This is more of a solution to a problem approach. A number of electronic devices are coming up with stretchable properties; the currently available line-up of batteries are simply not suitable for them. Only recently, suitable stretchable lithium-ion batteries have been successfully tested to address this concern.

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Golden-i

• Who is it for? How does it work?

The makers of Golden-i call it a headset than an eyewear. But structurally, it can be thought of as a combination of both. Golden-i simply a USB, Camera, phone, Wi-Fi and bluetooth enabled computer with a near-eye heads-up display (HUD) and speakers. It runs on Windows CE operating system and is driven by user’s voice commands. The device is also powered with a head-tracking functionality. So when Golden-i is connected to a camera located elsewhere, the user can easily look around those corners by manipulating the viewing angle of the camera.

Golden-i is specifically meant for heavy and light industry professions like for instance – fire fighters, security personnel and even health care.

• Release date and Pricing

Golden-i released this year, in 2013. With a price tag of $2,500 (₹ 1,25,000).

The following video represents a performance describing how Golden-i can help firemen can effectively find their way and save lives during catastrophic situations.

Google Glass

• Who is it for? How does it work?

Google Glass is probably the most talked about product after their search engine. They recently released a breathtaking video showcasing the Glass in action. You can take photographs, shoot videos, make phone calls, text, search, remind you of events, guide you through locations, etceteras – all of it with a simple voice command, at any moment. The device is connected to Google servers and all of the interactions will be communicated with Google’s cloud (privacy concerns?). While using the glass, you can scroll up and down on the software window on the heads-up display, just by tilting your head. Mind that Google glass independently as a standalone device, but additionally, it can tether to an iPhone and Android too.

Google glass is meant for general users for non-critical activities.

• Release date and Pricing

Google Glass is expected to release by the end of 2013 for consumers. Yes! You can very soon move around wearing a smartphone on your face! Currently, Google glass is currently selling exclusively for developers for a price of $1500 (appx ₹ 75,000). Google has promised the final consumer version to be significantly cheaper.

Watch how the ‘first person view’ with Google Glass look like.

Microsoft’s HUD glass – United States patent application 20120293548

Microsoft had filed a patent for it’s own idea of HUD glasses as per the news in late 2012. There isn’t any official information about this product, it’s target users or it’s functions. Speculations are that the device could probably be to improve their Gaming console’s experience. However, it’s sure that Microsoft is definitely cooking something on the lines of augmented reality. We’ll have to wait and watch on this one.

Vuzix M100

The Vuzix M100 appears like an elongated bluetooth device, but contains a virtual display with an integrated camera (capable of recording at 720p), bluetooth, Wi-fi, GPS, Accelerometer and a 16:9 aspect ratio with WQVGA display. The device is quite powerful too. It packs a 1GHz OMAP4430 processor, 4GB of flash storage and 1GB of RAM. The device primarily runs on Android OS 4.0 (ICS) and can connect to a secondary iOS and Android device wirelessly. So while the device is connected to a secondary device, the user can perform all major functions through the M100 like texting, making phone calls, shooting videos, etceteras. Wait what? Doesn’t all of this sound similar to Google glass? Though it does, unless Google actually reveals it’s hardware specs and more importantly, unless both of these devices are out in the market, it’s quite hard to tell if they are really similar.

VuZix M100 is meant for general consumers and professionals.

• Release date and Pricing

The M100 is scheduled for commercial release in late 2013. It is said to be around $500 (₹ 25,000)

Pravav Mistry’s Sixth Sense Project

Remember Pranav Mistry and his Sixth Sense project? Some of us may not know that the project isn’t really a message of an upcoming product, but only a concept. The concept is fabulous, but far fetched and a bit ahead of the time. Some of the current hardware technologies are not evolved enough to complete the exact product. It’s being said that Microsoft will use a part of Pranav Mistry’s project in it’s upcoming HUD glass. If you want to know more on the whereabouts about this project, head over to an interesting discussion at Quora.

Oculus Rift is a gaming accessory. If the rumours about the Microsoft’s HUD glasses being a gaming device hold true, that both of these could stand on a competing position. We recently covered an article titled ‘Leap Motion And Oculus Rift – Augmented Reality, Now And The Future‘.

Motorola HC1 is on the same lines as the Golden-i. Interestingly, Motorola had initially collaborated with Golden-i, but now they have brought out their own device. Full details and specs about the HC1. The device is priced around $4,000 – $5,000 (₹ 2,00,000 - ₹ 2,50,000).

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It’s quite an effort to keep a track of the ‘new’ with incessant updates in the technology market . This is especially true for the cell phone and tablet industry. And the warm success of tablet computers has led more manufacturers to come up with their own versions. As such, some tech companies are working with their unique ‘twists and whacks’ to spill out the next-generation tablet computers. Here’s a quick look at the upcoming tablet computer technologies.

