VR Interfaces: Novint Falcon
Novint Falcon is a commercial grade haptics unit. Essentially, it is a 3D joystick that responds with the full range of force: Weight, shape, texture, dimension, dynamics and force effects.

Ray Kurzweil is a formidable force in VR and AI. Hell, he is a formidable force anywhere he has turned his attention. He has a knack for predicting the future, and so far so far not a single one of his predictions has ever been wrong. This book is his theory on Accelerating Intelligence made flesh and a warning for the monumental acceleration of technological change in the years to come.

Chemical Sensor as Sensitive as a Dog's Nose
A technological scent sensor that works in almost the exact same manner as a bog's biological nose has been developed by researchers at the University of California. The sensor, the size of an adult male fingerprint, uses microfluidic nanotechnology to mimic the biological mechanism behind canine scent receptors. The device is both highly sensitive to trace amounts of certain vapour molecules, and able to tell a specific substance apart from similar molecules.

This Blessed Plot, Part Three
Looks at the most powerful of all plots - those which force a permanant change to something within the world, and what you have to bear in mind to achieve this.

Adding Haptics to a Second Skin
Researchers have prototyped an electrotactile second skin to be worn over the first, which adds additional pressure sensation to the user's own sensory capabilities – it makes the natural skin much more sensitive to touch.

Haptics Theories Upturned: Pressure Independent of Velocity
It has been a staple of our understanding of the processes behind human dexterity for decades, that the faster you push at something, the more force you exert. Now, it seems that is not actually accurate.

Room Lighting as Network Access
A new method of creating wireless networks without interfering with sensitive equipment, including medical equipment, is to make use of the rapid on/off capabilities of LEDs in normal modern LED lightbulbs. 800mb/s is the current limit, and that is only in the prototype.

This is very much, through and through, a sceptic and downcryer?s book. A 180 page tome of essays that often argue utterly against the use of virtual environments for any purpose whatsoever, and decries them as a force of change.

(20/07/2008)
Engineers puzzling over which materials should form the basis of the next generation of flash memory chips appear to have had the answer close to hand. It has been lurking in their computer's CD drawer all along.

Numonyx, a ...

(09/02/2010)
Amazon has acquired Touchco, a New York start-up that was developing flexible, transparent, force-sensitive multitouch panels.

The acquisition indicates what Amazon might try to do next in response to Apple’s iPad announcemen...

(23/05/2010)
he Air Force says it performed no advance testing on the specific type of military GPS receiver that had problems picking up locator signals after a change in ground-control software.

The Air Force said Monday that it perform...

(31/12/2009)
Multitouch screens have been a little slower to enter the electronics marketplace than consumers might have hoped. Since Jeff Han, a research scientist at New York University?s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, first presented his...

(29/09/2008)
Gel-filled fingertips could give prosthetic hands greater sensitivity, even allowing them to react "instinctively" to objects slipping from their grasp.

Human hands automatically estimate the minimum force needed to hold on...