Aerial 3D by Burton Using lasers to excite nitrogen and oxygen in the air, the Aerial 3D system produces natural 3-D images in space without using a screen.
It's a kind of validation when our past visions of the future and the present collide, reminding us that things we thought were possible back then actually were within reach. Take, for example, Tokyo-based Burton's Aerial 3D technology. The company claims it's the first 3D tech that casts three-dimensional objects in mid-air without using any kind of screen. It recalls that scene in Star Wars where the crustacean-faced guy is planning the rebel battleplan around his big holographic table. And it's here today.
Kernighan and Ritchie, Second Edition
This morning the news came over the internet: Dennis Ritchie has died. Dr. Ritchie doesn't have the mainstream adoring following of Steve Jobs, but he can take considerably more credit for the creation, and even the aesthetics, of the computer world we live in. It's almost impossible to find a personal computing product or paradigm that doesn't owe a direct debt to Ritchie.
Stanford's Braille Writer for Touchscreen Tablets Place your fingers on the screen, and the buttons find the fingers rather than the other way around.
IMAGE BY
Stanford
Typing in Braille is tricky, requiring clunky and expensive dedicated devices--some costing as much as US$6,000--with limited functionality beyond their primary design purpose. But a team of researchers at Stanford University in California, including an undergrad on loan from New Mexico State University, have created a touchscreen interface that brings the ability to write in Braille to tablet PCs.
Chip for Quantum Computing The two black squares are the qubits, or processor; the center meandering line is the quantum bus; and the lateral meandering lines are the quantum memory.
IMAGE BY
Erik Lucero
Researchers on two continents are reporting two big breakthroughs in quantum computing today - a quantum system built on the familiar von Neumann processor-memory architecture, and a working digital quantum simulator built on a quantum-computer platform. Although these developments are still constrained to the lab, they're yet another sign that a quantum leap in computing may be just around the corner.