NUI: Natural User Interface

English: The Microsoft Kinect peripheral for the Xbox 360. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The NUI will be a bigger departure than the GUI, Graphical User Interface, was. This is a big one. Microsoft has some advantages here. But it will not be any one company thing. This will be a tectonic shift.

Intel Says Laptops and Tablets with 3-D Vision Are Coming Soon

Laptops with 3-D sensors in place of conventional webcams will go on sale before the end of this year ...... Partners already working with Intel include Microsoft’s Skype unit, the movie and gaming studio Dreamworks, and the 3-D design company Autodesk ....... a startup called Volumental, lets you snap a 3-D photo of your foot to get an accurate shoe size measurement—something that could help with online shopping. ..... data from a tablet’s 3-D sensor can be used to build very accurate augmented reality games, where a virtual character viewed on a device’s screen integrates into the real environment. In one demo, a flying robot appeared on-screen and selected a landing spot on top of a box on a cluttered table. As the tablet showing the character was moved, it stayed perched on the tabletop, and even disappeared behind occluding objects. ...... the front-facing 3-D sensors can be used to recognize gestures to play games on a laptop, or take control of some features of Windows. ...... reminiscent of Microsoft’s Kinect sensor for its Xbox gaming console, which introduced gamers to depth sensing and gesture control in 2010. Microsoft launched a version of Kinect aimed at Windows PCs in 2012, and significantly upgraded its depth-sensing technology in 2013, but Kinect devices are too large to fit inside a laptop or tablet.

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Nanostructured Ceramics

Just like biotech has a huge appetite for Big Data, I keep wondering how you plug in software into these nano scale equations. You know how they say for sensory perception the software-only approach is a dead end. You need to innovate at the hardware level. So you design neuro inspired chips. I think nano could see software use in that direction. Smarter hardware? In built smartness?

A Super-Strong and Lightweight New Material

they could make ceramics, metals, and other materials that can recover after being crushed, like a sponge. The materials are very strong and light enough to float through the air like a feather. ..... In conventional materials, strength, weight, and density are correlated. ..... nanoscale trusses made from ceramic materials can be both very light—unsurprising, since they are mostly air—and extremely strong. ..... To make the ceramic nano-trusses, Greer’s lab uses a technique called two-photon interference lithography. It’s akin to a very low-yield 3-D laser printer. ..... Nanostructures have a very high surface area and are lightweight, a combination that could make for a fast-charging battery that stores a lot of energy in a convenient package.