Top TechTop Tech #74: See-thru mirrors, smart ovens, water-based computing
Highlighting interesting or important innovations with long-term promise.
By Paul Worthington
Today’s Top Tech:
• Samsung sees thru mirror display
• Smart oven cooks for you
• Computer operates on water droplets
Samsung sees thru mirror display
Saying it’s “a dazzling state-of-the-art showcase for personalized shopping and informational browsing,” Samsung Display claims it’s developed the first OLED display panels that are both mirrored and transparent.
Coupled with Intel’s Real Sense consumer-grade 3D cameras, the company says, yields “a visually compelling, interactive closet or “self-modeling” wardrobe that can enable consumers to virtually “see” clothes or other retail items from an extremely realistic, customized perspective… a “virtual fitting room.”
The Mirror Display “may also replace home mirrors in the future, providing digital information services to sophisticated consumers in the same space where they now just have a traditional mirror,” Samsung adds, with its more than 75 percent reflectance level.
Smart oven cooks for you
“A computer-based oven that thinks like a chef,” the June is
billed as the first
“Intelligent Oven.”
Bet you didn’t know you needed one, right?
“Ready to become a better cook?” the company asks. “The June Intelligent Oven lets you cook with more precision and efficiency than ever before. June is engineered for precision heating. Like cruise control on your car, June continually calculates the power needed to maintain a constant temperature. Food cooks faster while using less energy than traditional ovens. And a core temperature probe alerts you the moment your food is cooked to perfection.”
It has a quad-core processor, 5-Inch touchscreen, HD camera, WiFi connectivity, and digital scale.
What’s the price for perfect food? About $3k.
There’s more information here.
Computer operates on water droplets
That’s some smart water: Engineers at Stanford University developed a computer that operates on droplets.
The synchronous computer works with “the unique physics of moving water droplets.”
Their goal is to design a new class of computers that can precisely control and manipulate physical matter, Stanford says here. “The computer is nearly a decade in the making, and… combines expertise in manipulating droplet fluid dynamics with a fundamental element of computer science – an operating clock.”
However, it won’t be replacing your PC any time soon. “Because of its universal nature, the droplet computer can theoretically perform any operation that a conventional electronic computer can crunch, although at significantly slower rates,” they add.
Here’s a video interview with the developers that *kind of* clears up why they’re doing this…
“We already have digital computers to process information. Our goal is not to compete with electronic computers or to operate word processors on this. Our goal is to build a completely new class of computers that can precisely control and manipulate physical matter.”
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