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Meet Nelson, Coupland, and Alice — the faces of tomorrow’s book. Watch global design and innovation consultancy IDEO’s vision for the future of the book. What new experiences might be created by linking diverse discussions, what additional value could be created by connected readers to one another, and what innovative ways we might use to tell our favorite stories and build community around books? 




The Future of the Book is a design exploration of digital reading that seeks to identify new opportunities for readers, publishers, and authors to discover, consume, and connect in different formats.

As more people consume pages in pixels, IDEO designers wondered why we continue to discover and consume the written word through the old analog, page-turning model. We asked: what happens when the reading experience catches up with new technologies?

The team looked at how digital and analog books currently are being read, shared and collected, as well as at trends, business models and consumer behavior within related fields. We identified three distinct opportunities—new narratives, social reading with richer context, and providing tools for critical thinking—and developed a design concept around each one.

The first concept, “Alice,” turns storytelling on its head by making narratives non-linear and participatory. With Alice, the story world starts bleeding into the everyday life of the reader. Real-world challenges, like acting on a phone call from the lead character, or participating in photo based scavenger hunts, unlock new aspects of the story, and turn other readers into collaborators or competitors. Alice is a platform for authors to experiment with narratives, to allow their stories to transcend media, and to engage fans in the storytelling process.

The second concept, “Coupland,” makes book discovery a social activity by allowing readers to build shared libraries and hear about additional texts through existing networks. Coupland makes it easy for busy professionals to stay on top of industry must-reads. Businesses can assign book budgets to their employees and build collective libraries through a group-licensing model. Personal recommendations, aggregation of reading patterns, and the ability to follow inspiring individuals and groups help ensure that Coupland users always are tapped into the latest essential content within and outside of the organization.

The third concept, “Nelson,” connects books to commentary, critique, and contextual information, letting readers explore a topic from multiple perspectives. Nelson reinforces the role of books as carriers of knowledge and insight. Readers can explore polarizing material and see whose word currently has the greatest impact on popular opinion and debate. Layers of connected commentary, news, and fact-checking augment the core book content—providing greater context and encouraging debate and scrutiny.

Each concept features a simple, accessible storytelling format and a particular look and feel. We believe that digital technology creates possibilities, so our solutions truly adapt to the new environment, rather than emulate analog qualities onscreen. For example, we resisted any temptation to move books closer to the bite-sized character of other digital media, because longhand writing encourages immersion (deep reading) and reflection.
Massive rapports méduses robot pour reconstruire devoir, monsieur (vidéo)

As if there weren't enough real jellyfish around to trigger our thalassophobia, researchers at Virginia Tech have created Cryo -- an eight-armed autonomous robot that mimics jelly movement with the help of a flexible silicone hat. The man-sized jellybot altogether dwarfs pre
vious efforts, hence the upgrade from small tank to swimming pool for mock field tests. And unlike the passively propelled bots we'veseen recently, Cryo runs on batteries, with the researchers hoping to better replicate the energy-efficient nature of jelly movement to eventually increase Cryo's charge cycle to months instead of hours. That's also the reason these robotic jellyfish are getting bigger -- because the larger they are, the further they can go.Potential uses include ocean monitoring and perhaps clearing oil spills, but the US Navy, which is funding the work, sees an opportunity to recruit jellies for underwater surveillance -- a job the researchers say is suited to their natural-looking disguise. But, before the tables are turned, you can spy on Cryo for yourself in the video below.


T-box is a power generator that harnesses wind-energy when a train moves across the tracks. T-box is composed of mechanical components required for supplying, harnessing and storing the converted energy. The generated power can be provided to remote areas where there are not any sources of electricity and public facilities along the railway. The new device could be ideal for developing countries, because it is capable of solving many of the electricity problems occurring in such places.

To fix the T-box on the rails, the concaves must to be constructed in cement between every two sleepers. After that, two brackets are to be fixed on two sides of the concave. This way the new device can be set upon these maneuvered tracks.