Razer’s Gaming Tablet

Despite the popularity, tablet computers have never been able to gain a notable support from the gaming communities. And it’s justified. Currently, even the best tablet in the market lacks enough hardware to run graphic intensive games to match the quality of new age gaming consoles.

So here’s an update. Once a concept gaming tablet from Razer (Project Fiona), now confirmed for production - the device promises an integrated Intel Core i7 processor with a sound system certified by THX. Though it’s said to have a 10.1-inch display, the screen size seems pretty small for a proper console-like gaming experience. But hey, there are ways to stream games from any device to a larger display!

Bendable or Foldable Tablets

The next generation of tablets may be even more portable than they are now. These may be made of an OLED display and folded like a newspaper and placed in your back pocket. Sounds genius, right? Interestingly in the year 2011, Samsung released a concept video and confirmed the introduction of such a bendable and transparent device sometime in the year 2012. Well, the year has almost ended with no such thing happening – 2013 may be?

Electronic Skin and Wrap-Around Glass

A solar-powered stretchable touchscreen device is being developed by Stanford University. The idea is to create wearable gadgets that are light, flexible, and thin as your daily apparel. A tablet or smartphone ingrained on the sleeve of a shirt – a common element in sci-fi movies may soon be a reality.

Corning Inc. manufactures the ‘Gorilla Glass’ popularly used in today’s cell phones and tablets and the company is working on a glass display that could be wrapped around a device. This would mean that touch-screen gadgets may no longer be limited to rectangular shapes.

Tablet Projector

Hold on, this one’s is already available in the market! SmartQ U7 tablet from SmartDevices has introduced a tablet with a built-in projector! While Samsung may be working on a Windows tablet with a built-in projector. This would allow the projection of presentations or videos from the back of the tablet.

So, how would you like to have your tablet computer? Discuss your ideas and expectations in the comments section below – the manufacturers might actually pick them up!

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What is Leap Motion? (Current Technology) - 

In the video above, you can notice that Leap Motion is a device not much larger than an iPod. It sits wirelessly on a desk and creates a virtual cubic metre of point tracking space. That means it can detect your hands, your body or any object you suspend in a cubic metre of 3D space before it. It can track well over a million points at once – over a thousand times more accurately than current tracking technology such as the Microsoft Kinect – and can discriminate between a finger, a pencil and palms. It supports whole new ways to interact with your computer, from using chopsticks to pull Google Earth about to using a playground-style pistol-shaped fist to play first-person shooters.

Leap Motion – Founded in 2010 as OcuSpec, the startup raised a $1.3M seed financing round in June 2011 with investments from venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund as well as several angel investors – An excerpt from Wikipedia.

What is Oculus Rift? (Upcoming Technology) - 

The Oculus Rift is revolutionary too, but in a completely different way.

Current virtual reality headsets suffer from two main problems. The first is the speed of head tracking: as the head moves, the view shifts with noticeable latency. The second is the field of view: users of VR headsets currently have about an 40 degree field of vision, well below the 130-degree field of vision (average) of normal sight.

The Rift solves both of those problems. It contains revolutionary head-tracking technology enabling virtually instant view transitioning based on the user’s movements. It also ups the field of vision to 110 degrees – just off that of normal sight. It is, in both senses, totally immersive.

The company announced a Kickstarter campaign on 1 August 2012. Within four hours of the announcement, Oculus secured its objective of $250,000 to further develop the headset. In less than 36 hours, the Kickstarter campaign surpassed $1 million dollars in funding, eventually ending with $2,437,429 in funding – An excerpt from Wikipedia.

So what about the two together?

There’s the most exciting part. Leap claimed that the original idea for the Motion came out of the difficulty of 3D modelling. Something so simple in real life, they believe, should not be so difficult on a computer. And so, the Leap allows you to manipulate virtual clay in to any sort of structure you want – incredibly realistically. Oculus Rift slots straight into this, of course. Manipulating a 3D model on-screen is all very good and well, but real sculptors need to be able to see the shape they create before them.

One of the unexpected benefits of the Motion and the Rift is that the device a program is being run on will become less important. This could see the end of desktop computers altogether – both devices are so portable that fully-immersive computing will be possible using a quality quality, powerful notebook or laptop. Remove the static media, and you remove the static category – perhaps this will be the catalyst the notebook industry needs to continue its meteoric rise.

The Oculus Rift will be available as Developer Kits from January 2013, with the Leap Motion Dev Kits already shipping. End-user products are available to pre-order from both company websites.

