Contactless

Drawing power from the road

19:59 October 1, 2009 PDT

The electric car of the future will “refuel” while driving or parked, complete...

It’s starting to look like roads will become much more than simple thoroughfares made of concrete and asphalt in the not too distant future. As we’ve seen, work is already underway to embed them with solar panels and piezoelectric generators to generate electricity. Now engineering company Ingenieurgesellschaft Auto und Verkehr (IAV) is looking to embed them with electrical conductors that would “refuel” the electric cars of the future while they are driving or parked. Read More

ROBOTICS

The Polaris mobile handset robot

By Paul Lester

17:34 September 10, 2009 PDT

Polaris keeps track of user activity to offer tailored information and advice

Despite having limited success in other countries, Japan enjoys nothing more than coming up with progressively weird and wacky designs for robots, and it doesn’t seem to matter whether they have any real practical application.The latest entry into this category is the Polaris mobile phone robot, a spherical, mobile device designed to house a handset that, when not docked, will be busy recording data based on a user’s day-to-day activity. Read More

MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

Forget your wallet? Pay with your mobile phone

By Paul Evans

18:07 March 11, 2009 PDT

With around four billion mobile phones in use world wide at the end of 2008 they now outnumber credit cards in circulation by a factor of 2:1, so the proliferation of payment systems based on the ubiquitous mobile phone seems almost a certainly. We've previously reported on Near Field Communication (NFC), a new generation of mobile phones able to make contactless payments and now UK mobile phone operator Orange is partnering with businesses to offer a complete range of contactless services. Read More

ELECTRONICS

iPoint system promises touchless gesture control of 3D displays

By Darren Quick

22:29 February 23, 2009 PST

For all the advances in computing and display technology over the years it’s a little disappointing that the main way we interact with them is still largely keyboard and mouse based, or for gaming consoles, controller based. The Wii’s motion controller has shown that the traditional ways of interaction serve as a barrier to many people and that new ways of interaction offer up a whole new range of possibilities. We also know that there are people hard at work on delivering whiz-bang new Minority Report style glove-controlled interfaces, but iPoint 3D goes a step further – the system allows people to communicate with a 3D display through simple hand gestures – without touching it and without 3D glasses or a data glove. Read More

MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

The ABnote-LAKS Smart Transaction Watch

By Jack Martin

21:44 November 22, 2008 PST

November 23, 2008 Approximately 1.1 billion watches are produced annually and around three billion credit cards are issued, which makes the LAKS Smart Transaction Watch look like a significant market opportunity given that it combines both. Laks is one of the most innovative producers of wrist-worn gadgetry in the world, with specialty watches that track the phases of the moon, play Mp3s and even monitor fertility cycles to aid women in getting pregnant, so the ingenuity of putting a smart card into a wristwatch to readily facilitate contactless payments was probably a no brainer for them. Perhaps one day we'll all be wearing these things, though our money is on the mobile phone being the logical long-term winner as the platform for contactless payments. Read More