Posts tagged technology
iPhone Technical Specifications
Mar 23rd
iPhone screen size is: 480-by-320-pixel resolution at 163 ppi
Find all technical specifications here.
Zeo : Personal Sleep Coach
Mar 22nd
Step 1: Wear the Zeo Headband
You begin by wearing the Zeo Headband each night. The headband uses our patent-pending SoftWave™ sensor technology to accurately and safely measure your unique sleep patterns through the electrical signals naturally produced by the brain. As you pass through different levels of sleep – lighter to deeper and back again – the Zeo Headband tracks how you are sleeping. Find out more about the headband.
Step 2: Review Your Sleep Data on the Bedside Display
The Zeo Bedside Display puts last night’s sleep data at your fingertips and will store up to two weeks of data for easy viewing. When you wake up, it gives you a personal sleep score – your ZQ – and shows a graph of your Light, Deep and REM sleep over the course of the night. The bedside display will also present you with information about last night’s sleep and how it compares to previous nights. The optional SmartWake™ alarm feature will look for a “natural awakening point” based on your sleep patterns to decrease the grogginess associated with waking from Deep sleep. When SmartWake is selected, Zeo will find a time to wake you within a half-hour of your set time, never later. The result should be a slightly easier way to wake up. Learn more.
Step 3: Upload and View Your Sleep Data
Your personal sleep discovery doesn’t stop with the bedside display! The Zeo Bedside Display allows you to store your sleep information on an SD memory card (like the memory cards used with digital cameras). With your SD card and its USB adapter, you can easily upload all of your sleep information to the myZeo Personal Coaching website, and begin to spot trends in your sleep that you have never been able to see before.
Sleep Journal
Uncover the links between how you live – including exercise, diet, stress, and environment – and how you sleep. Available both online and on paper, your Zeo Sleep Journal allows you to record lifestyle, environmental, and consumption factors that can disrupt your sleep. You’ll learn about the 7 Sleep Stealers™ and how much they can affect your sleep data each night. You can also define your own lifestyle factors to record. The more sleep stealers you track, the more insights you’ll find about how your actions may be affecting your Sleep Fitness.
Sleep Tools
Using Zeo’s online tools, you can begin to understand how your ZQ and morning feel scores change from night to night. You’ll also spot any connections between your daily lifestyle choices and your nightly sleep and find out for yourself some of the cause and effect patterns in your sleep.
Step 4: Start Your 7 Step Sleep Fitness™ Program, Your Personal Guide to a Better Night’s Sleep
The 7 Step Sleep Fitness Program is a guided self-discovery process for your sleep. This personalized sleep coaching program asks you to set goals for your sleep and then provides you with customized strategies to help you to achieve these goals. In addition, you can learn more about the latest sleep research, and receive recommendations on how to track the items that are most beneficial for you. Through this program, you’ll experience the power of seeing your own sleep data and learn about which factors may be affecting your sleep. You will have full control over the program to skip, repeat or start-over any step you wish. Special features of the program include:
- A series of personalized e-mails that incorporate effective sleep tips and advice, customized to your sleep data, lifestyle and goals.
- A customized action plan to deal with each of the 7 Sleep Stealers as they relate to you and your sleep.
- Goal-oriented assignments that are realistic and achievable, and will not require you to drastically rearrange your lifestyle or even your sleep style.
- Positive, supportive, and easy to understand suggestions and exercises, in everyday language that is easy to follow.
- The Zeo Sleep Information Center is an online library for sleep information and science. In addition to offering another kind of self-guided, personal coaching tool, you can use the Sleep Information Center to discover what sleep is, and why it’s important.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas (Microsoft)
Feb 17th
In a demo that drew gasps at TED2010, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos new augmented-reality mapping technology from Microsoft.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas leads a dazzling demo of Photosynth, software that could transform the way we look at digital images. Using still photos culled from the Web, Photosynth builds breathtaking dreamscapes and lets us navigate them.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ background is as multidimensional as the visions he helps create. In the 1990s, he authored patents on both video compression and 3D visualization techniques, and in 2001, he made an influential computational discovery that cast doubt on Gutenberg’s role as the father of movable type.
