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iCandy: Tech for the Hands, Eyes, and Body

Touch and see what isn’t really there

Willie D. Jones

25 Jul 2012

This gargantuan bucket is part of Taiyuan Heavy Industry Co.’s WK-75, the largest mining excavator in the world. The shovel, which can move 75 cubic meters of earth with a single scoop, can be used to dig up to 12 000 metric tons of coal per hour. But there is no concern that such heavy loads may cause the attached vehicle to tip over: The excavator is longer than a basketball court and weighs 2000 metric tons.
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Photo: Rex Features/AP Photo

Now adults don’t have to feel awkward about joining in the fun at the playground. This gym at Shaw Park in Hull, England, installed by the Great Outdoor Gym Company, includes a standard fitness bike, a recumbent bike, a bike that’s pedaled by hand, and a cross-training station. Best of all, it’s usable 24/7 because the equipment harnesses the energy that users exert and converts it to electricity to light up the gym at night.
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Photo: Ben Solomon/The New York Times/Redux

As the New York Giants American football players go through off-season workouts, their coaches are using gadgets—such as watches equipped with GPS devices and bands that track players’ heart rates—to get a better sense of their exertions on the practice field. Now coaches can see how far and how fast individual players run and how quickly they recover from activity, so as to avoid overtaxing them.
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Photo: NASA/eyevine/Redux

The United States plans to use the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle—here in its unfinished state—to send four-person crews into space. For Exploration Flight Test 1, or EFT-1, in 2014, NASA will shoot the unmanned capsule into space aboard a Delta IV rocket, maneuver it, and bring it back down in a test of its avionics, heat shielding, and parachutes. If all goes well, Orion will likely make its launch with astronauts aboard in late 2017.
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Photo: The Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images

Researchers at Keio University in Yokohama, Japan, are testing a mind-blowing new function of the Telesar V telepresence robot, shown here in the background. The researcher in the foreground is wearing special gloves that allow him to “feel” the texture of the cloth that the robot’s fingers are touching. The system is sensitive enough to tell a remote operator whether the robot is touching cloth or paper or whether an object is hot or cold.
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Photo: Yuriko Nakao/Reuters

I was more than satisfied that the protection film for my mobile phone kept the display from looking like it had survived a bar fight. Now the good folks at Global Wave have invented an overlay that turns any old LCD screen into a glasses-free 3-D display. They showed off their invention at the Virtual Reality Expo in Tokyo in June.
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Photo: Susannah Ireland/eyevine/Redux

An engineer at the BAE Systems plant in Rochester, England, is shown wearing the same helmet that pilots of the Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jet will wear in combat. A suite of sensors projects images right onto the visor, giving the pilot a 360-degree view in all directions and putting vital information—such as the location of enemy aircraft or missiles and his own heading, speed, and elevation—right before his eyes.
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Photo: Nomaan Merchant/Redux

Police officers from the Dallas suburb of McKinney are shown being put through their paces during a demonstration of Raytheon’s Virtsim law enforcement training environment. Although they were in an empty building, the lightweight virtual-reality glasses the officers wore made it appear to them that they were trying to capture a gunman on the street. Afterward, the system replayed the simulation, letting the officers review how they responded to the computer-generated crisis.
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Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The creators of this device, an EEG sensor headset, say it helps wearers keep track of their levels of mental focus so that over time they learn to control their brains better. The Brainwave, from start-up Axio, purports to do this by monitoring brainwaves and providing positive reinforcement in the form of audio feedback when the user is highly focused on a task.
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Photo: TopPhoto/AP Photo

These children are enjoying one of the exhibits at the Hangzhou Low Carbon Science and Technology Museum, in China. The museum, which opened on 18 July, features seven exhibition areas, including a driving simulator that reports the total carbon emissions at the end of a virtual road race and a theater where visitors perch on seats that look like electric motorbikes to watch videos about low-carbon living.
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Photo: Nick Gentry/Barcroft Media/Landov

Despite what F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, there are apparently second acts in the lives of technological gadgets. This portrait, a product of the ongoing Xchange project by London-based artist Nick Gentry, is a collage made from plastic floppy discs, used discarded X-rays, and film negatives. The aim of the project is to take obsolete technologies and turn them into art.
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Willie D. Jones

Willie Jones is an associate editor at IEEE Spectrum. In addition to editing and planning daily coverage, he manages several of Spectrum's newsletters and contributes regularly to the monthly Big Picture section that appears in the print edition.

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