Now and the Future

It’s intriguing to see new startups (like the two above) blooming with innovative ideas. Leap Motion and Oculus Rift are strong examples, seeds of augmented-reality-laden-systems in the future. Apart from entertainment; such devices will find a definite place for education and training purposes.

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There are plenty of free Linux derivatives around to try. They’re like free candies lying around the web. I’ve tried a few of them (Sabayon, Open SUSE, Mandriva, Fedora and a few more), and among the list, I particularly liked Damn Small Linux. It’s cute and straightforward with only 50MB in size. It doesn’t raise many expectations as a user nor does it explicitly claim/ imply to be a desktop replacement.

Ubuntu is popularly believed to be a complete desktop replacement. And with so many too-good-to-be-true words and promotions about Ubuntu (back in the days) I felt ‘Ubuntu could be my next best and uber-neat OS’. That didn’t work out. Even though my computer’s (Macbook Pro 13 Mid-2010) hardware specifications are more than recommended for Ubuntu; it was still very sluggish – annoying – disappointing. The setting panels and apps took their own time to execute. The default pack of applications still include Firefox browser, which is just another layer to discomfort. And it’s not just my computer – it’s a known problem. With such basic issues on hand (out of hardware incompatibility, driver issues or whatever reason there may be), it’s too soon to claim Ubuntu as a desktop replacement. It isn’t completely reliable yet.

Update – There are mixed experiences regarding the ‘sluggish-ness’ issue. Some users are having no problems, while some are facing severe performance issues even on systems with enough hardware specifications. A google search on this issue will help you undersand more.

Windows and OS X have been under closed development much before Ubuntu was born and with different software development processes. Due to Ubuntu’s open source nature, it is maintained by a large developer’s community and it still has time grow into a complete-reliable operating system. Currently, Ubuntu is NOT a suitable Windows or an OS X replacement.

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Nanotechnology is a science that has helped mankind seek solutions, which is otherwise impossible on a macro scale. Over the course of time, a myriad of new applications and formulations have been developed to tackle the problems encountered while preparing conventional medical formulations. In this article, i’ll talk about a few devices which have been built using the principles of nanotechnology.[1] Nanotechnology aims at targeting the specific delivery of therapeutic agents (medications), which have been known to reduce the toxicities in other organs. And this has been a major concern in cancer therapy. The therapeutic agents are conventionally directed towards the patient’s cells that have lost apoptotic control and that are growing limitlessly.[2] These medications are directed towards human cancerous cells, it becomes difficult to select the right target, and hence the therapeutic agents end up killing the normal body cells.

Nanotechnology directs the therapeutic agents to target a specific organ and also help save other organs from being killed. Many of the recent anti-cancer drugs failed the clinical trials due to safety concerns, but as genuine fix to the concern, they are now being formulated using nanotechnology. Wortmannin, a potent anti-cancer drug that acts as an inhibitor of Phosphoinositol 3-kinase[3] had failed the clinical trials due to problems related to toxicity, solubility and stability. It was later re-formulated as a nanoparticle where the researchers have claimed to solve all the aforementioned problems that earlier caused it’s failure.[4]

Wortmannin bound to target (Image credit: wortmannin.noneto.com)

Similarly, researchers have successfully experimented to develop nanoparticles which comprise small chains of magnetic particles (Nanochains) and liposomes loaded with doxorubicin. This was tried in rodent models for triple-negative breast cancer.[5] By doing so, researchers reported that the toxicity was reduced remarkably and as the formulation was loaded with liposomes and made target specific the dose also reduced considerably.

Nano-chain targeting (Image credit: spectroscopynow.com)

The action of this formulation was such that when the liposomes reached the target organ or site of cancerous growth, magnetic nanoparticles were stimulated by electric field which made them vibrate due to which the liposome membrane would disrupt and the drug directly releasing on the cancerous cells. The targeting was based on αvβ3 integrin-targeted nanochain particle composed of four iron oxide nanospheres chemically linked in a linear assembly. The αvβ3 integrin is an adhesion receptor expressed by breast cancer cells and osteoclasts. [6]

1. Martis, E.A., R.R. Badve, and M.D. Degwekar, Nanotechnology based devices and applications in medicine: An overview. Chronicles of Young Scientists. 3(1): p. 68.
2. Lowe, S.W. and A.W. Lin, Apoptosis in cancer. Carcinogenesis, 2000. 21(3): p. 485-495.
3. Weng, L.P., J.L. Brown, and C. Eng, PTEN induces apoptosis and cell cycle arrest through phosphoinositol-3-kinase/Akt-dependent and‐independent pathways. Human molecular genetics, 2001. 10(3): p. 237-242.
4. Karve, S., et al., Revival of the abandoned therapeutic wortmannin by nanoparticle drug delivery. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 109(21): p. 8230-8235.
5. Peiris, P.M., et al., Imaging Metastasis Using an Integrin-Targeting Chain-Shaped Nanoparticle. ACS nano. 6 (10), pp 8783–8795
6. Zhao, Y., et al., Tumor αvβ3 integrin is a therapeutic target for breast cancer bone metastases. Cancer research, 2007. 67(12): p. 5821-5830.

