Product Inspiration

This new fingerprint reader for your car beats out the competition on quite a few different levels:

• Better security: It uses vein identification (identifies you by your unique pattern of veins in your finger tip), instead of the conventional fingerprint
• Easier to use: It’s attached to the steering wheel
• Personalized: Once the driver is identified, the car will adjust to that person’s preferred seat position, air conditioning, and stereo settings.

Now that digital fingerprint readers are more and more widespread each day, its nice to see that people are finally using them for other uses that actually have some day to day benefit. This is a perfect example of successfully “re-appropriating” an existing technology to serve a new purpose, and hopefully is the first of many more convenience- based uses for boring old fingerprint readers.

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/hitachi/hitachi-to-install-its-fingervein-s ecurity-system-in-steering-wheels-313869.php

Sending sound through our bones seems like a really strange concept. You put a ’speaker’ of sorts on some bone of your body, and it vibrates the bone to create and send the sound throughout your body (most importantly, to your inner ear). In the last year or two, there have been a few new products that take advantage of this concept, such as headphones and even a children’s toothbrush. This time, developers have built it into a cell phone.

One nice advantage of using bone conduction is that headphones can become much smaller and less obtrusive. In a few years, will this be the one of the first technologies that starts the horrendous-yet-inevitable trend of installing electronic hardware on our bodies?

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/10/bone-conduction.html

This T-shirt has a graphic that changes depending on how close you are to a wireless network. Here’s what I really like about it

• It is a wearable piece of technology that serves a useful function
• It is another great example of how dynamic displays can be built into clothes
• Its another step in the ongoing trend of geeky stuff becoming mainstream

I hope this type of stuff gets cool before I’m too old to wear T-shirts. The lack of wireless networks in my rural area, and a fleeting grain of pride, will keep be from buying this. For now.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/generic/991e/?cpg=cj via gizmodo

This simple, yet effective design prevents your audio jack or headphone connector from being damaged when you accidentally yank on it in the wrong direction. The flexible nature of this connector allows it to bend and pull out of the earphone port with ease. I like the simplicity yet effectiveness of this idea, and bet there are quite a few other areas where a similar breakaway design could save us countless headaches.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/10/02/replug-breakaway-cable-protects-you r-3-5mm-jack/

In the last year or two, Electronic Ink, or E-Ink, has hit the shelves in consumer products such as Sony’s e-reader and other thin, monochrome displays. It works by having polarized particles which effectively rotate whenever an electric charge is applied, either revealing their dark, or their light side. The benefits of this technology include great contrast, and EXTREMELY long battery life (power is only needed to change the picture, and no backlight is needed).

Up until now, the technology has been limited to monochromatic applications only, but this new development is the first to offer an electronic ink- like material that provides the full range of colors. The principle of operation is the same as that of E-ink, except that it uses “nematic liquid crystals, which can be twisted to form any color in the visible spectrum.”

http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/967/

Technorati : electronic ink

Here’s a slick software analysis tool which turns previously unreadable digital fingerprints into useable data. It works by checking each minute detail of the print, and converting them into a standard coordinate system. The high amount of detail this provides also opens the door for previously impossible analysis, such as the locations of individual sweat pores and instantaneous results for matches.

http://www.physorg.com/news110454467.html

Technorati : fingerprint analysis, scanning

This new touchscreen from Sharp incorporates an optical sensor at EVERY pixel of the display. These photodiodes work together to create a digital image of a fingerprint, and can also provide multitouch control of a device. This paradigm of an array of optical sensors for tactical control could provide cheaper and much more accurate control of devices. In addition, the fact that the screen is also a camera could be extended into much more useful functions than fingerprinting and control alone. Maybe there’s an opportunity to create better imaging from these displays, even to a point where your cell phone is able to take pictures by using the screen as a lens! It would definitely improve conventional webcams, which do not connect the remote users eye-to-eye, due to the screen-focused gaze being away from the camera, which is on or next to the monitor


The Engineer

Technorati : multitouch control, portable electronics, user interface