About 150 T-boxes could be assembled on a 1000 m long railway track. A train that runs with a speed of around 200 kph would produce a wind speed equivalent to 15 m/sec. In such conditions, a normal wind power generator can produce about 3500 W of power. Generally speaking, a train (200 m long) running at a speed of 300 kph, is able to travel a railway track (1000m long) in 18 sec. The electricity produced by the T-boxes would be of about 2.6 KWh.







T-box is a Liteon Winning Project


High fashion meets high-tech in this unique concept called the Mini Projector Bangle. You’d never know from looking at it, but this wrist ornament houses a powerful high def projector and USB data storage, making it possible to project presentations directly on to any surface. Simply slide a finger over the touch sensitive bangle to move between slides or touch to turn on the LED time display. Perfect for the working woman!





Designer: Prospective Design Studio


Car firms hope to turn windscreens into giant computer displays that overlay the real world with useful information, such as directions or even social media feeds.

The dangers of talking on a mobile phone or texting whilst driving are well known.  So adding what, on first glance, look like added distractions may not seem like the best idea.

But researchers and car firms are increasingly looking to give drivers enhanced, or augmented reality (AR) that adds extra information ranging from directions to social media feeds to the view through the windscreen. And, perhaps the most unintuitive part of it is that it is designed to make the roads more secure for all of us.
 “The biggest way augmented reality can be useful is in supporting safe driving,” says Professor Anind Dey, of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “The ability to enhance information around us that might otherwise be opaque to us is invaluable.”
AR is usually considered to be a live view of the real world, onto which extra data – usually pulled from the internet - is layered or superimposed. It is similar to the view of the world that Arnold Schwarzenegger had in the Terminator movies. 

The technology is already well established elsewhere. For example, there are numerous smartphone apps that allow users to overlay the view from their camera with everything from directions and transport options to restaurant reviews and house prices. Point your phone at something of interest, power up your app and you are away.

Companies like Google are taking it one step further. Earlier this year the search giant unveiled its Google Glass project, a pair of minimal glasses that overlay a person’s vision with everything from weather data, location and diary appointments.   It is an idea that has been seized upon by other firms, such as Microsoft.

And now AR is making its way into cars. It builds on so-called “heads up display” (HUD) technology that is commonly used in fighter planes and began to make its way into high-end cars in the late 1990s. These HUDs are frequently used to project directions or speed onto the windscreen in the driver’s line of sight to minimize the amount of time the driver takes their eyes off the road. But augmented reality could allow these displays to go much further than that.

Looking glass

Car manufacturers such as BMW, Toyota, Mercedes and GM have shown off various prototypes in recent years. For example, a Mercedes concept unveiled earlier this year and known as Dice allowed drivers to conjure up information about passing places of interest by merely pointing at them while friends driving past the car show up as an icon on the windscreen, alongside their social network status.

Another concept from GM, known as the enhanced vision system, uses an array of sensors and cameras mounted inside and outside the vehicle to monitor the environment around the car and the driver’s eye and head movements. This information is then used to overlay the view from the windscreen with relevant information about driving conditions – such as the location of the building you are trying to find or dangers that you may not be aware of, such as an animal or child at the side of the road. Another mode marks the edges of the road when fog obscures the drivers view.

Other concepts take AR even further. Japanese car maker Toyota has shown off a prototype of “enhanced car windows” that would allow passengers to zoom in on places and objects of interest that they are passing.

However, the most extreme concept comes from designers at Keio University in Japan, who are working on technology that will make the back seat of a car appear transparent, so that when drivers are reversing they can see everything around them.

Their experimental setup uses cameras mounted outside the car to project an image inside the car in the driver’s field of view. Using similar technology to a heads-up display, the image is shown on a reflective screen mounted behind and between the two front seats. When a driver looks back over his shoulder, he sees the “real” image out of the rear view window continued, through augmented reality, right down the seats to the floor.