He also created Seadragon (acquired by Microsoft in 2006), the visualization technology that gives Photosynth its amazingly smooth digital rendering and zoom capabilities. Photosynth itself is a vastly powerful piece of software capable of taking a wide variety of images, analyzing them for similarities, and grafting them together into an interactive three-dimensional space. This seamless patchwork of images can be viewed via multiple angles and magnifications, allowing us to look around corners or “fly” in for a (much) closer look. Simply put, it could utterly transform the way we experience digital images.
Multitouch Screens Could Enliven New Devices
Feb 7th
A clear version of Touchco’s multitouch sensor platform.Update | 11:09 a.m. Correcting post to reflect that capacitive touch screens use contact with skin, not pressure, as an input.
Update | 11:58 a.m. Correcting post to reflect that capacitive touch devices are not limited to two simultaneous inputs.
Multitouch screens have been a little slower to enter the electronics marketplace than consumers might have hoped. Since Jeff Han, a research scientist at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, first presented his multitouch wall at the TED Conference in 2006, we’ve seen other multitouch technologies trickle into the electronic marketplace. The cellphone has used the technology most, starting with the iPhone, and then moving into other smartphones using Google’s Android platform and Hewlett-Packard TouchSmart countertop computer. But with the exception of a few outliers and device manufacturer research demos, we haven’t really seen multitouch used in other consumer electronics yet.
That might all change soon. Ilya Rosenberg, Ken Perlin and a small team of computer scientists from New York University’s Media Research Lab hope to bring a new kind of multitouch to everything from new e-readers to musical instruments, with their new company, Touchco.
Devices like the iPhone use a technology called capacitive touch and require contact with skin to activate a touch point. These touch technologies also limit the number of simultaneous inputs (the iPhone can track up to five fingers at once). In contrast, Touchco uses a technology called interpolating force-sensitive resistance, or I.F.S.R. This technology uses force-sensitive resistors, which become more conductive as you apply different levels of pressure, and then constantly scan and detect different inputs.
This allows for very low power, unlimited simultaneous touch inputs and the possibility of fully flexible multitouch devices. The technology is also extremely inexpensive; Mr. Rosenberg hopes to sell sheets of I.F.S.R. for as little as $10 a square foot.
So where can you expect to see this technology? Mr. Perlin believes you will see a new range of multitouch e-readers in the coming year, along with new musical instruments and other laptops or notebooks. Touchco has also been working closely with Disney animators to create a true digital sketchbook replacement, utilizing extremely sensitive pressure sensors to determine pencil thickness or even use of an eraser. The software behind the sensors can easily differentiate between the palm of a hand, a brush or a pencil.
There is also the possibility that the right implementation on computer could change the way we interact with interfaces. As an example, Mr. Rosenberg showed me a long sheet of I.F.S.R., about the size of a large flat panel computer monitor, which allowed manipulation of a 3-D computer program. When I lightly dragged my hand across the touch panel I could control the cursor. When I applied more pressure, I could select objects and change their orientation, size and shape within the program. It was incredibly intuitive and simple to navigate.
As you can see from the images below, there are lots of potential applications and devices that could use inexpensive multitouch technology. You can also see some video demonstrations on Touchco’s YouTube page.
Sensors pick up the pressure of a hand placed on a Touchco device.
Sensors capture the variation in pressure levels of a pencil drawing.
Photos: Nick Bilton/The New York TimesTouchco’s multitouch technology being used with an e-ink screen.Touchco began selling developer product kits to device manufacturers this year and hopes to see new devices enter the digital marketplace by late 2010. Touchco published technical specifications here.
GOOD Magazine: The Decade in Design
Jan 9th
by Alissa Walker on December 23, 2009
Being a designer means being able to not only predict the future, but to have a hand in shaping it as well. In the last 10 years, however, designers also had to dramatically change the way they worked: What other industry got to weather the dot-com crash, a real estate bubble, and the death of print?
But it was not all boom and bust. The design field redesigned itself during this decade, transforming from an industry that created better objects to one that created better experiences—and endeavored to deliver them to everyone, not just the people who could afford them. Design was the place for big thinkers to cultivate new technology, and it’s where the sustainability movement found its most trusted partners. Here’s a look back on the design decade that was.