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When Resident Evil 4 was released, it changed the way people looked at the horror genre. Lots of horror games had come before, many of them achieving great successes both critically and commercially, but none of them combined horror, tension and action to this degree. The game was the absolute pinnacle of survival horror and was a pivotal game in the Game Cube life cycle. It eventually made its way onto the PS2, garnering critical acclaim and commercial success. And as expected, the bar was set too high.

A poster for Resident Evil 4

This bar, this hypothetical tower that builds itself whenever something good is created, this is the thing developers must be really getting scared and pissed of. This bar changes everything. It creates expectations, of monumental proportions. And this is what affected the Resident Evil franchise. The fifth game in the series was not a bad game. I actually enjoyed it a lot. The gun play was really improved over the previous games and the enemy AI was better. But what it gained in the action perspective, is what is lost when it came to providing the chills. The game simply did not have the eerie feel of its legendary predecessor, and did not give that feeling of hopelessness. The last feeling a horror game needs to impart a player is that of actually being able to survive, or worse still, of being a badass with great chances of making it out with your head and limbs intact. And this is what most horror developers don’t seem to get these days. And Capcom are no exception to this.

I think what the industry needs is different directions for different genres. These days, action is integrated into almost every game, at the cost of originality, at the cost of the elements which actually made the game good. There is a huge market for the casual gamers out there, and every company is trying to attract that market by making their games more accessible. And accessibility means including elements that people on a large scale will like. But that will not necessarily make a game better or even good compared to what it was. The focus should be on providing a better experience, and not on making one which should cater to many. If what you have created is great, it will garner an audience. This was what Resident Evil 4 did so well, and look how well it sold. With what i’ve been hearing about Resident Evil 6, that does not seem to be the case. And if the future releases follow the same path, then I believe the series as we know it is dead.

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Image credit: images.kuruvila.net

SLR (Single-lens Reflex) cameras are defined by the way in which the viewfinder works. Unlike standard compact digital cameras, whose viewfinders can sometimes suffer from parallax issues when taking close-up shots, SLRs use a system of mirrors and prisms to allow the photographer to use the viewfinder to see exactly what will be captured through the lens. This allows the user to gauge the focus on close-up shots far more precisely.

SLRs also feature interchangeable lenses – and while this may not be a definite selling point for the hobbyist, it’s invaluable for professional photographers.

Whilst SLRs still use traditional 35mm film to capture images, DSLRs combine the features of an SLR camera with a digital camera system. This type of camera typically features an LCD display and higher-quality image sensors, as well as a range of customisable settings and modes to tailor the camera to the scene. DSLRs have largely replaced SLRs as the preferred camera type for professionals, due to the level of versatility they offer, while still maintaining the defining features of a conventional SLR.

A new competitor on the photography scene is the SLT (Single-Lens Translucent) camera, produced by Sony. These cameras have similar lenses to DSLRs, but they also feature an electronic viewfinder (EVF), which allows for a more accurate preview of images taken with a high-zoom lens, and the ability to display information, such as camera settings or a histogram, on top of the image. These viewfinders can, however, sometimes suffer from a higher level of lag, and it can be difficult to manually focus images with lower-resolution EVFs.

On the other hand, SLTs are also generally less bulky, lacking the complex moving mirror system that SLRs use, which also allows for more frames to be captured per second – ideal for the rapid-fire bursts of shots typically needed for sports and action photography.

Overall, SLRs, DSLRs and SLTs are all likely to appeal to professional photographers and hobbyists, offering a high level of versatility. When it comes to choosing the right camera for your needs, it’s important to know exactly how you will be using it. For high-action sports or nature photography, you’ll get the best results using an SLT, whilst low light and night-time photos will look best when taken on a traditional SLR or DSLR.

• Sensor size – Cameras with larger sensors take better shots.

• Megapixels – Ensure that the camera has at least 8MP, as – whilst this won’t necessarily improve the quality of your images – it will enable you to print out larger photos without distortions.

• Features – Your camera need not necessarily have plenty of features. You might end up paying more money for the extra features you might never use. As a beginner or an amateur, think about the convenient features you would like your camera to have. Features like image stabilisation can be particularly useful if you want to avoid taking blurry photos, particularly in low-light indoor environments.

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