Gadgets

Cambodian children grow up in a nation where millions of landmines left by decades of civil war have continued to cripple and kill hundreds of people each year. Now they could get a life-saving lesson from a video game developed by Michigan State University researchers.

In the game, players navigate photos of Cambodian jungle landscapes in search of photos for several adorable cartoon pets -- no cartoon landmine characters here. The point of the maze-like game is to train players and embed warning signals about landmines in their minds.

Yes: this is, in fact, the largest video-game peripheral you've ever seen. The VirtuSphere is a new interface that captures movements in 360 degrees, and translates them into a video game. The gang over at Joystiq first caught wind of the human hamster ball in '06, but got to see it in the flesh just this week.

More than a year after the first consumer 3-D-ready HDTVs were demoed at CES, the next generation of sets are going on sale this week. But, aside from the new TVs, glasses, and Blu-ray players, the question of content remains. While there are already brand partnerships with networks like Discovery and ESPN, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Chalk up another technological victory for Big Brother. Japanese phone maker KDDI has developed a mobile phone that analyzes users' movements, beaming that information back to the corporate office/Party headquarters/the Ministry of Love for review. Specialized software can identify several distinct movements, including walking, stair-climbing, and even cleaning. On-the-job slackers, the jig is up.

While the launch of Apple’s iPad has been delayed until April, the buzz is growing for a new device being developed by Microsoft: The Courier. The existence of the Courier tablet has been rumoured since last September, but the release of a teaser video seems very aptly placed to steal the iPad’s thunder.

Leave it to Japanese designers to turn technology into something both stylish and functional -- and then keep it all to themselves. The SolarFold and SolarFan portable solar chargers unfold into surface-area-utilizing solar collectors when needed, supplying enough power to make a three-minute iPhone call after just ten minutes in the sun.

Good news for anyone out there straining to read this text: Pixel Qi plans to ship its 3Qi technology in an easy-to-install DIY kit sometime toward the end of the second quarter of this year.

Pixel Qi’s dual-mode 3Qi displays function as both full-color LCD monitors and e-ink-like, low-power black and white displays, giving laptops and netbooks the ability to toggle between vibrant, video-playing LCD color and an energy-efficient, eye-strain-saving e-reader mode.

Following the success of Olympus and Panasonic’s respective lines of mirrorless DSLR cameras, Sony has announced at the PMA conference in the US that they intend to release one of their own this year. That is, unlike the usual design of the average Canon or Nikon camera, these cameras allow interchangeable lenses without the hassle of optical viewfinders or mirror boxes.

The cool thing about economies of scale, and especially about cutting-edge gadgetry, is that generally the price goes down over time (remember the $500 iPhone?). But that may not be the case for ever-more-popular LED-backlit LCD TVs this year, or for LED light bulbs for that matter. Accompanying the surge of LED use in electronics, a shortage of light emitting diodes could put upward pressure on prices as device makers cut deals to get their hands on the essential little components.

The future of touchscreen interfaces is: you? A project between a Carnegie Mellon researcher and a couple of creative thinkers over at Microsoft Research have created Skinput, a Bluetooth-enabled device that allows you to use your own skin as a peripheral input device for devices like cell phones, MP3 players or gaming consoles.

Today Apple made it abundantly clear that they have noticed all those iPhone-esque smartphones, and filed a patent-infringement suit against HTC claiming the company has cribbed 20 of their iPhone-related technologies in their own Android and Windows Mobile phones.

Today was supposed to be a great day for the Web. As of March 1, 2010, Google will no longer support Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 browser—a decade-old dinosaur engineered to navigate the Web as it existed in the year 2000. Why would this be cause for celebration? Because IE6 is barely capable of navigating the modern Web and a total nightmare to build sites, services and applications for.

But ten years after its release, it’s still being used by an estimated 20% of surfers. And while Google’s move is one in the right direction, I’m not breaking out the whiskey and noisemakers for IE6's funereal wake quite yet. Sadly, IE6 isn’t going away for good anytime soon.

Do you think your connection speed is fast? Do you tout your torrent bit rate? Perhaps your rig is swift, but there's no reason it couldn't be many times faster. The only thing standing in the way is some creative materials science, and researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology may have just found the key to converting everything from individual computers to data networks into blazing-fast, all-optical transmission devices.

The Google Goggles Android app can already copy business cards directly into the address book and provide augmented reality overlays for restaurants. But now, Google has unveiled a prototype of a real-time optical character recognition system, providing the menu translation we Chinese-food-obsessed gwailo have been craving.

High-capacity SD cards are the black holes of digital photo libraries. Eight gigs of storage means months and months of card filling, and (about) zero card emptying. In fact, we've become so used to SD cards that we're now finding ways for our physical prints (yes, people still have those) to live in one too.