Top TechTop Tech #43: Smartphone Eye Exams, Google Projects, Planting Hydrogen
Promising products and interesting innovations
By Paul Worthington
Today’s Top Tech:
• Eye Exam via Smartphone
• Google projects displays everywhere
• Hydrogen directly from plants
Eye Exam via Smartphone
An optometrist service in New York will do its initial diagnosis through your smartphone.
Blink already offered in-home exams — but now it won’t even have to send its experts out of the office.
“Our optometrists are among the best in their field,” the company says. “They remotely review every test we perform, taking into account your lifestyle, medical history and test results for a holistic picture of your vision needs.”
The company does not sell eyeglasses: it provides a new prescription and measurements, with which “you can buy glasses anywhere.”
“Our innovative tools represent a revolutionary leap in accessibility to vision care,” Blink says. The company behind Blink is EyeNetra, “founded to develop and commercialize current and future MIT Media Lab research on methods to use smartphones to deliver personalized vision correction to the masses.”
Technology Review reports the smartphone eye-exam tool is $75. It “takes the place of an autorefractor for measuring your level of focusing error. The device uses a Blink app shown on the smartphone’s display to shine red and green beams of light at your eyes. You line up these beams with a dial and the app figures out your refractive error by measuring the difference between where the beams are on the screen and how much you adjust them.”
Google projects displays everywhere
A wall covered with photo-reactive paint could display any image — and unlike typical projections, the wall would continue to show the image even after the laser that “painted” it was turned off.
Google patented a projection system that could “essentially turn any wall in a house into a massive e-book screen” Quartz reports.
The system could even reach video frame rates.
Part of the patent reads: “…the photo-active paint is one of a photo-luminescent material that emits visible spectrum light in response to electromagnetic stimulation or a photochromatic material that changes light absorption properties in response to the electromagnetic stimulation, and wherein the theme image displayed on the photo-active paint persists for a period of time even when an obstruction moves into a path between the spatial electromagnetic modulator and the theme image displayed on photo-active paint.”
Hydrogen directly from plants
A professor at Virginia Tech developed an enzymatic method to break complex sugars into their component parts, without fermentation — yielding hydrogen fuel.
Technology Review reports the process worked on corn stover, “the most abundant agricultural waste product in the United States,” and produces three times more hydrogen per unit of sugar than conventional fermentation methods.
The research could “pave the way for hydrogen refueling stations that rely on agricultural waste… Transportation accounts for roughly a quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions,” the report adds.
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