Tag Archives: Innovative Technology

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Why Shoot For The Stars, When You Can Shoot Stars!

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Many cultures have told kids to wish upon a shooting star, because if you do, it will most certainly come true! This elusive phenomenon, and it superstitious promise has got people looking to the skies since, forever! That is going to change now, if a project being touted as “The future of entertainment” gets its way.

Meet Sky Canvas. Please see video below!

Yup, you did just watch that!

The project aims to use satellites to shoot you stars at will! For entertainment! According to the brains of this idea “A natural shooting star occurs when a particle in space, with a size of a few millimetres, enters the atmosphere and burns brightly through a process called plasma emission. Our goal is to artificially recreate this process.”

We think it is a great lucrative idea, but one that also takes the magic out of a lifetime-old fable!

If you want to know more about this, you can read more about how it works here.

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Tanvas; Touch Innovation!

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If you are into online shopping like many people I know, then you must agree with me it would be nice to know more about what you are buying. E.g the fabric of that jacket you were forced to look at by your computer and the unsatisfying feeling you felt when you thought to yourself “This ad is invasive, but I really like this one!”

Tanvas is here to change that!

Tanvas claims “it enables you to add a sense of touch to any touch display and truly differentiate the experience for your customers.” This  technology has been in works for more than a decade and the researchers now think it might be finally ready to see the light of day or feel the touch of your skin! You can read the in-depth research here.

This is another promising technology that will change the world of touchscreen that we have all loved to love now!

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The Full Power Of Wireless

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As of June 2016 the number of audio-visual devices connected to the internet was inching toward 13 billion according to a report by IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS). Now that figure must have come about by how many can be practically counted because they are connected. Bringing this into context, there are billions more that are not connected. More than half of all these devices are mobile, which means they run on some form of battery, and batteries need charging.

If you look around, you will most likely see at least two of such devices in sight. This brings to question how we keep these devices charged! There have been promise of such technologies around. From long lasting battery to air charging!

Another organisation, Energous, think they have cracked it one more time. Meet the the rightly named Wattup!

If Energous gets their way, cable chargers will be a thing of the past and you would never be worried about your devices running out of power!

We at thecomputerpotato can’t wait for this to be reality! It will most definitely change the world of mobile devices!

 

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Hang In The Skies

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There comes a time in history when everything changes! Think the invention of the telephone, the radio, or the discovery of electricity itself. One of those history changing events was the test of one of the heights of human advancement; the very first successful machine flight test!

Image taken of Jean Marie Le Bris from http://www.flyingmachines.org
Image taken of Jean Marie Le Bris from flyingmachines.org

But all that doesn’t seem to matter to us in 2016, as we advance we seem to forget and many new nifty smart devices become a part of us. We now have miniature devices we call drones that fly at our command and directives! This brings us to the subject of today’s article. We at the  Computer Potato think this concept we are about to introduce to you will make its mark in history if it kicks off!

Meet Ehang 184

Brilliant I hear you scream! Your own very personal Uber! A shame it can’t carry more than one person!

Unfortunately, at this stage it is merely a concept with its own prototype, but the idea is out there and with human enhancement and doggedness, you can be sure it will soon be reality!

If you would like to know more about it, please click here.

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This Tiny Device Purifies Water By Harnessing Solar Energy

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A joint research with the Nature Nanotechnology team at Stanford University in the USA claim to have created a tiny device that uses the sun’s power to purify water, in just 20 minutes! That is ground breaking technology!

A researcher holds a tiny device that uses sunlight to disinfect water.
The Tiny Miracle (Jin Xie/Stanford University)

When in water, this device absorbs sunlight in the way most solar devices do not, efficiently, and uses this to cause a reaction that kills bacteria. The test killed off 99.9% of the bacteria in 20 minutes! If you want to read more, please click here!

Boy is this good news for many parts of this blue globe we live in.  1.9 billion people, that is almost a third of the world, are said to drink water that is faecally contaminated according to WHO! Needless to say this technology will be seeing the light of day soon!

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MIT : This Machine Can Tell Your Mood Even If You Hide It

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Do you remember the polygraph? I am sure you have seen it in movies. You know the machine they hook the accused to test if they are lying or not? Yes, that one! It is a not fiction, it is a real machine, and it works most times. Now. have you ever wondered how it worked? So with all the connections to skin, chest and fingertips, it detects your pulse, breathing, e.t.c. Apparently if you lie, these readings change and the polygraph knows you are lying!

