Those of you who’ve seen The Wolverine , remember that crazy self-adjusting gurney thing that Master Yashida was lying on? That might not be as far off a piece of technology as you’d think. A team of researchers at MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group have created this mind-blowing Dynamic Shape Display with a similar vertical-pixel-grid set-up: Called inFORM , the system provides a fascinating way for one party to physically manipulate objects at the other’s location. It has to be seen in action to be believed: (more…)
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MIT’s Dynamic Shape Display is Like a Sandbox in California that You Can Manipulate from New York
Something very strange happened in the R&D lab of a UK-based electronics engineering company. A research team at Roke Manor Research was working on text-based radio frequency systems when a team member suddenly detected a signal—coming from a random bag of components off to the side. A small movement had apparently turned mechanical energy into electrical energy within the bag. After figuring out how this phenomena occurred, a Roke team subsequently harnessed it and created a new tiny tracking device. Their invention works over a greater distance than most existing tags, and here’s the killer quality that makes it really different from nearly all tracking devices: It works without batteries. The device is called Agitate and it’s a self-charging miniature device, no larger than a quarter. The agitate tag’s signal “can be tracked through walls and up to 20 kilometres in built-up areas, ” writes the company, “with an estimated range of 200 kilometres in free space.” So how does it work? Basically Agitate is made of two plates, one is metal and the other a charged material. When either of the two plates are moved, even just slightly, mechanical energy is turned into electrical and is used to transmit a radio pulse. The signal only lasts a few seconds but is more powerful than a cell phone. And it’s very precise—the shorter the radio pulse, the more precise the signal to a specific location. (more…) 
My ID classmate kept getting burgled. His second-storey East Village apartment was broken into multiple times, and in frustration he signed a year lease on apartment 6B of a six-flight walk-up. He reasoned that no thief would be willing to haul a television down six flights of stairs. But within a month, he was robbed again—this time they broke in through the roof door. And my TV-less buddy spent the next 11 months going up and down six flights of stairs every day. Six storeys (some say seven) was the maximum height they’d build residential buildings in New York, prior to the elevator. No resident was willing to climb more stairs than that. After Otis’ perfection of the elevator, that height limitation was gone, and within a century we had skyscrapers. Then the new height limitation was building technology. Advanced construction techniques have since skyrocketed, if you’ll pardon the pun; as the World’s Tallest Building peeing contest continues, it is rumored that Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Tower will be a kilometer high . But the new height limitation is the thing that smashed the old one: Elevators. Steel cable is so heavy that at its maximum elevator height of 500 meters, the cables themselves make up 3/4s of the moving mass. You can stagger elevator banks to go higher, but the heaviness of steel cable makes long-haul elevators prohibitively expensive to run. Finnish elevator manufacturer Kone believes they have the answer. After ten years of development they’ve just announced the debut of UltraRope , a carbon-fiber cable that’s stronger than steel, lasts twice as long, and weighs a fraction of the older stuff: (more…) 
We were pretty impressed with Amanda Ghassaei’s 3D-printed records , but apparently the Tech Editor at Instructables isn’t content to blow our minds with her digital fabrication prowess just once. As of this weekend, she’s back with a veritable encore: a Laser Cut Record . Although all the documentation for that project is available here, and the 3D models can be printed through an online fabrication service, I felt like the barrier to entry was still way too high. With this project I wanted to try to extend the idea of digitally fabricated records to use relatively common and affordable machines and materials so that (hopefully) more people can participate and actually find some value in all this documentation I’ve been writing. As with the 3D-printed vinyl, the laser cut record is hardly high-fidelity… but that’s not the point. The point is, it’s really f’in cool. (more…) 
How can you ensure your product design never gets knocked off? By manufacturing it with proprietary production methods and materials no one else has access to. That’s always been the government approach to making currency, which is arguably the number one thing you don’t want people knocking off. But as manufacturing techiques trickle down, and now that digital imaging has become child’s play, the design of physical currency has to continually evolve. That creates a situation essentially the opposite of what industrial design is: Currency makers have to design something that’s as complicated as possible to manufacture. This week the Federal Reserve announced that a new, redesigned $100 bill is coming out, and as you’d expect, the thing is a cornucopia of proprietary manufacturing techniques. It’s got embedded thread imprinted with “USA” and “100,” and when you hit it with a UV light the thread glows pink; it’s got the X-ray thing where a blank space on the bill reveals a hidden face (Benny Franklin) when it’s backlit; the copper-colored “100” turns green when you tilt the bill. It’s also got a “3D Security Ribbon” (that blue stripe you see) containing images of a funky bell that turns into a “100.” So where’s the 3D part? The bell/100 appear to move and shift in a 3D, holographic way while you wave the money around, as we in the Core77 offices do during our weekly dice games in the hallway with the building superintendent and the FedEx guy. (more…)