7th sense

Aaron Greenspan:mobile face cash payments

Aaron Greenspan: During my freshman year, I studied facial recognition in a seminar with Professor Ken Nakayama, who does research in Harvard’s Psychology Department. One of the things that struck me was how incredibly fast most people–(“most” because there is a tiny percentage of the population that suffers from a disease called prosopagnosia)–are able to recognize faces. It doesn’t matter what language you speak, how much education you’ve been able to complete, or generally how old you are; facial recognition is just one of those things we have evolved to be able to do incredibly quickly and relatively inexpensively, meaning that it requires almost no conscious effort. All of these facts combined make it a really good method for identity verification, when combined with some other security tokens such as a PIN number and e-mail address. What we have *not* evolved to be able to do is recognize the handwriting of other people–and of course that’s how identity verification (barely) works in the payment industry today.

FaceCash® Overview from Think Computer Corporation on Vimeo.

fold of your wish

Kyocera's EOS folding concept phone incorporates a flexible OLED screen, changing its form factor from a clamshell into something more closely resembling a wallet or clutch-purse. Explains Kyocera industrial designer Susan McKinney:

The concept Eos envisions a future where we have a more humanistic relationship with our phones. Appealing to our haptic senses, a soft, semi-rigid polymer skin surrounds a flexible OLED display. The metaphor of a "living" skin was used for its notions of protection and constant evolution, providing a heightened user experience.

Shape memory allows keys to morph up from its surface when needed and fade away when not in use. The flexibility of the screen allows for greater adaptability of form and interaction it maintains a compact shape (the size of a small wallet) for simple phone calls, and unfolds to reveal a large widescreen display. The device feeds off of our physical interaction with it, translating kinetic energy into an electric charge via an array of nano-scale piezoelectric generators. The more we interact with Eos, the more energy it creates - without using batteries.

Though the Kyocera future concepts are still in their early design stages, the design teams from San Diego and Bangalore are exploring many different ways and possibilities of infusing some of the concept ideas into their near future lineup of phones and devices.

ALL IN ONE

GSM, CDMA, Wi-Fi, WiMax: Can't we all just get along? With IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), we just might. Now in trials, IMS network technology will allow any type of packet data--voice calls, video, music, HTML, you name it--to move seamlessly between IMS-enabled networks. With IMS, you'll be able to start a call on your cell phone and end it on a VoIP landline, watch pay TV on either a handset or a big screen (smart-card technology identifies you), and access your contacts from any connected PC or handset. But the benefits will kick in only once IMS is widely deployed, which will take several years.