such a high viscosity that the [...]
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Certain types of infrasound have been blamed for inducing chilling unease, hallucinations, and general discomfort among people. Some experts have even gone so far as to stick infrasound with the blame for ghost-sightings and mass hysteria. Some of this is probably hype, but given the broad number of possible sources of infrasound, especially in urban [...]
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Energy is a big topic these days, and I have to say I’ve run into some rotting bad ideas. Let’s try to top ‘em.
Photovoltaic panels in mirrors. Surely you don’t need all of the light reflected off your mirror to preen in the morning? By adding these indoor solar panel [...]
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One of the problems surrounding the development of in-atmosphere hypersonic travel is communication. Specifically, when a vehicle gets up to hypersonic speeds, the atmosphere around it develops a variety of weird characteristics that includes (for starters) crazy heat, gas ionization or dissociation, and unusual airflow. The end result is a glowing mass of [...]
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Let’s use microfluidics and vesicles to characterize temperatures on a very very tiny scale!
Vesicle membrane fluctuations are highly temperature dependent. Specialized microscopy systems can visualize vesicles, and image processing techniques can quantify the visualizations. Microfluidics can be used to carefully control the proximity of microscopic objects and global background temperature characteristics.
So, after proper calibration, one [...]
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How about Christmas-music filtering headphones/earmuffs. You hear the world as normal, minus any ambient Christmas music.
We use intensive passive noise damping in the earmuffs to drown out just about everything. Add high-quality microphones to pick up sound from your surroundings. Process the sound to identify key content, filter out undesired content, and play out the [...]
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I like the idea of capturing energy from the “excess” efficiencies of social activities.
Soccer balls that absorb the kinetic energy of kicks and store some of it into internal batteries. Kids play football on their way home from school, and their play powers the lights in their home when they stay up past dark to [...]
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Self-heating shoes. Shoes with electrically-powered heating elements around the toes. Very nice for those of us with poor circulation to the extremities.
Power is the big issue, though. Plug-in cords kinda put a damper on the whole “mobility-enabling” aspect of shoes. Batteries are probably reasonable, if one doesn’t mind changing them every [...]
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The theremin is a pretty neat instrument. However, it is notoriously difficult to learn. I’d blame at least part of that difficulty on the fact that playing a hands-off instrument means that you must do so without the advantage of tactile reference points.
Let’s fix this by adding an array of holes somewhere [...]
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Put some simple flow-measuring equipment into a typical western toilet. Add optical and mass analysis equipment into the out-stream. Auto-detect/calculate/report some of the assorted properties of human waste that may be indicative of pathology. Red blood in the stool might be worth an alert on the first detect, while something simple like overly-darkened urine might [...]
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