Cool New Tech

January 5, 2005 8:52 AM

Looking for cool new technologies that takes advantages of cheaper, faster processors, networking and sensors.
It's a grad class assignment: Find something less than 6 months old that hasn't been in Wired or Time magazines and is not mere incremental advancement, but a new idea. For example, the invisibility cloak. Ideas? Links?
posted by cccorlew to Science & Nature (7 answers total)

Surely there will be a Wired Article soon ("Where the wild waves are," or something), but how about sensor networks? They're used to monitor everything from weather, to factories, to people.

Embedded sensor networks take advantage of improvements in processors and networking to monitor large systems. There's a big NSF funded research group at UCLA / Cal / Caltech.

This is related to motes , which Wired has covered in the past. So that might not work.

This assignment seems kinda hard -- find something that exists (i.e., a new technology, not just a design or thought experiment / thought piece), but that hasn't been written up in the press. And that's not *just* an incremental advance or an application of the technology into a novel use. Sounds impossible to me. Perenial favorites from this domain are: AI, haptics (gives plenty of sensor stuff), AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality). But these topics are pretty well covered by Wired.
posted by zpousman at 10:50 AM on January 5, 2005

This might not be considered new, as I was doing research in the field 5 years ago, but it has still failed to materialize, and may continue to do so. Still, I often feel we're on the cusp of it.

My research was basically into building self-organizing sensor networks for RFID systems. The idea being that you might have the need for rapid deployment of RFID systems by inexpert users. Say, for example, that you were doing relief work in Sri Lanka and needed to be able to track items or even people. We were working on methods to deploy such systems without a large degree of planning or expertise. RFID tags in question might be the really miniature ones that don't do much, or might themselves be larger and linked to small processors that could hold data and do computation. Considerable attention was also paid to the fact that battery life is a dear commodity, and trying to balance network throughput, transmission latency, and power consumption. It was a pretty interesting year or two of my life.
posted by RustyBrooks at 11:10 AM on January 5, 2005

On the RFID tip, I've been working on putting RFID readers/writers in mobile phones. The big idea is putting reader/writers in the phones, rather than just a tag. This means you can read your environment, tag your items, even leave digital graffiti. Phones also have voice and data capability, and are basically small portable computers these days - glue everything together and there will be lots of new things!
posted by deaddodo at 11:18 AM on January 5, 2005

I have a friend who's designing a system that detects airborne chemical/whatever gradients (think mustard gas or chlorine gas or something) and then tries to pinpoint which direction, and hopefully how far away, the thing originated.

I'm peripherally involved with a project that aims to put black boxes into medical doctor's offices - instead of sending a sample to the lab, they put a sample (ie., peripheral blood) into this black box, and it spits out the answers. The advantages is that the samples would be fresh (wouldn't have to be shipped overnight or couriered to a local lab) and that the assays are consistant regardless of who processes them. It's pretty pie-in-the-sky right now, on purely economic reasons. The technology is available/can-be-developed, but nobody's going to pony up the amount of money that it would take to get it off the ground.
posted by PurplePorpoise at 2:33 PM on January 5, 2005

According to someone, 2005 will be all about convergence. I can't think of any examples, but all the convergence seems to be clustered around the mobile phone. This should cover networking and possibly, sensors.

ePaper is slowly coming on line. The latest eBooks from Japan are pretty wicked, and use some new display technology that doesn't soak up the batteries.

Talking of batteries, research into Portable Hydrogen cells (for mobile phones and notebooks) continues at a pace.

Of course, what I really want for Xmas is one of these.
posted by seanyboy at 3:13 PM on January 5, 2005

I'm sure you could find an interesting topic by looking thru the sessions listed for this year's Emerging Technology conference.
posted by pwb503 at 3:56 PM on January 5, 2005

If you need sensors to Seanyboy's networking, look no further than cameraphones (an interesting phenomenon being used to recognize UPC codes, etc.), and GPS sensors on phones. One or the other or both of those might get you some ideas.
posted by RikiTikiTavi at 8:36 PM on January 5, 2005