Technology

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The electronic eyeglasses that could replace bifocals

PixelOptics plans to release a new line of high-tech specs that toggle between prescriptions with a mere tilt of your head

posted on April 22, 2011, at 3:31 PM

They may look like normal glasses, but they are the first electronic specs that can toggle between prescriptions with a mere press of a button… or tilt of your head. Photo: pixeloptics.com

Bespectacled Americans who rely on bifocal or progressive lenses may soon get a new view on life. This June, PixelOptics of Roanoke, Va., plans to introduce a line of electronic eyeglasses, called emPower, that allow wearers to effortlessly switch between prescriptions for reading and distance viewing. Here, a guide to the new technology:

How do these glasses work?
Their parts are reminiscent of those found in iPods, says Anne Eisenberg in The New York Times. The lenses “feature a thin layer of liquid crystal sandwiched between two layers of plastic,” says Catherine Clifford at CNNMoney. When zapped with a jolt of electricity, the crystals change their alignment to affect how the lenses reflect light. Wearers can simply tilt their head downward or manually press the frames to activate that change. The toggling function will work for two to three days after each six- to eight-hour battery charge.

Why is this necessary?
The reading portion of traditional bifocal lenses “blur objects more than an arm’s length away,” says Eisenberg in The New York Times, meaning that they can distort the view when looking down at the ground, stepping off a curb, climbing a staircase, or even swinging at a golf ball. In 2010, more than 20 million sets of progressive lenses and more than 16 million bifocals were sold in the U.S.

How long have these high-tech specs been in development?
The process took about 12 years and involved some 275 patents.

Where will they be available?
The emPower glasses “will be distributed through a network of local eyewear professionals,” according to Clifford at CNNMoney. The company will roll them out regionally, starting in Virginia and North Carolina, this summer.

How much will they cost?
Considerably more than a basic pair of glasses. The individual retailers will set their own markups, but Blum says the price tag will be between $1,000 and $1,250 a pair. That includes the frames, lenses, coatings, and charger. Still, even at that price, these glasses “can be a convenient alternative for those with qualms over corrective surgery with lasers,” says Paul Eng at The Consumerist.

Sources: CNNMoney, The Consumerist, New York Times, Orlando Sentinel

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Technophiles who have been dreaming of mobile devices that run longer on lighter, slimmer batteries may soon find their wish has been granted.

Three parallel memory bits with carbon nanotube electrodes (false color image based on topographic profile from atomic force microscopy). The middle bit is in the “off” state, the other two are “on.” The silicon dioxide substrate is shown in blue. | Image courtesy Eric Pop

University of Illinois engineers have developed a form of ultra-low-power digital memory that is faster and uses 100 times less energy than similar available memory. The technology could give future portable devices much longer battery life between charges.

Led by electrical and computer engineering professor Eric Pop, the team will publish its results in an upcoming issue of Science magazine and online in the March 10 Science Express.

“I think anyone who is dealing with a lot of chargers and plugging things in every night can relate to wanting a cell phone or laptop whose batteries can last for weeks or months,” said Pop, who is also affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois.

The flash memory used in mobile devices today stores bits as charge, which requires high programming voltages and is relatively slow. Industry has been exploring faster, but higher power phase-change materials (PCM) as an alternative. In PCM memory a bit is stored in the resistance of the material, which is switchable.

Pop’s group lowered the power per bit to 100 times less than existing PCM memory by focusing on one simple, yet key factor: size.

Rather than the metal wires standard in industry, the group used carbon nanotubes, tiny tubes only a few nanometers in diameter – 10,000 times smaller than a human hair.

Researchers at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) are participating in the development of an application to integrate electronic ID data into an SIM mobile phone card so as to use the terminal as a means of personal identifications

The prototype of mDNI, recently presented at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, allows secure identification of the user by his eID data stored in the mobile phone SIM card. “The SIM cards are like small computers that we carry in our mobile devices allowing us to store information and execute applications, with the advantage of providing a high level security,” explained the UC3M Professor from the Telematic Engineering Department, Celeste Campo, the principal researcher for this project which is being carried out in collaboration with Telefónica R D and Secuware.

The remarkable ability of an electron to exist in two places at once has been controlled in the most common electronic material – silicon – for the first time.

The research findings – published in Nature by a UK–Dutch team from UCL, the University of Surrey, Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, and the FOM Institute for Plasma Physics near Utrecht – marks a significant step towards the making of an affordable “quantum computer”.

According to the research paper in Nature the scientists have created a simple version of Schrodinger’s cat – which is paradoxically simultaneously both dead and alive – in the cheap and simple material out of which ordinary computer chips are made.

