A Contactless Sensor that can Read Your Mind
Top CES 2017 Innovations – Imagine how cool it would be to control machines, gadgets and other interfaces with just your thoughts.
Self-Repairing Cities
In this video interview, Futurist Shara Evans is speaking with Prof Robert Richardson at the University of Leeds about an audacious project to use robots for automated repairs of city infrastructure.
The latest trends in Digital Signage
In this blog post we check out the latest display products at the Integrate show, and share our near term predictions for the digital signage space.
Looking at the Latest Advances in Virtual Reality
Scott O'Brien (Humense) is a pioneer in the fields of augmented and virtual reality. He's working on a new project - generating ultra-high definition virtual reality scenes. In this blog post we visit Humense's lab environment for an early look at an 8K VR projection. VR has lots of potential commercial uses. Right now though, one of the biggest drawbacks of VR as a business tool is the clunkiness of VR headsets.
#CensusFail
Last December, the Australian Bureau of Statistics quietly announced a major change to the way the 2016 Census would be conducted - making it mandatory for people to include their name and address, along with highly sensitive personal information about their household income and habits. A number of people, myself included, raised red flags about this massive breach of privacy.
IBM Watson: Commercialising the Latest Advances in Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence has been around for a very long time with initial work beginning back as far as the 1950s and 1960s. In more recent times, with the explosion in the amount of data available, expert systems now have a lot more information to be able to work with, and a lot more opportunities to become useful as well. As a result, we’re starting to see AI being deployed for mainstream business applications. IBM Watson has been an early leader in this space, and continues to roll out innovative applications. In this Future Tech interview we talk with Jason Leonard, the Watson Business Leader for IBM across Asia Pacific, GCG & Japan about machine intelligence and the many industries where Watson is being deployed around the world.
Cloud-based Spectroscopy — Analysing What We Eat
It’s impossible to know exactly what’s in the food you’re eating, and for some of us — diabetics, celiacs, allergy sufferers, and others with food sensitivities — that can be a serious problem. By combining the established technology of spectroscopy with mobile communications and cloud computing, startup Tellspec is developing a handheld scanner that might one day reveal all. In this Future Tech interview we talk with Tellspec founder and CEO, Isabel Hoffmann, about Tellspec’s technology and plans, food allergies, additives, genetically modified organisms, and more.
The Many Facets of Facial Recognition
Facial recognition systems rarely have the luxury of taking full frontal photos from stationary people: for many applications they need to rely on side-on, or top-down views of people in motion. In this Future Tech interview we talk with Brian Lovell, founder and CTO of Imagus Technology about the challenges of facial recognition and the capabilities of his company’s technology. Brian also discusses some of the implications, good and bad of facial recognition technology.
In the Future Communication will be in 3D
Until now there’s been no easy way to capture a 3D representation of an object, communicate that representation and easily recreate it. Russell Consadine’s DottyView technology changes all that. In this Future Tech interview, Consadine explores the potential applications for his technology, in areas ranging from customer service, consumer product guides and maintenance at remote oil and gas facilities.
Augmented Reality will Inform, Entertain … and Empower
Augmented reality is a broad term encompassing technologies that add information to our, generally visual, experiences of the real world. Examples include: nutrition information about a product on a supermarket shelf, the identity of a person using facial recognition technology, multiple views of a sporting event, or value and location information on a property for sale. In this Future Tech interview, we speak with augmented reality pioneer, Scott O’Brien. He examines some of the current and emerging applications for augmented reality, looks at the key enabling technologies, and at recent acquisitions as global players move to gain an early lead in the field.