Innovations like this may be a long way from going into production. But other uses of AR could appear much sooner. For example, the most common use of AR is to overlay the world with directions that are overlayed on the road in front of you. Almost all concepts show some variant of this and, earlier this year, electronics firm Pioneer claimed to introduce the world’s first GPS with AR, that can be installed in any vehicle.

Game view

This kind of innovation would be helpful to any driver. But Professor Dey and his team believe it could be especially useful for older people, whose sense of spatial awareness may be reduced. This is especially problematic when they must look down at a navigation system, for example.

“The amount of time being spent not looking out the windshield, and the number of times that occurs on a short drive, can get pretty high,” he explains. “Particularly when you are talking about elder drivers who may have diminished facilities for driving, you want to reduce the amount of time they are looking away.”

To test this theory, he devised a simulator that projects the navigation system across the full width of the screen. The driver sees the real world, but with a map superimposed on top. As turns or streets come up, the map updates like a panning computerised window that is locked to the real world around them.

Although the system is a prototype, it has given Prof Dey and his team clues about how a real system should work. For example, to ensure that one set of distractions is not replaced by another, he believes that drivers should be allowed to personalize a system so that they can receive notifications from the system in ways that feel intuitive to them, such as audio tones, or even by touch, using haptic feedback through the steering wheel and seats.
  “We should be using technologies like augmented reality to personalise the driving experience much more so that we are currently.”
The trials have also flagged potential problems. For example, many of the subjects who have tried the system out in Professor Dey’s simulator have reported that it feels like playing a computer game – this  detachment from reality is an issue that the engineers know needs to be addressed.

“You don’t want to lessen the impact of making a mistake,” Professor Dey explains.

In addition, and perhaps most importantly, more work needs to be done to work out what is the optimum amount of the windscreen that can be covered with AR graphics, he says.

After all, augmented reality is only useful if the driver is in touch with the reality behind it.

Written by Jon Stewart Originally Appeared on BBC


Home of the Future, on the rooftop of a new furniture mall in Beijing, is a showcase for future living, with nature, technology and man in a new harmony.

An ETFE geodesic sky dome provides a year-round microclimate that opens up the home to a garden filled with sun, light and fresh air, away from the pollution and noise of the city. Visitors will experience fifteen different living spaces, from internal/external bathroom zones to kitchens flowing to veggie patches and barbecues to sunken bedrooms with dream inducing lighting.



At night the home and the tropical garden turn into an otherworldly experience, with the underlying technology, the electronic veins of the system, coming to life. Technologies are invisibly integrated to satisfy everyday needs and senses. Its fluid design and organisational strategy based on cells is easily modified to suit specific requirements. It integrates the latest improvements in comfort and instantaneous information technology. Smart floors and walls with lighting and heating sensors, intelligent surfaces, and fully integrated media displays showcase comfort and sustainability for ‘homebodies’ of the future.





The spatial continuum is characterised by a curvy freeform skin, the interface between cutting-edge technology and the human body. Soft and hard materials transition functional spaces.

The performance criteria for the home includes a self-sufficient environment, air and water purification, fully sustainable food generation, water recycling, passive systems, self-sufficient power generation and recycled waste.

Originally appeared on l-a-v-a


If biologists could put computational controls inside living cells, they could program them to sense and report on the presence of cancer, create drugs on site as they’re needed, or dynamically adjust their activities in fermentation tanks used to make drugs and other chemicals.

Now researchers at Stanford University have developed a way to make genetic parts that can perform the logic calculations that might someday control such activities.

The Stanford researchers’ genetic logic gate can be used to perform the full complement of digital logic tasks and it can store information too. It works by making changes to the cell’s genome, creating a kind of transcript of the cell’s activities that can be read out later with a DNA sequencer. The researchers call their invention a “transcriptor” for its resemblance to the transistor in electronics.

 “We want to make tools to put computers inside any living cell—a little bit of data storage, a way to communicate, and logic,” says Drew Endy, the bioengineering professor at Stanford who led the work.