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Now a research team at the prestigious MIT in the USA have created another machine that can read your vitals without the need for wires. How does the machine do this? It bounces wireless radio signals off your body and reads them many times and continuously. It is claimed it can then use this information to accurately deduce your mood. It can do this because as humans, our vitals often translate to how we feel. E.g When you are aroused or scared your heartbeat increases rapidly.  You can read the technical babble here.

Much like the polygraph though, it can be easily fooled. If you are very good at keeping your body calm when scared or aroused, then the machine won’t be able to tell! But like any great innovation, we at The Computer Potato think this technology has a lot of  potential application and we wish to see more of its use in the nearest future! Think robots!

 

 

 

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The Power Of Trillions In A Car: A Step Closer To Full Self Driving Automobiles

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Unless you are disconnected from the entire earth due to some natural disaster that placed you on the moon itself, you would have heard cars are becoming autonomous, slowly but surely! Autonomous? That just means they can drive themselves in everyday language, nothing sinister.

How do they do this? They use cameras as eyes, sensors as skin to know if an object is near, GPS as direction, and a computer (processor) – that ties all these parts together – as brain. Now this is the tricky part. A car like that needs a computer fast enough to handle all the data it gets from all these different components in realtime, in other to be able to drive safely to its destination: a super computer with artificial intelligence!

The-Future

As always with new technology nowadays, tech giants are vying doggedly to get a piece of the action, and who is to blame them? Autonomous cars are looking, everyday, more like they are the future even if they don’t stick around for long.  So when Nvidia – a computer graphics processor giant- showcased their latest endeavour in Jan 2016, it sent a shock round the information technology world. Meet the Nvidia Drive PX 2!

Courtesy of www.engadget.com
Courtesy of www.engadget.com

Why is it news worthy you might say, it’s because of its speed. It can deal with 24 trillion computer instructions in a second. In everyday language, it is 150 times faster than your MACbook Pro or I7 Windows computer! So yeah, it is fast, for now! Not only is it a supercomputer in speed, it also runs on artificial intelligence, meaning it learns!

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Even though the Drive PX 2 is not the fastest processor in the world, it is one of those that are solely made for self driving cars, and within a year, we are sure to see faster processors for this very purpose. Another glimpse into our futures!

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A Must Have Water Bottle For Adventurers!

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This one is for the light-travelling, outdoor sport enthusiasts. We are talking about a water bottle! Why are we talking about a water bottle on a tech blog? Well, this water bottle is not just any bottle because it fills itself with water!

Do we need say more? The bottle fills itself with “drinking” water. The technology being used is not new to us at all, people have been condensing atmospheric water for generations, but this very innovation of putting it together like this is new.

Its efficiency depends heavily on the environment as you would think. The higher the humidity of the atmosphere, the more water it can make. It also uses solar power to begin the water making process, so you need a lot of sun.

TheFontus2

 

If this nifty gadget comes to fruition as claimed, then we cannot start to mention the benefits. Hence, kudos to the thinkers of this nifty gadget! We hope to see it in market soon enough

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Future of Transport?

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China has brought the world many things for eons. A good example is paper money we all love now! Hence, when china comes out with something pioneering, we needn’t be surprised! You might have seen a video a while back of a concept bus that straddles traffic to beat the traffic hold up! We all thought it was a brilliant idea and went on to watch a surprised cat on youtube!

Well you might need to recollect that memory and even live it now, because it is a brilliant idea that has come to reality. If it works out, we all might have to adopt it everyday to commute. Why? Because it is quintessentially creative innovation. You don’t have to worry about traffic jams caused by cars. See below!

If that video hasn’t convinced you of the benefits of it, then no amount of words can. We at thecomputerpotato can’t wait to see these buses everywhere! Why? We know it will ease transport for both public transport users and private cars. If you want another reason, they are electric powered, which means no poisonous fumes from operating them, another step to save our earth.

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EyeForcer Wants To Save Our Spine!

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We all have that neck pain every now and then and we  know what caused it too, but do not want to admit to ourselves. Yes, our mobile devices do cause us neck pains. It is so bad that it is now known as a condition called Gameboy Disease, Gameboy Back, or also Tech Neck!

It was once a condition for the adults! But more and more kids are said to visit the doctors for this very condition. Who is to blame anyone, that candycrush game is captivating, both to adults and children alike, and we are all guilty of slouching to enjoy it better.

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Eyeforcer wants to change that. It has made a smart glasses frame without any lenses that  monitors the head’s position to make sure you or your kids are not slouching. If it detects the slouch multiple times, it quits whatever you are doing. See below

We need more of ideas like this to help us stay focused, and literally in shape in this world were gadgets are now part of everyday life!