“This is a real breakthrough for modern electronics and has huge potential for the future,” explained Professor Ben Murdin, Photonics Group Leader at the University of Surrey. “Lasers have had an ever increasing impact on technology, especially for the transmission of processed information between computers, and this development illustrates their potential power for processing information inside the computer itself. In our case we used a far-infrared, very short, high intensity pulse from the Dutch FELIX laser to put an electron orbiting within silicon into two states at once – a so-called quantum superposition state. We then demonstrated that the superposition state could be controlled so that the electrons emit a burst of light at a well-defined time after the superposition was created. The burst of light is called a photon echo; and its observation proved we have full control over the quantum state of the atoms.”

And the development of a silicon based “quantum computer” may be only just over the horizon. “Quantum computers can solve some problems much more efficiently than conventional computers – and they will be particularly useful for security because they can quickly crack existing codes and create un-crackable codes,” Professor Murdin continued. “The next generation of devices must make use of these superpositions to do quantum computations. Crucially our work shows that some of the quantum engineering already demonstrated by atomic physicists in very sophisticated instruments called cold atom traps, can be implemented in the type of silicon chip used in making the much more common transistor.”

Professor Gabriel Aeppli, Director of the London Centre for Nanotechnology added that the findings were highly significant to academia and business alike. “Next to iron and ice, silicon is the most important inorganic crystalline solid because of our tremendous ability to control electrical conduction via chemical and electrical means,” he explained. “Our work adds control of quantum superpositions to the silicon toolbox.”

Emily Howell’ is a computer program that composes classical music by following rules of music its programmer taught it.

Earlier this year, 6-year-old musical prodigy Emily Howell released an 11-track debut album, resembling the work of history’s most renowned classical composers. But instead of receiving the praise given to Beethoven, Mozart, or Bach, the California native has become a lightning rod for controversy within the musical community.

Why? Because Emily is not human.

Emily is a computer program, and “her” ability to write original compositions has called into question whether art is as uniquely human as many like to believe.

“Can computers be creative? In the sense that they are creating something that wasn’t there before, yes,” says David Cope, Emily’s programmer and professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “But so can birds and insects and volcanoes. We have reserved this notion of creativity for humans for a long time, and we are enamored of it.”

As he sees it, creativity has never been a human-defining trait. This feeling of his stretches back three decades, to when Mr. Cope first dabbled in teaching music to computers. After hitting a dead end while trying to write new music on his own, Cope created a program called EMI, which he pronounces as “Emmy.”

EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) would analyze the work of human composers, pick up on their musical styles, and generate new work seemingly written by the original musician. EMI created “zillions” of compositions before being scrapped for Cope’s latest project, he says.

The concept of self-healing materials has been successfully demonstrated for polymers and is being developed for applications such as coatings on large scale structures like bridges. Now, a Beckman Institute research group that pioneered this rapidly emerging field has shown that healing can also work for a critical small scale application: restoring lost conductivity in electronics.

Writing in Advanced Functional Materials, the researchers report on a twin-microcapsule method that is “the first microcapsule system for the restoration of conductivity in mechanically damaged electronic devices in which the repairing agent is not conductive until its release.” The paper, Restoration of Conductivity with TTF-TCNQ Charge-transfer Salts, is available online and will serve as a cover story for the journal.

Lead author of the paper is postdoctoral researcher Susan Odom, with faculty member Jeff Moore the corresponding author. They and their co-authors are members of the Autonomous Materials Systems (AMS) group at Illinois’s Beckman Institute.

Odom said that the system builds upon recent work in the group on a single capsule method for restoring conductivity, but with the added feature of being non-conductive until damage occurs and the conductivity agents are needed. The microcapsule shells of the twin microcapsules rupture in response to the damage and the component precursor materials are released as a liquid from the core, forming a solid charge-transfer salt that restores conductivity to the electronic device.

“We’ve been able to encapsulate this conductive salt on its own but we wanted to show that we could encapsulate something that was non-conductive,” Odom said. “We only want it to be conductive when it’s actually being used in repair.”

The precursor components are encapsulated in a solution in an organic solvent. An advantage of using non-conductive liquid precursors is improved flow of the healing agent, enabling improved delivery to a damage site.

For as long as there have been computers, there has been coding. And with coding comes repetition – lots of it. That’s always been the basic fact of a programmer’s existence, even as computers have become ever more friendly from a user’s perspective.

That’s where Sikuli comes in. The latest from the User Interface Design Group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, it’s a programming tool that has the ability to see like a human being. Not only does it put the graphical user interface (or GUI) in the hands of programmers, but it may one day put programming in the hands of everyday computer users.

