Tuesday, July 30, 2002

Could Music Someday Stream From The Windows In Your House?.... Panasonic Unveils Flat-Panel Speakers "Matsushita Electronic Industrial and its subsidiary Matsushita Electronic Components will start shipping samples of transparent flat-panel speakers for mobile phones and PDAs next month, they announced Monday. The products, the Acoustic Panel and the Acoustic Touch-Panel, use Sound Window technology jointly developed by Matsushita, better known for its Panasonic brand name, and its subsidiary. Sound Window consists of a transparent panel mounted in front of a device's display and a separate driver to vibrate the air between the panel and the display to create sound. The panels are thin and flexible, so they do not affect the sound quality when they are touched. Because the panel is placed over the LCD, the mobile device does not require speaker holes.... The Acoustic Panel is aimed mainly at mobile phones and compact music players, and the Acoustic Touch-Panel, which has a touch-screen panel function, at PDAs and car navigation systems. The Osaka companies plan to start mass production in March next year, when they expect to manufacture 1 million Acoustic Panel units and 500,000 Acoustic Touch-Panel units a month." [PC World] So now the touchscreen on the OQO mini-computer could also be a speaker, and you could truly access The Heavenly Jukebox from anywhere with embedded Wi-Fi in chips in cell phones. PDAs and smartphones could let you listen to an audio ebook in your car or in bed. Now if it just doubled as a microphone for processing voice commands.... [The Shifted Librarian] 10:30:52 PM    comment []

Olympus and Fuji pitch another digital film format. Camera makers unveil new media format. Photo giants Olympus and Fuji Photo Film announce a new removable media format despite analyst concerns that camera buyers already have to deal with too many storage choices. [CNET News.com] 10:19:06 PM    comment []

Small Times.  A breakthrough in creating inexpensive polymer actuators.  The cross fertilization continues.  At $1 a pound, this could form the basis of inexpensive polymer muscles for robotics.  Imagine one of DARPAs "soldiers of the future" with an extra 50 pounds of polymer muscle in an external suit:  scary. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 10:17:20 PM    comment []

New Scientist.  Scramjet test in Australia seems to have worked.  Woo Hoo!  Scramjets are the key to single body earth to orbit vehicles.  Basically, every bit of oxygen you don't have to carry in a tank reduces the weight of the vehicle.  Conventional jet engines can get you up to Mach 2.5 or so.  Ramjets (where there isn't a compressor section, but flow through the combustion chamber is subsonic) can get you up to Mach 4 or so.  Scramjets get you to Mach 8 or 9.  That gets you to within 50-60% of earth's escape velocity (the speed at which you can enter a stable orbit around the earth).   I suspect, however, that the first application of this tech will be in developing hypersonic cruise missles that can be launched from the safe locations and hit targets anywhere on the globe in under 1 hour.  It's much more efficient and accurate than launching an ICBM.  Personally, I would rather see it focused on a commercial single stage earth to orbit transport.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 10:14:13 PM    comment []

A Lego VCR. Too cool... [Wrinkled Paper] 7:06:11 PM    comment []