Top Tech

Top Tech #150: 2D Drawing Animated Into 3D; Carbon Nanotube Chips; Gold Supercapacitors; Radio Wave Electricity

Posted October 6th, 2015 @ 2:37pm

Important innovations in science and technology

By Paul Worthington

Hey, it’s #150, and today I turn 50!
As a birthday treat, I’ll be taking time off from this column this week to start writing fiction instead of science fact, and also later this month for a vacation trip.

Please post comments here in the meantime regarding what you see that I should cover when I return.

Monday’s Top Tech:

• More exciting coloring books via 3D

• Chips made from carbon nanotubes

• Gold yields tiny supercapacitors

• Electricity from radio waves

More exciting coloring books via 3D

A new technique can take a colored drawing and turn it into an animated figure, complete with textures such as colored pencil from the original art.

The Disney Research project creates 3D objects from 2D drawings, and can even wrap the texture around the sides of the object that were not originally illustrated. It includes “a deformable surface tracking method designed for colored drawings that uses a new outlier rejection algorithm for real-time tracking and surface deformation recovery,” Disney reports.

“Coloring books capture the imagination of children and provide them with one of their earliest opportunities for creative expression,” the researchers say. “However, given the proliferation and popularity of digital devices, real-world activities like coloring can seem unexciting, and children become less engaged in them. Augmented reality holds unique potential to impact this situation by providing a bridge between real-world activities and digital enhancements… We present an augmented reality coloring book App in which children color characters in a printed coloring book and inspect their work using a mobile device. The drawing is detected and tracked, and the video stream is augmented with an animated 3D version of the character that is textured according to the child’s coloring.”

Here is a video demo.

Here is the research summary.

Chips made from carbon nanotubes

IBM claims significant progress in its work on carbon nanotube computer chips, connecting nanotubes in a microprocessor that conduct electricity when in their “on” state, CNet reports, by bonding each end of a nanotube to the metal molybdenum.

IBM is spending $3 billion to build chips using a foundation of carbon nanotubes, “a lattice of carbon atoms rolled into a cylindrical shape. Each one is about 10 billionths of a meter wide – about 10,000 times thinner than a human hair,” CNet adds.

Here is the full article.

Gold yields tiny super capacitors

A new micro-supercapacitor has the same energy density of a modern lithium-ion battery, Engadget reports.

Scientists in Canada and France developed a 3D electrode built from porous gold, “vastly increasing the available surface area.”

The result: energy density that exceeds all systems available to date.

“Micro-supercapacitors are a promising alternative to micro-batteries because of their high power and long lifetime,” the researchers in Toulouse and Quebec note in their announcement. “They have been in development for about a decade but until now they have stored considerably less energy than micro-batteries, which has limited their application.”

New batteries could be used in wearables, microcircuits and autonomous sensor networks.

Here is the full article.

Here is the researchers’ announcement.

Electricity from radio waves

Can electricity be “harvested” from common radio waves? A team in London claims they’ve done just that.

The Freevolt is billed “a revolutionary energy harvesting technology that turns ambient radio frequency waves into usable electricity to charge low power electronic devices… The Freevolt harvester comprises a multi-band antenna and rectifier, which is capable of absorbing energy from multiple RF bands at almost any orientation.”

The patented technology was developed by a team from Drayson Technologies and Imperial College London. It’s now commercially available for license. It’s already being used in the CleanSpace Tag air sensor, which is available now in the UK.

Here is the announcement.

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