Super-Spy Privacy Monitor Lets You Browse in Total Secrecy. It’s pretty safe to say that if you use a computer connected to the Internet, there have been at least a few times when you’ve been browsing on a page you’d rather the people around you didn’t see. Instructables user Dimovi turned an old LCD monitor into a “privacy monitor” that looks like a blank white screen to everyone except the user. Brilliant! The process to make your own involves taking the monitor apart and removing the polarized film. This film is the magical ingredient since it allows only certain light waves to pass through and be seen. Removing it from the monitor and attaching it instead to some old sunglasses frames is the trick behind this particular hack.
This clever trick lets you browse in complete privacy since your monitor will always look blank to anyone not wearing the magic glasses. Of course, that means you can’t share the latest adorable cat video on YouTube with whoever happens to be in the room at the time, but it’s a small price to pay for absolute privacy. Hook Line + ‘Stinguisher: Awesome DIY Grappling Hook Gun.
Plenty of DIY projects can help you pass some time and enhance your tinkering skills, but this one can actually help fulfill your geeky dream of being a little more like Batman. A super-inventive MIT student put together a fire extinguisher, some pipes and hoses and a Nerf gun to make a sweet grappling hook gun that kind of makes us want to run out to Home Depot right now. The video displays just how much power this cool little hook shooter is packing. The guy behind the project says it’s not at all hard to build, which is easy to say for someone who got into MIT – but as long as you know how to solder and have basic building skills you should be able to throw together one of your own thanks to the awesome Instructables he put together. Just don’t shoot your eye out, Batman. High-Tech Silencer: Painless Mic Gun Shushes the Wordy. While you may get the urge to pull out a gun every time that loudmouth in your office starts rambling, common courtesy and a number of laws suggest that’s not the right way to go about regaining your peace.
A team of researchers has developed a silencing gun called the SpeechJammer that serves to shut people up with no pain or risk to you or them. The SpeechJammer consists of a directional microphone, a distance sensor, and a directional speaker that all work together to provide you with blissful silence. You point the device at the offending jibber-jabberer and the mic records his speech. After a delay of a fraction of a second, the directional speaker plays the target’s words right back at him. Thanks to the way the human brain processes its own speech, this nearly-instant but slightly offset playback serves to trip up the speaker.
Social X-Ray Specs Take the Awkward Out Of Conversations. Nonverbal communication is said to make up much more of any conversation than the actual words being spoken. But for people who have trouble reading facial expressions it can be extremely difficult to tell if the person they are talking to is interested in what they are saying. Researchers from the University of Cambridge, UK, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing glasses that can read facial cues and let the speaker know what the listener is really thinking about the conversation. Using glasses embedded with a tiny camera about the size of a single grain of rice, the system analyzes 24 points on the listener’s face to analyze their reactions to the speaker’s words. As the speaker is talking, a traffic light-type signal is displayed. The Eyes Have It: LED Lenses Make Cool Heads-Up Display. Watching TV or surfing the internet might be easier and more convenient than ever right now, but they still require having some kind of device in front of you.
That’s not very futuristic, now is it? Researchers at the University of Washington have worked out a way to implant teeny-tiny LEDs in contact lenses so we can wear heads-up displays absolutely everywhere. According to the team, the display wouldn’t require a shift in the depth of focus, and when it’s switched off it would be completely unnoticeable. There are still lots of questions to be answered about this concept, like how it will be powered and where the actual electronics will go. It would be interesting to integrate an eyeball-based heads-up display like this with all of our existing electronics. Info Overload? ASUS’ Three-Part Plan to Virtual Freedom.
Information overload is a very real problem for many modern humans. The problem is only increased by our mobile computing devices, smartphones and other gadgets that let us stay in touch and share information no matter where we are. ASUS thinks their Waveface system is the solution to the problem. The system gives you smarter updates, bringing you only the information that’s relevant to you at that moment through an intelligent network of devices.
When you’re on the go, you’d wear the stylish wristwatch-type smartphone seen above. Your personal network would realize that you’re mobile and would only push information to you that you need right then. But when you’re at home, the connected HDTV would give you the whole picture: your documents, communications, schedule and whatever else you need. The above video, recorded at the ASUS event inside CES 2010, shows how the system works. Look Closer: $10 DIY Microscope Uses Cell Phone Camera. We all know how handy a cell phone can be when we’re stranded on the side of the road or late for a meeting. And far from just making phone calls, cell phones let us take pictures, send text messages, and even watch movies. But now a UCLA engineer has come up with an entirely new way to use cell phones. He took a regular cell phone, around $10 worth of off-the-shelf parts, and software that he wrote himself to make the world’s first cell phone microscope.
He hopes it can be used in remote locations to diagnose diseases when getting to a hospital for tests just isn’t possible. Aydogan Ozcan, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at UCLA, has formed a company called Microskia to develop and market the technology. The concept could be used with cell phones with or without cameras; for those with cameras, a slide containing a blood sample would be placed over the camera’s sensor. Info at Your Fingertips? Futuristic Cybernetic Reading. Whether you’re reading in your native language or learning a foreign language, there are plenty of times when a little extra help would be welcome.
What if you run across a word that you just don’t know the meaning of? Or what if you know what it means and how to use it, but aren’t sure how to pronounce it? Usually you’d either dig out the dictionary, turn to Wikipedia, or try to find an audio file online that would tell you how to pronounce the mystery word. But stopping to do any of those things can break the rhythm of your reading and cause you to lose concentration. Touch Hear, a futuristic concept from the National University of Singapore, would allow users to simply touch a printed word to hear its meaning and pronunciation whispered in their ears. Universal Power: Wristlet Gives Gadgets Emergency Juice. True geeks are never without a holster full of gadgets, but this lifestyle begins to get problematic when away from power sources for long periods of time. ThinkGeek offers a solution with this outstanding little device that gives you power no matter where you are. The Universal Gadget Wrist Charger powers any device that is compatible with mini USB.
