Toothy Talk
Soon you could be swapping your mobile phone for a molar phone. Royal College of Art students in London have developed a phone that fits inside a tooth. The concept device picks up signals with a radio receiver and uses a tiny vibrating plate to convey them as sound along the jawbone to a person’s ear. The mini-molar phone could be implanted in a tooth during routine dental surgery. Currently, the tooth phone is only a mock-up and lacks the communications chip to actually turn it into a functioning device. The designers speculate that it could be used by stock traders to receive up-to-the-moment information about share prices or to help football managers communicate quickly with players during key matches.

(Source: B.B.C. News - July 2002)

Heer, Bir, Phatte with Digital Intelligence
Computer game characters in the future could be truly interactive, reacting to your movements and changes in the virtual environment. In UK, researchers have developed a new way of animating virtual characters in games or films. They have created computer characters that use artificial intelligence to learn how to produce their own body motion. The potential for this is truly interactive characters in computer games.
The animation technique, called Active Character Technology, works using a process of artificial evolution, so that a character learns how to move. A simplified model of the brain into the character is put. This brain is connected to the virtual muscles and then tell it how to walk.

(Source: B.B.C. News - July 2002)

ILU - ILU messaging on TV
Sending and receiving short text messages (SMS) could soon become as easy as turning on the television. Wireless Oceans, a company based in Devon in southwestern England, has developed a system called Text2TV that would allow text messages to be received, displayed and sent on TV screens. To reply you can use the TV remote control and a virtual keyboard on screen or just the remote if it is marked with text characters. The system is incorporated in a box that plugs into the mobile phone and the television. If a message comes in, it displays an icon on the television screen. When the message is read, a microchip formats the characters and overlays the message on the TV picture.

(Source: The Economic Times, July 2002)

Back to Punch Cards

IBM researchers have gone back to the pioneering days of computers to create a novel method of storing data. A miniaturized version of the punch cards used in some of the earliest computers has helped the company store the equivalent of 25 million pages of text in a space not bigger than a postage stamp. The technology, dubbed Millipede, records individual bits of data using tiny heated levers to make holes in a plastic film. IBM researchers believe the Millipede technology could pack even more data in by punching out individual atoms.

(Source: B.B.C. News - July 2002)

Keeping an Eye
Computers of the future could be controlled by eye movements, rather than a mouse or keyboard. Scientists at Imperial College, London, are working on eye-tracking technology. The scientists have been using an infra-red eye-tracking headset to understand how the eye moves when given a task. The team is looking at applying its research for use in areas such as keyhole surgery or robotic surgery. Eye-tracking technology could also help the way we interact with machines, such as computers.

(Source:B.B.C. News - July 2002)