Top 5 Future Technologies

HAL-5 Robot Suit

This robot suit allows anyone who wears it, the potential to lift up to 10-times the weight they normally could. Production will be limited to just 20-units next year and 400-500 units in 2008.

While the idea of having your own personal strength-boosting Halloween costume might sound appealing, you’ll have to pony up an estimated “¥5 million ($42,273) – ¥7 million ($59,182)” to purchase one, or ¥70,000 ($592) per month to rent

[via engadget]

The Incredible Dishmaker

Created by MIT student Leonardo Bonanni, this incredible device “can actually replace cabinets worth of dishes by storing them as flat disks.”

If the Dishmaker ever becomes a reality, you will never have to worry about dishes again. You just make dishes on demand and try to put all the extra free cabinet space to good use

[source 1 – 2]

Partial Invisibility Cloak

According to LiveScience, scientists “have created a cloaking device that can reroute certain wavelengths of light, forcing them around objects like water flowing around boulders in a stream.”

“The microwaves come in and are swept around the cloak and reconstructed on the other side while avoiding the interior region,” said study team member David Smith at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering. “So it looks as if they just passed through free space.”

MIT’s Assist Sketch Understanding System

MIT’s amazing “Assist Sketch Understanding System” basically “allows an engineer to sketch a mechanical system as you would on paper, and then enables them to interact with the design as a mechanical system.”

… for example by seeing a simulation of the drawing. We have built an early incarnation of such a tool, called ASSIST, which allows a user to sketch simple mechanical systems and see simulations of her drawings in a two-dimensional kinematic simulator

Diamond Touch Hardware Toolkit

Rob Diaz-Marino shows off work that he’s completed to simplify the development of applications on Mitsubishi’s Diamond Touch hardware.

He shows compelling demos of squiggle draw, memory and an tabletop audio mixer. Interaction on a digital table supports face to face collaboration with the added benefits of digital displays (e.g., real time updates, access to the Internet and rich satellite imagery)

Honorable Mention – Transparent Concrete Display

Two engineering/architecture students have created the world’s first display made of transparent concrete — similar to this technology.

The screen consists of concrete with embedded optical fibres, arranged as pixels, capable of transmitting natural as well as artificial light. The light-admission points are on the back of the screen where the fibres are positioned. The light, or the picture, is then displayed in pixels on the front. The light source can be a projector emitting either pictures or film footage. In principle, the screen is capable of acting as a window since – owing to the combination of the screen concept’s light-absorption and optical cables – it has a capacity for transmitting natural light

[Source]

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