The Zephyr Solar Plane is a high altitude (>100k feet), long range (weeks or months) plane powered only by the sun.
Tag » technology
A Stanford research project is working on allowing refocusing at various depths from a single exposure. Coincidentally, I met Ren (one of the people involved) at my climbing gym the other night.
Hany Farid is devising algorithms to detect fake art. Hany was a prof at Dartmouth while I was there, in fact I seriously thought about doing a thesis with him.
The six stroke engine. It seems too early to tell whether this will actually provide a net benefit, but a cool idea for sure.
Flickr’s ZoneTag allows you to post pictures directly from your cellphone and figures out where a picture was taken based on cellphone-tower data.
Interesting side-effect of DRM-protection: reduced battery life for portable players (because it’s more processor-intensive to decode).
Computers-assisted mathematical proofs are getting impossible to verify with certainty.
BMW has developed a car that can parallel park on its own. I could see how that would be convenient!
PixelOptics, a company from Virginia, is working on giving us Super Vision. Better than 20/20 eyesight, this could theoretically allow someone to see twice as far as before.
IBM’s speech recognition technology. Speech recognition has been steadily improving and is finally starting to become usable. My favorite example: my friend can tell his Prius “I’m hungry”, and it will show him the restaurants in the area.