Sikuli stemmed from the research of Associate Professor Rob Miller, Ph.D. student Tsung-Hsiang Chang, and University of Maryland post-doctoral researcher Tom Yeh. It’s a software agent that allows one to quickly automate just about any task – so long as there’s a GUI involved. Sikuli enables the programming of tasks through a combination of screenshots and simple commands.

The key to Sikuli’s appeal is how intuitive it is, something that has rarely if ever been true of programming before. Sikuli users can script what look like function calls, except with screenshots between the parentheses instead of code. This type of interface allows for use by beginners and seasoned programmers alike.

At this point in its development, more involved Sikuli use requires some understanding of Python. But a streamlined, novice-friendly Sikuli could one day put programming into the hands of the average computer user. It would mean a sort of democratization of computing, and would have far-reaching cultural implications.

“You can look at it as an augmentation of human capability,” Miller observes. “Which is pretty exciting, because we’re not really getting much smarter biologically. I think we need to find ways to make ourselves smarter technologically.”

Scientists have made a breakthrough toward creating nanocircuitry on graphene, widely regarded as the most promising candidate to replace silicon as the building block of transistors. They have devised a simple and quick one-step process based on thermochemical nanolithography (TCNL) for creating nanowires, tuning the electronic properties of reduced graphene oxide on the nanoscale and thereby allowing it to switch from being an insulating material to a conducting material.

The technique works with multiple forms of graphene and is poised to become an important finding for the development of graphene electronics. The research appears in the June 11, 2010, issue of the journal Science.

Scientists who work with nanocircuits are enthusiastic about graphene because electrons meet with less resistance when they travel along graphene compared to silicon and because today’s silicon transistors are nearly as small as allowed by the laws of physics. Graphene also has the edge due to its thickness – it’s a carbon sheet that is a single atom thick. While graphene nanoelectronics could be faster and consume less power than silicon, no one knew how to produce graphene nanostructures on such a reproducible or scalable method. That is until now.

“We’ve shown that by locally heating insulating graphene oxide, both the flakes and epitaxial varieties, with an atomic force microscope tip, we can write nanowires with dimensions down to 12 nanometers. And we can tune their electronic properties to be up to four orders of magnitude more conductive. We’ve seen no sign of tip wear or sample tearing,” said Elisa Riedo, associate professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

On the macroscale, the conductivity of graphene oxide can be changed from an insulating material to a more conductive graphene-like material using large furnaces. Now, the research team used TCNL to increase the temperature of reduced graphene oxide at the nanoscale, so they can draw graphene-like nanocircuits. They found that when it reached 130 degrees Celsius, the reduced graphene oxide began to become more conductive.

“So the beauty of this is that we’ve devised a simple, robust and reproducible technique that enables us to change an insulating sample into a conducting nanowire. These properties are the hallmark of a productive technology,” said Paul Sheehan, head of the Surface Nanoscience and Sensor Technology Section at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.

The research team tested two types of graphene oxide – one made from silicon carbide, the other with graphite powder.

“I think there are three things about this study that make it stand out,” said William P. King, associate professor in the Mechanical Science and Engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “First, is that the entire process happens in one step. You go from insulating graphene oxide to a functional electronic material by simply applying a nano-heater.  Second, we think that any type of graphene will behave this way. Third, the writing is an extremely fast technique. These nanostructures can be synthesized at such a high rate that the approach could be very useful for engineers who want to make nanocircuits.”

“This project is an excellent example of the new technologies that epitaxial graphene electronics enables,” said Walt de Heer, Regent’s Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics and the original proponent of epitaxial graphene in electronics. His study led to the establishment of the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center two years ago. “The simple conversion from graphene oxide to graphene is an important and fast method to produce conducting wires. This method can be used not only for flexible electronics, but it is possible, sometime in the future, that the bio-compatible graphene wires can be used to measure electrical signals from single biological cells.”

The research is a collaboration among the Georgia Tech, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Other members of the research team include: Zhongqing Wei, Debin. Wang, Suenne Kim, Soo-Young Kim, Yike Hu, Michael K. Yakes, Arnaldo R.Laracuente, Zhenting Dai, Seth R. Marder, Claire Berger, and Walter A. de Heer.

 

The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the world’s premier research universities. Ranked seventh among U.S. News & World Report’s top public universities and the eighth best engineering and information technology university in the world by Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Ranking of World Universities, Georgia Tech’s more than 20,000 students are enrolled in its Colleges of Architecture, Computing, Engineering, Liberal Arts, Management and Sciences. Tech is among the nation’s top producers of women and minority engineers. The Institute offers research opportunities to both undergraduate and graduate students and is home to more than 100 interdisciplinary units plus the Georgia Tech Research Institute.