Top TechTop Tech #14: The blind can read, and flying fake bug eyes
Promising products and interesting innovations
Today’s Top Tech — it’s an all-optics edition:
• Spherical lenses yield wide-angle 3D display
• Bug-like electronic eye stabilizes flying robot
• Blind can read with finger-camera
Spherical lenses yield wide-angle 3D display
No one likes to wear glasses to see 3D imagery, but existing glass-free displays often have very narrow viewing angles. A new method might change that.
Microsphere lenses project images to different spatial directions. Their larger curvature compared to planar lenses increases the viewing angle, PhysOrg reports.
Researchers in China have built a prototype that increases the viewing angle from 20-30° to 32°, with a theoretical viewing angle of up to 90°.
Bug-like electronic eye stabilizes flying robot
Well, that’s about the creepiest headline here so far…
The BeeRotor robot has an artificial eye designed after those in insects. Thanks to the imaging capability, it’s the first robot able to steadily fly over uneven terrain without an accelerometer, Kurzweil AI reports.
“Aircraft, ships, and spacecraft currently use a complex inertial navigation system based on accelerometers and gyroscopes to continuously calculate position, orientation, and velocity without the need for external references (known as dead reckoning),” the article says. The researchers “decided to create simpler system, inspired by winged insects.”
Blind can read with finger-camera
Here’s an obvious-in-retrospect good idea: a camera on a fingertip that reads out loud to the blind.
Researchers at the MIT Media Lab built a prototype of a finger-mounted device that converts written text into audio for visually impaired users, PhysOrg reports. The device also provides feedback that guides the user’s finger along a line of text.
