Gadzooki

Bridge Universal Remote Being Developed

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One of the banes of owning a lot of tech devices for your home entertainment system is not the space that it occupies – true gadget geeks always find a way of fitting equipment into a room – but the growing number of remotes that one has to contend with. You’ve got remotes for your TV, BD player, receiver, media player, various legacy electronics. You get the idea.

The best way to really solve the remote control problem is to be able to use just one remote to control all of the equipment you have. But a universal remote does not usually perform as advertised. The usual universal remote will always have some feature lacking or will not perform as advertised. Even those expensive universal remotes that look like a daunting piece of future tech do stumble during real world applications. [Read more…]

Sony to develop “subtitle” glasses

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Watching movies has increasingly become accessible to the deaf because of subtitling. It is now a standard feature in DVDs and blurays and even downloadable video content has the option of getting subtitles either as a built in feature or downloading a separate subtitle file. But subtitling is not just within the realm of digital media. There are many theaters now that offer a subtitling service for those who need it.

The current system revolves around the use of a glass screen that is placed in front of the person, the glass then reflects text from a pixel board that is mounted at the back of the theater. This is an effective way of providing subtitles in theaters to those who need it but the difficulty of this solution is that those who want to get subtitles will have to seat themselves in a specific area in the theater to make sure that they get to see the subtitles.

Sony realized the limitation of this problem and has developed a new technology to provide subtitles to people who need them. The prototype are a pair of glasses that a person can wear when watching a #D movie. But the technology here is far different. The glasses allow for the subtitles to be projected on to the glass you are wearing, so this means the viewer can sit anywhere he wants to and still get to see the subtitles. The subs appear like it is part of the screen, which is a cool effect. Sony is still developing the glasses but expect the final product to look slimmer and svelte.

The MIT SOFT Rocker

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Soft-Rockers
Rocking chairs have never gone out of fashion, although one almost always thinks of their grandma when these comfy chairs are mentioned. Then again, you see all sorts of rocking chairs these days, and many of them your grandma would never think of buying!

Now a group of geniuses from MIT have created the rocking chair of the future. Dubbed the MIT SOFT Rocker, it is more than your ordinary rocking chair. It can function as an outdoor lounge, and it can even recharge your plethora of gadgets!

The best thing about the SOFT Rocker is that it does not need to be plugged in to provide you the juice that you need. It has a built-in array of solar panels at the top, which will soak up all of the sun’s rays. At the end of the day, you will have your own light and still be able to charge whatever device you have that is running low on power.

More than using the sun’s rays to power up, the SOFT Rocker also makes use of kinetic movement. As you shift and change your position, this piece of furniture also takes your movements into consideration by “using the human power of balance to create an interactive 1.5 axis 35 watt solar tracking system.” The Rocker does this courtesy of an “interactive real time energy feedback loop.”

The SOFT Rocker has a 12 ampere-hour battery that stores the charge that it collects from the sun, and you can charge devices via USB connection. The furniture is made of soft wood panels as well as a robotic arm.

I can already imagine having one of these in the balcony (if it fits), soaking in the warm tropical sun, and traveling the world via the Internet. Or maybe reading a book while listening to music coming from the iPod. No matter which I angle I look, this Rocker seems to be the perfect piece of outdoor furniture. Unless you live in Antartica.

Seriously, it really is a genius design, something which will probably have a place in the trendiest of lawns. And while there are no details as to the production date, pricing, and release, it looks like this concept is actually going to be more than a concept.

Via ARTS AT MIT