HP's new accelerometer changes how people interact with the environment

You've probably heard of or even owned a computer that automatically turns off its hard drive when it senses shock or heavy vibrations. That is an example of sensitive human-machine intimacy. Another example I like is tilting the iPhone to use it as the driving bar for my racing games. Well, that nifty human-to-computer interaction is about to go to whole new level.
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Methanol fuel cells for gadgets forge forward

Direct Methanol Fuel Cell has licensed a patent from CalTech to build methanol-based gadget chargers, a week after Toshiba took the wraps off its own portable fuel cell.

The patent will allow Direct Methanol Fuel Cell to design smaller portable charging packages for devices, such as mobile phones, said Viaspace, the parent company of Direct Methanol Fuel Cell. The company said Monday it has a partnership with Samsung and others to commercialize methanol fuel cartridges.

A direct methanol fuel cell converts the liquid fuel methanol into electricity through a chemical reaction between oxygen and methanol. It's a technology that a number of electronics companies are looking at to extend the life of power-hungry devices, such as laptops and mobile phones.
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Tele Scouter projects translations to your eye

If Japan-based NEC has its way, people who act as language translators could one day be replaced with head-mounted displays that project translations onto a retinal display. Come again?

The Tele Scouter system is composed of an eyepiece with a front-mounted camera and a mic that picks up conversations and sends the data to a small computer worn on the user's waist.

The computer then transmits information to a remote server, which does the heavy processing work converting the foreign speech to text, translating it, and wirelessly sending it back to the tiny eye display for viewing. That seems like a whole lot of work to get to, "he said, 'Welcome to my country!'", but we'll roll with the idea for now.

Truth is we could use a translator to help us make complete sense of the English on NEC's product page, but we do know the TeleScouter isn't ready to show up at the UN just yet (or maybe ever).
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Photoelastic touch, the next level of multitouch?

Hard to believe that before Apple made multitouch cool, the most we ever "touched" our PC was touch typing. Now, here's photoelastic touch, a more tactile form of interaction that enters into the Minority Report realm (still one of the coolest future tech shows) by not even touching the screen. Japanese researchers used a face mask comprising see-through gel as a haptic interface, allowing the user to press, pinch or touch the transparent mold to control the computer. In this case, the actions would prompt a furrowed eye brow or eye movement.

Of course, there's nothing like watching all this in action. So catch the video coming right after.
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Bridgestone unveils flexible e-book reader prototype

When not making tires, Bridgestone is working on e-book readers so flexible they'd probably survive being driven over. They've even got a prototype ready for testing, but no plans to commercialize the slender and bendy device at this point.

The reader (press release in Japanese) is definitely slender, as it's almost half as thin as a Kindle 2. It's said that it can be "bent to some extent since the circuit board and the electronic paper are flexible," but no one is saying how much "to some extent" is. No matter. While the lack of too many details about it or any plans for a commercial product put a damper on Bridgestone's device, the good news is that other companies might adapt the technology in their products.
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