Samsung is no longer the one only mobile holography game in town. Only a few short months after a patent application revealed that the Seoul-based electronics giant is experimenting with miniaturized projection technology that could allow its phones to display content several inches ahead of the screen, cross-city rival LG has filed over a dozen…
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IBM is bringing the corporate world’s unbreakable encryption to your phone
As any first-year computer science undergraduate could tell you, the rigid programming of current software prevents applications from taking any truly random actions. That requires important corporate systems like the mainframes processing your payments to tap physical parameters such as light and background radiation to generate cryptographic sequences that hackers can’t theoretically predict. The technology has been around…
Samsung’s future phone covers will irradiate your screen to clear germs
The competition in the emerging mobile health segment could soon move beyond apps into the physical realm if Samsung follows through on one of its latest patent applications. Detailed inside is a new kind of phone cover that employs technology from the industrial world to clear your screen of germs and other foreign substances every…
NASA and GM’s joint space robot is halfway to human-level flexibility
Three years after the last official update about its collaboration with NASA to develop a humanoid robot capable of performing maintenance work in orbit, a new patent filing reveals that GM has upgraded the most recent prototype shown to the public almost unrecognizably. The enhanced iteration shares little external resemblance with the astronauts that it may…
IBM is developing a nanoscale GPS
It is an irony of modern life that GPS has made finding your location during a trip to a remote mountain range easier than positioning a microscope in an air-conditioned lab, where the level of precision required below a certain scale makes moving the probe to the desired location a major undertaking. That’s the latest…
Patent filling reveals the Samsung Galaxy S7 iris scanner
The amount of effort that Samsung is putting into building a homegrown iris scanner leaves little room for guesswork about the authentication mechanism in its next generation of mobile devices. The rapid progress on the project has been chronicled in its sprawling paper trail of patent applications, which passed a new milestone on Thursday with…
IBM has invented a cloaking device to conceal military vehicles
With an annual research budget of several billion dollars, IBM has plenty to spare for moonshot experiments such as its recently revealed effort to bring DRAM technology to production, but the latest addition to the roster is in a league all of its own. Engineers at its optics group have developed a cloaking device that promises…
U.S. Army drones will have a mechanism to protect your privacy
The privacy concerns over the widening use of drones have apparently not gone unnoticed in the defense sector, where a leading UAV supplier to the U.S. Army is actively working to make field reconnaissance less intrusive for bystanders caught in the stare of the camera. Prioria Robotics disclosed the fruits of its efforts for the…
This Italian exoskeleton could revolutionize physiotherapy
The term “exoskeleton” brings to mind images of futuristic battlefields and exotic industrial settings, but where bionics are most likely to achieve widespread use first is the medical field, in therapeutic and rehabilitative applications. Researchers at Rome’s Università Campus Bio-Medico hope to speed along that mechanized revolution with a new cybernetic support frame for the lower…
LG’s radical smart glasses wrap a battery around your neck
Manufacturers have been experimenting with exotic wearable designs for a quite while now in an effort to stand out from the growing competition, but LG’s latest entry may just take the cake. It’s a regular pair of smart glasses save for an oversized external battery that hangs over your shoulders like a sort of high-tech necklace.…
Microsoft is developing 3D folders for Windows 10
The rows of folders you see in Windows Explorer may soon be replaced by interactive 3D cubes with contextual navigation aids to help you find files and applications judging by a recent patent filing from Microsoft that was published last week. The new scheme aims to address what Redmond perceives as a fundamental problem with the present arrangement.…
IBM is reviving an experimental memory type that could replace all others
Heightening performance expectations have spurred multiple parallel efforts to develop faster memory in recent years, but the answer to the growing demand for speed may come from a much older source. Two new patent applications reveal that IBM is working to revive a storage technology dating back to the 1990s that could blow everything else out…
Sony's cylindrical display will shake up wearables
Wearables have evolved unrecognizably from the original wristwatches of the early 19th century, but manufacturers still have ship their hardware attached to low-tech wristbands for lack of a better option. The first exception may be Sony, which hopes to exploit recent advancements in display technology to break out of the trend line. Revealed in one of the…
Here’s the rugged Surface Pro Microsoft designed for the NFL
The NFL takes note-taking very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that its technology division gave Microsoft a $400 million contract last year to supply every coach with a specially-created rugged edition of the Surface Pro for that very purpose, the specifications of which recently surfaced on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s online database. The…