Computers

Over the past decade, Sweden’s Tobii has been working on adding eye-tracking technology to a mix of user inputs that includes keyboards, mice and touchpads and screens. After demonstrating its GAZE UI for Windows 8 at last year’s CES, the company is set to showcase its first eye-tracking consumer peripheral device which brings the GAZE functionality to any Windows 8 PC at CES 2013. By tracking their eye movements, the Tobii REX allows Windows 8 users to scroll, zoom, navigate and select using their peepers in conjunction with a mouse or touchpad.  Read More

USB drives have become so prolific in recent years that they've become practically disposable. Now, one company has created a different type of flash drive that can literally be crumpled up and thrown in the garbage. With an embedded silicon chip, intelliPaper seamlessly turns an ordinary strip of paper into a fully functioning USB drive.  Read More

Philip M. Parker, a marketing professor at INSEAD (the European Institute of Business Administration), has written and patented a system that uses an algorithm to automatically compile data into book form. Between his works and those of his research group (ICON Group International), he has over 900,000 books currently for sale on Amazon. More than a smart search engine, his system only requires a few minutes or a few hours to scan the databases relevant to any given topic and organize that data into a technical report. Next stop? Romance novels.  Read More

In common with many of today's digital content junkies, I get my daily entertainment fix from a computer screen and not a TV. Even if I could afford to buy into the jaw-dropping Ultra HD image quality I witnessed from the giant goggle boxes being showcased by Toshiba, Sony and LG at IFA 2012 in Berlin a few months back, they'd likely spend much of their time powered off. As such, the upcoming release of a 32-inch 4K2K computer monitor from Sharp would be of great interest, were it not being aimed specifically at the business community in Japan.  Read More

You just never know when you might find yourself in a situation where your computer needs to be doused in water or run over by a pickup truck. The original waterproof Stealth WPC-500F had you covered for the water situation, but the latest model adds the strength to withstand the weight of a pickup truck running it over.  Read More

The maker of the display cells used to create the world's biggest multi-touch wall and the interactive Twitter Wall installed at CES 2011 has just announced the release of 42- and 55-inch MultiTaction display cells, fully integrated with Windows 8.  Read More

About this time last year, Lenovo made a bid for the title of creator of the world's smallest desktop PC, with the launch of the IdeaCentre Q180. Now, an equally diminutive replacement is making a grab for the very same title. The IdeaCentre Q190 is reported to offer up to 80 percent faster processing performance over last year's model, is available with double the system memory, and up to 1 TB of HDD storage.  Read More

The smallest gesture can hide a world of meaning. A particular flick of a baton and a beseeching gesture can transform the key moment of a concert from mundane to ethereal. Alas, computers are seriously handicapped in understanding human gestural language, both in software and hardware. In particular, finding a method for describing gestures presented to a computer as input data for further processing has proven a difficult problem. In response, Microchip Technologies has developed the world's first 3D gesture recognition chip that senses the gesture without contact, through its effect on electric fields.  Read More

Most of us are bombarded by advertisements in one form or another throughout the day. While there’s not a lot we can do about the ads in the subway, or placed up on billboards, the internet is another matter. AdTrap is a new low-power, zero configuration device which promises to banish adverts from computers, tablets, and anything else connected to the local network.  Read More