3D Projector

Electric Unicycle

A pair of 18-year-old Canadians have designed and built an electric-powered unicycle with a top speed of 40mph, which uses similar principles to the Segway scooter to maneuver.

Dubbed the Tango (or Uno, depending who's talking), the bike is based off a Yamaha R6 and was designed and built by the high school students for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in New Mexico.

It looks dangerous as all hell, especially if you're talking about moving at 40mph, but I can see it being quite fun, so long as you're all padded up properly. The designers are hoping to get the Tango to market, with particular designs on bike-heavy areas like China and India - so long as they can get the investment to develop the thing.

LG makes screen from water and oil

In the pursuit of a cheap flexible display, LG Philips have come up with a screen that's made with the help of oil and water.

The patent they've filed has the following, almost impenetrable, abstract:

A display is disclosed, which can be fabricated without a high-temperature process, and also realize color images, the display including a reflective electrode formed on a flexible substrate; a transparent insulation layer having a predetermined color formed on a surface of the flexible substrate including the reflective electrode; an opposite substrate formed in opposition to the flexible substrate; an opposite electrode and a black matrix formed on an inner surface of the opposite substrate; and an electrolytic layer and a nonelectrolytic layer formed between the flexible substrate and the opposite substrate, where the electrolytic layer is transparent, and the nonelectrolytic layer is nontransparent.

Thank God Engadget are on hand to translate this gibberish - their coverage manages to render that readable even to me.

HD DVD consortium declares premature victory in Europe

The European HD-DVD group has announced rather misleading figures that show the format's market dominance in several European countries. According to their statistics, Blu-ray only makes up 1/4 of the high-definition market in Europe.

HD DVD video players have outsold rival standard Blu-ray players by a three-to-one margin in Europe's main markets so far this year, according to a lobby group.

The European HD DVD Promotional Group claimed it had 74 percent market share in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland for stand-alone players

Which all seems very open-and-close, until you read the fine print.

The figures for Blu-ray didn't take into account Sony's PlayStation 3 - only stand-along players for both formats were included. One commenter on the Engadget story about this annoucement points out (not sure where the figures came from) that if you include the sales of the PS3 and the Xbox360 add-on in the French figures through April, HD-DVD jumps from 2,600 to 10,000 while Blu-ray goes from 800 to 108,000.

The HD-DVD group declined to give any specific numbers of HD players shipped in their statement, and on top of that, Blu-ray discs are still selling significantly more copies than their HD-DVD counterparts.

As the Yahoo! article points out, the VHS/Beta format war took almost a decade before a winner emerged, and it's likely that a similar timeframe might be needed here before there's a clear victor in the high-def struggle.

We're still a couple of years away from mass-market pricing as well - it took DVD a few years before players were cheap enough that the general public bothered with the format. And there was only one DVD format; with two jostling for supremacy this time around, consumer confusion might drag the whole thing out even longer.

Yours Truly, 60 AD

The New Scientist blog has an article up about the oldest known programmable robot - all the way back in Alexandria around 60 AD.

In about 60 AD, a Greek engineer called Hero constructed a three-wheeled cart that could carry a group of automata to the front of a stage where they would perform for an audience. Power came from a falling weight that pulled on string wrapped round the cart's drive axle, and Sharkey reckons this string-based control mechanism is exactly equivalent to a modern programming language.

The post also has a (short) video of a version of this robot that the blog's writers built themselves.

There's a full report on the New Scientist site (subscribers only), or in this week's magazine (I think?) if you can find it.

iWant

I've been skeptical about the iPhone pretty much since it was announced; the iPod's synonymity with "mp3 player" pissed me off, especially since it's tied into iTunes so completely. I was expecting a lot of the same PR flash and no actual bang from the iPhone, but to be honest I'm getting more and more convinced.

I'm still far from a sure sale for Apple, though. For one thing, I have a problem the lack of a 3G or GPRS data connection. If they really want me to use it as a portable internet/email device, it's got to be at least as quick as my current phone. There's plenty of software concerns too; there are strange limitations on what you can do. For instance, there's no way to delete multiple emails at once - you've just got to wipe them one at a time. I get 50 or 60 spam emails a day, thanks to my email appearing on my website; having to go through each of them one by one would just get frustrating.

So, on that front I'm going to have to wait for the next model, which will hopefully address some of the missing hardware and software functions. Which doesn't bother me, really; I'm not sure I could justify anything like £300 on a mobile phone.

But if it was available as a free upgrade, colour me very interested indeed. Shame that's not going to happen though; while it was rumoured for a while that my cell provider, Vodafone, was going to get the exclusive iPhone contract, it's now looking likely that O2 (my old provider, as it turns out) is getting it instead. TMobile got the contract in Germany.

Which is a pity. I might still see if I can get into an O2 store and demo the thing when it launches (or a couple of weeks after, once the hysteria dies down), but this first generation is a no-go for me, at least until the exclusivity deal passes and I can get one for much less than retail.

I really, really want one, though.