Timothy Lu, who leads the Synthetic Biology Group at MIT, is working on similar cellular logic tools. “You can’t deliver a silicon chip into cells inside the body, so you have to build circuits out of DNA and proteins,” Lu says. “The goal is not to replace computers, but to open up biological applications that conventional computing simply cannot address.”

Biologists can give cells new functions through traditional genetic engineering, but Endy, Lu, and others working in the field of synthetic biology want to make modular parts that can be combined to build complex systems from the ground up. The cellular logic gates, Endy hopes, will be one key tool to enable this kind of engineering.

Cells genetically programmed with a biological “AND” gate might, for instance, be used to detect and treat cancer, says Endy. If protein A and protein B are present—where those proteins are characteristic of, say, breast cancer—then this could trigger the cell to produce protein C, a drug.

In the cancer example, says Endy, you’d want the cell to respond to low levels of cancer markers (the signal) by producing a large amount of the drug. The case is the same for biological cells designed to detect pollutants in the water supply—ideally, they’d generate a very large signal (for example, quantities of bright fluorescent proteins) when they detect a small amount of a pollutant.

The transcriptor triggers the production of enzymes that cause alterations in the cell’s genome. When the production of those enzymes is triggered by the signal—a protein of interest, for example—these enzymes will delete or invert a particular stretch of DNA in the genome. Researchers can code the transcriptor to respond to one, or multiple, different such signals. The signal can be amplified because one change in the cell’s DNA can lead the cell to produce a large amount of the output protein over time.

Depending on how the transcriptor is designed, it can act as a different kind of logic gate—an “AND” gate that turns on only in the presence of two proteins, an “OR” gate that’s turned on by one signal or another, and so on. Endy says these gates could be combined into more complex circuits by making the output of one the input for the next. This work is described today in the journal Science.

MIT’s Lu says cellular circuits like his and Endy’s, which use enzymes to alter DNA, are admittedly slow. From input to output, it can take a few hours for a cell to respond and change its activity. Other researchers have made faster cellular logic systems that use other kinds of biomolecules—regulatory proteins or RNA, for example. But Lu says these faster systems lack signal amplification and memory. Future cellular circuits are likely to use some combination of different types of gates, Lu says.

Christopher Voigt, a biological engineer at MIT, says the next step is to combine genetic logic gates to make integrated circuits capable of more complex functions. “We want to make cells that can do real computation,” he says.

Written by Katherine Bourzac. on Mashable
Image via iStock, palau83



A video has begun making the rounds and it's, well, going to disturb you a little bit, sorry. It's an animatronic baby designed by special effects guru Chris Clarke, to be used in an unnamed UK soap
opera. While your immediate reaction might be to think that this is merely the first in an all-out assault from the uncanny valley, Clarke explains in the comments that there's something much less ominous at play here: you simply can't put an actual, premature baby under TV studio set lights for hours at a time. It's also not Clarke's first work on infants, as you can see at the 4:45 minute mark in the second video below. Clarke also did some of the special effects work for War Horse, enabling scenes that otherwise would have harmed an actual horse.
So the animatronics are creepy, but they're also preventing real humans and animals from suffering for our entertainment. Feel better now? Yeah, us neither.
 


The Ivy Guide is a unique device that fits over any pen or pencil and scans words for translation. Basically it helps you understand the language better and makes comprehension easy. It is rechargeable via USB and adapts to your grip with ease. 
With international students crossing borders and the global community shrinking, this could prove to be a beneficial device.



Designers: Shi Jian, Sun Jiahao & Li Ke


The single-axle Honda type E concept uses similar physical principles as a segway for maximum maneuverability in the urban jungle. The ultrasmall vehicle focuses on minimum space consumption, maximum driver visibility, easy access, high efficiency, and, most importantly, driving dynamics that make it capable of turning 360 on the spot. It’s got a far-out aesthetic, but it’s really not all that unrealistic from what we’ll probably see not-so-distant future.




