Testing of the prototype gloves continues. Photo / 123RF
Testing of the prototype gloves continues. Photo / 123RF
Long-distance couples can share a walk, watch movies together and give each other a massage using a pair of interconnected Flex-N-Feel gloves being developed by researchers at Simon Fraser University in Canada.
When fingers "flex" in one glove, the actions are transmitted to a remote partner wearing the other.
Theglove's tactile sensors allow the wearer to "feel" the movements.
To capture the flex actions, the sensors are attached to a microcontroller.
The sensors provide a value for each bend, and are transmitted to the "feel" glove using a Wi-Fi module.
While one set of gloves enables one-way remote touch between partners, Neustaedter says a second set could allow both to share touches at the same time.
Talk of the future
The butt of jokes less than 10 years ago, automatic speech recognition is on the verge of becoming the chief means of interacting with principal computing devices.
In anticipation of the age of voice-controlled electronics, MIT researchers have built a low-power chip for automatic speech recognition.
Whereas a cellphone running speech-recognition software might require about one watt of power, the new chip requires between 0.2 and 10 milliwatts. That's a power savings of 90 to 99 per cent, which could make voice control practical for relatively simple electronic devices.
"Speech input will become a natural interface for many wearable applications and intelligent devices," says Professor Anantha Chandrakasan, whose MIT group developed the new chip.
"The miniaturisation of these devices will require a different interface than touch or keyboard.
"It will be critical to embed the speech functionality locally to save system energy consumption compared to performing this operation in the cloud."
The new chip requires 90 to 99 percent less power. Photo / 123RF
Scan the galaxy
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are brief spurts of radio emission, lasting just one-thousandth of a second, whose origins are mysterious.
Fewer than two dozen have been identified in the past decade using giant radio telescopes such as the huge dish in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
Only one has been pinpointed to originate from a galaxy about three billion light years away.
The other known FRBs seem to also come from distant galaxies but there is no obvious reason why an FRB wouldn't occur in our own Milky Way.
If it did, astronomers suggest that it would be "loud" enough for a global network of cellphones or small radio receivers to "hear" it.
"The search for nearby FRBs offers an opportunity for citizen scientists," says theorist Avi Loeb, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.
Previous FRBs were detected at radio frequencies that match those used by cellphones, Wi-Fi and similar devices.
Consumers could potentially download a free smartphone app that would run in the background, monitoring appropriate frequencies and sending the data to a central processing facility.
