Although I am not a friend of omnipresent technology, I must admit these are faszinating applications for future technology. Read more at the Wear ur World project website

Wired quotes Pattie Maes, the project manager of Wear ur World:

In the tactile world, we use our five senses to take in information about our environment and respond to it [...]. But a lot of the information that helps us understand and respond to the world doesn’t come from these senses. Instead, it comes from computers and the internet. Maes’ goal is to harness computers to feed us information in an organic fashion, like our existing senses.

This might be right. But in my opinion, the organic fashion Mae is aiming at will rather leed to excessive Nerdism. Early adopters and grown-up-childs will refer to this technology as gadgets and will use it to impress their surrounding – just like we they do today with iPhones and Netbooks.

That’s OK with me. I just want the ePaper thingy because that’s real hot shit.
via Timo Heuer.

Quoting the engineering team from Boston Dynamics:

It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog’s legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule.

Second thought: US Army wants one of those. Right, the United States Department of Defense resp. the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is founder of the BigDog Research Program; while Boston Dynamics is the engineering company that specializes in robotics and human simulation.
They began as a spinoff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where Marc Raibert and his colleagues first developed robots that run and maneuver like animals.

Question: Who holds the intellectual property? Engineers or military? I simply hope that civil usage of these walking robots will be first.

Ein Material, das sich fast wie Flüssigkeit verformen lässt, sich aber seiner ursprünglichen Form erinnert. Wozu braucht man es? bestimmt macht es Sinn im Flugzeugbau oder der Textilindustrie. Ganz bestimmt. Und das kann eben nur Nano, weil keiner weiss, wie es geht.

In Japan kosten die läppischen Wirbellosen nur etwa 2,20 Euro. Wer japanisch spricht, findet vielleicht auf der Herstellerseite heraus, aus welchem Teufelszeug sie gegossen wurden: lokuloku.com

via ODK