Pros:

  • no drive chain (lower weight, low fictional resistance)
  • no steering ear (lower weight)
  • turns on a dime
  • high efficiency start/stop-drive with regenerative braking
  • standing phase without loss of energy (traffic)
  • minimum use of parking space
  • zero emissions


Designer: Michael Brandt


As an avid MasterChef fan, the appliances that the participants get to use, stump me. Imagine dabbling with molecular cooking and cooking meats in a water-bath. The Mo’Sphere hopes to recreate those magical moments in a regular kitchen. With bringing molecular cooking techniques to everyday homes, the possibility of experimenting with flavors and textures become limitless.


Until now this kind of cooking was restricted to celebrity chefs and Five Star restaurants. Basically molecular cooking appliance makes use of physical and chemical reactions during cooking. Imagine using flash freezing, foams, frosts, gelés and even cotton candy on an everyday basis. Mo’Sphere makes all of this possible.

Mo’Sphere is a 2012 Electrolux Design Lab top ten finalist entry.

Designer: Yunuén Hernández


Introducing… Wallet! It’s an all-in-one device that functions as phone, camera, and tablet. Incredibly, it’s merely the size of a standard wallet, but features 3 folding screens in a unique construction that allows them to perform multiple tasks at once or even be combined to stream movies or photo slideshows. But HOW?? You’ll have to check out the video after the jump to see just how this incredible multitasking machine works!



The first screen is formed by two sets: a framework that allows the folding of the entire screen, and an inner screen which can perform a rotation of 180 °, which at its rear part includes a 12.1 Mpx camera with 16x digital zoom and video recording at 1080p HD. In addition, a flash light that improves the quality of photos. On one side is a LED that spares the user from having to open Wallet to check if they have received a call, message or any other notifications. Moreover, this screen also includes a microphone and a speaker for calls, so it can be used without opening it. At the top corner of the frame are connectors for standard 3.5mm headphones to avoid burden when it is used as widescreen and next to it is a power button for easy accessibility.











The second screen has a built-in support in the outer casing made of Technogel. Eventhough this material can be easily bendable, it is also strong enough for the support to carry the entire weight of Wallet. The Technogel is an innovative material invented by an Italian company. Among its many properties are resistance to shocks, large durability and high protection. At the top of the screen is a standard micro USB connector type B which serves to connect any peripherals items (mouse, keyboard, printer, and even a TV). Additionally, it can be connected to a computer to recharge. The connecter is located in a spot where it does not interfere when it is used as a tablet or widescreen.

Designer: Claudia Copersito



3Doodler is the world’s first and only 3D Printing Pen. Using ABS plastic (the material used by many 3D printers), 3Doodler draws in the air or on surfaces. It’s compact and easy to use, and requires no software or computers. You just plug it into a power socket and can start drawing anything within minutes.


Oh, and it’s also the most affordable way to 3D print… by a looong way! With 3Doodler we’re making fun 3D creation accessible to everyone.

How does it work?

If you can scribble, trace or wave a finger in the air you can use a 3Doodler. As 3Doodler draws, it extrudes heated plastic, which quickly cools and solidifies into a strong stable structure. This allows you to build an infinite variety of shapes and items with ease! Most people will instantly be able to trace objects on paper, and after only a few hours of practice you will be able to make far more intricate objects.


3Doodler is a brand new way of creating objects and artistic works. Whether you are an artist, hobbyist or 3D printing fanatic, we can’t wait to see what you 3Doodle!

What can I make with 3Doodler? 


There are many ways 3Doodler can be used. 3Doodles can be created as flat forms and peeled off a piece of paper, as freestyle 3D objects, or in separate parts, ready to be joined together using the 3Doodler. The creative opportunities are endless, including:

  • Basic 3D shapes and 3D models
  • Jewellery, pendants and hanging ornaments
  • Decorative art and fridge magnets
  • Personalization of everyday objects (iPhone cases, laptops, pens, etc.)
  • A mini Eiffel Tower or a soccer pitch for your Lego men
  • And much much more…