In the ETH Zurich Flying Machine Arena a rope bridge was built autonomously by several quadrocopters. This demonstrates the great power of cooperating drones interacting with their environment and solving tasks in a team.
More Information: www.idsc.ethz.ch
Researchers of the Korea University and TU Berlin developed exoskeleton which can be controlled via human thoughts. The skeletons movement is performed whilst the person wearing the skeleton has to look at bunch of LEDs. Each LED corresponds to a skeletons movement – the brain produces a specific electrical signal while the person is looking at the light, which then is used to move the skeleton. The signals are received via a cap with electrodes and processed by a controller within the skeleton.
More information: www.tu-berlin.de
TRANSFORM is designed to create and change shapes, functionality and design of furnitures just by moving objects around or – if desired – on demand. To achieve this behaviour “tangible bits” and the Tangible User Interface (TUI) was used.
More Information: tangible.media.mit.edu
Acer Cloud Professor is a “Plug, Play, Code & Make” IoT starter kit for people in all ages to feel the vibe of Internet of Things development. Using mobile devices as input interface, anyone can conduct IoT remote control by simply following the tutorial kits by any popular programming languages such as Scratch, LiveCode, JavaScript, and C/C++. Its open architecture, open source, and cross platform App features support major OS. Users can get started now with Cloud Professor’s easy and quick prototyping tool to go instantly on to the Acer Cloud. Users can simply plug it in and be ready to go!
read more: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/…/
Based on a free software from the Institute of Data Analysis and Visualization of the University of California Davis, severall sandbox systems were created around the world. The first video shows the realisation done by the EPSCoR based in Alaska. The second one shows an installation from a czech Team called the “Sandy Station”. All systems are using an xbox kinect, a projector and the sandbox software.
More information: www.heise.de
The new droid, which will also be available as a $150 toy for franchise fans, has a head that can remain mostly stationary even as its spherical body is rolling madly to move it from place to place. The effect almost makes it look as if BB-8’s head can defy gravity.
read more: http://www.theverge.com/
After introducing the “dash buttons” in March this year, Amazons one-click-ordering-devices are now available for sale (only for Amazon Prime accounts). Currently products of 18 brands are available and equipped with this wifi-enabled device. The consumer just need to connect the button to a wifi and select the deposited product (via the Amazon smartphone-app) once. Having done that, just one “click” is necessary to reorder the desired product.
More information: developer.amazon.com