Before you leave home, you charge up the charger’s battery and strap it onto your wrist. And when you’re out taking care of business (or waiting in line for tickets to the newest nerd flick) and your iPod, phone or handheld game starts losing juice, you’ve got a backup power source right there. The amount of power that can be pumped from your wrist battery to your flailing gadget varies from one gadget to the next. It comes with all kinds of connectors to provide emergency power for a variety of electronics. Power to the People: Whole-Body Gadget Charging System.
Whether running errands or running a marathon, our body movements can create a lot of energy every day – energy that is basically wasted since we tend not to capture and use it. The Tusk concept would harness the energy of the human body and use it to charge mobile gadgets. The clever system uses rotary dynamos, rectifiers and linear regulators to create electricity from the repetitive movements of its wearer.
The power created by an active person can power a phone, iPod or whatever else needs a topping up. It’s doubtful that the device, if it were ever to hit the market, would be powerful enough to charge a phone or other mobile device completely using just the wearer’s regular daily movement. But if you’re one of those people who can’t work out without music and never seem to remember to charge your iPod, it could be an insanely useful tool for making use of all of that human-generated power. A Sunny Concept: Clothesline Solar Power Collectors. We all know the benefits of hanging our laundry out to dry: it saves money and energy over using a tumble dryer, and your clothes and linens smell great when you pull them inside.
Seeing laundry hanging outside on clotheslines gave designer Jinsic Kim another idea for saving energy: hanging small solar panels outside to soak up the sun. The idea behind the Sunbox concept is that your home appliances probably won’t be in use while you aren’t home, so there’s plenty of time to charge the solar collectors during the day while you’re off at work. When you come home, you simply grab them from the clothesline, plug them into whatever appliances you need, and enjoy your clean solar power. While the concept is lovely and poetic, sadly it’s not too realistic. Based on the designer’s renderings, the Sunbox is very small; a solar panel that size would be able to provide only an extremely small amount of power to any electric device. Power to the People: Camping Pot Cooks Up Electricity.
If you’ve ever seen the show Doomsday Preppers, you know that there are some pretty bizarre ideas out there for producing off-the-grid power. This idea isn’t marketed to preppers, but it will no doubt appeal to them as well as to campers and people who want to provide simple power to folks in developing parts of the world. The PowerPot is a brilliant product that makes use of energy that is ordinarily wasted during cooking. It’s a regular cooking pot, but with one important difference: a small thermoelectric generator attached to the bottom that produces electricity to charge your USB gadgets. It can be used over a fire, on a grill, or even on top of a stove; while your rabbit stew or ranch-style beans are heating up, your electronic gadgets will be charging. A high-temperature, flame-resistant cord connects your gadgets to the pot safely, even when the pot is on an open fire. The PowerPot comes in 5W, 10W and 15W sizes, and fundraising is ongoing on Kickstarter.
Planet Power: Chemical Reaction Makes Clean Electricity. No matter how energy-efficient your appliances are, there is always at least a little guilt associated with using electricity for people who are environmentally conscious. Somewhere down the line, the chances are that the electricity powering those appliances came from a planet-harming source. This interesting concept product from designer Jun Hyuck Choi, Jooyeon Kim and Sungi Kim would take away the guilt and provide clean power for up to three devices at a time. The Eco Power Strip works on the concept of electrolysis: two liquids combine to create electricity. The small devices certainly wouldn’t be powerful enough to provide juice for a washer and dryer, but they could provide enough power to charge a mobile phone or MP3 player. We aren’t likely to see this concept replacing house outlet power anytime soon, mostly because of its relatively low power output.
Moving Pictures: Wearable Camera Documents Life Events. Cell phones have taken the place of pocket-size cameras for a majority of the population, but design group Artefact wondered what it would take to get a teenager to go back to carrying a separate camera. They came up with Meme, a wearable camera with an integrated greyscale screen and Bluetooth connectivity. The 8 megapixel camera is aimed at teens and young adults, a demographic that typically prefers to use the latest and greatest technology.
It’s a little bigger than an iPod Nano and can be work around the neck on a cord or chain of the user’s choice, or worn on the clothing with a pin or clip. A single large button on the top of the device controls the shutter. A single push of the button activates the shutter to take a single picture. A double-push turns on auto-capture mode, snapping pics of everything that happens to document a party, game, or other occasion. Turn the Meme around and it displays the previously-captured pictures on a small screen.
Thumbs Up: Gesture-Controlled Camera is Nearly Invisible. With electronic components shrinking all the time, it’s a little surprising that we haven’t yet started embedding gadgets like mobile phones right into our bodies. The Air Clicker camera concept does the next best thing by taking away all but the most essential elements of a digital camera and turning those elements into tiny wearable components, rendering the camera virtually invisible. Designed by Yeon Su Kim, the Air Clicker consists of a miniature lens which is worn on the thumb and a barely-there shutter button that attaches to the forefinger. To take a picture, the user simply makes a gesture in the air as though she is framing a photo.
Then by tensing the index finger as though pressing down on a shutter button, the user activates the camera to capture a picture. The picture is sent to a Bluetooth-connected mobile phone, which acts as an extension of the camera assembly. Pics in the Blink of an Eye: Iris-Reading Biometric Camera. Rolling Snail Shell Shelter is a Wheely Tiny Portable Home. Human-Powered ‘Rolling Home’ Rotates as You Run Around. Bodily-Fueled Lamp’s Energy Comes at the Cost of Blood. Green Light: CO2 + Water Power ‘Algae Energy’ Eco Lamp.