Hitachi
Toyota, Honda, and General Motors have been toying with the concept of eco-friendly single-seater urban vehicles over the past few years, and Hitachi has taken notice. Although it may look like a miniature car, Hitachi's ROPITS is more like a robotic wheelchair designed to assist people with difficulty walking (i.e. Japan's growing elderly population). The key difference is that – unlike the concept vehicles demonstrated by the auto makers – ROPITS drives itself. Read More
Following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that crippled TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the Japanese robotics industry was criticized for developing expensive walking humanoids rather than more practical robots. It seems the country won't have to rely on foreign robots to do the dirty work much longer, as Hitachi has announced a compact, dual-armed heavy duty robot that will begin removing rubble at the plant next year. Read More
With pat downs, metal detectors, X-ray machines, and “puffer machines,” catching a plane can see you and your belongings scanned and probed more thoroughly than a trip to the doctor. Yet another explosives-detecting device may soon be added to the airport screening arsenal. However, because the explosives-detecting equipment is integrated into a boarding gate, the developers claim it won’t disrupt the flow of passengers boarding a plane. Read More
Hitachi develops "incorruptible" glass-based data storage technique
Back when compact discs were first coming out, they were touted as being able to store data “forever.” As it turns out, given no more than a decade or so, they can and do degrade. According to an AFP report, Hitachi has unveiled a system that really may allow data to last forever – or at least, for several hundred million years. It involves forming microscopic dots within a piece of quartz glass, those dots serving as binary code. Read More
Earlier this year, Western Digital (WD) acquired Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST), and with it G-Technology. With HGST now operating as a wholly owned WD subsidiary, one of the first products hitting the shelves after the acquisition was the recently released G-RAID with Thunderbolt, which claims the title of the world’s highest capacity, RAID 0, Thunderbolt external storage drive. Read More
Japan’s Hitachi Kokusai Electric has developed a surveillance system that can automatically detect a face in either a provided photo or video footage, then search for that same face in other video provided by networked cameras. While such facial recognition systems have been seen before, this one is able to compare the target face against others at an astounding rate of 36 million faces per second. Read More
Just when you thought that you still had loads of room on the 1TB of storage in your PC or Mac, another holiday season comes around and tempts you to capture all the antics at the office party in multi-megapixel clarity, or record high definition movies of loved ones as they excitedly rip through reams and reams of wrapping paper. Suddenly your monster hard drive starts to look somewhat elf-like. Hitachi GST (Global Storage Technologies) has unveiled two new hard disk storage solutions of gargantuan capacity that may well help to alleviate some of those storage woes. Both center around the same 4TB Deskstar 5K4000 HDD - with one being prepped for internal use, and the other given a nice outer jacket and USB 3.0 connectivity. Read More
Seagate and Hitachi GST unveil 4TB external hard drives
On Wednesday, Seagate announced it was shipping the world’s first 4TB external hard drive in the form of the 4TB GoFlex Desk Drive, which offers a high speed USB 3.0 interface. Obviously looking to steal a bit of Seagate’s thunder – or should that be Thunderbolt – the very next day Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) demoed its own 4TB external hard drives at IBC 2011 in Amsterdam in a two-drive, 8TB, RAID 0, G-RAID unit with Thunderbolt, FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 ports. Read More
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has unveiled a rugged external drive and some new high capacity storage solutions aimed at audio/video professionals at this year's National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas. The new additions to the G-Technology range support Standard Definition, High Definition, 2K, or 4K post production workflows for Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and a host of other post production software solutions. Interface options include FireWire 800, USB 2.0 and eSATA, with 3TB 7200 RPM Hitachi enterprise and desktop class hard drives playing a central role and various RAID configurations also on offer. The company has also announced that Thunderbolt I/O devices will be landing later in the year. Read More
Readers who follow developments in the growing field of bio-signal telemetry (perhaps we can call it "life data monitoring") will likely be familiar with the Fitbit, an activity monitor that collects and measures data about your daily movements. Hitachi's Life Microscope goes a few steps further, collecting even more data that can be used to analyze your life trends. Read More
