Journey Digital Media - Absolutely Amazing New Phone: Flip Phones are Back! DARPA's Brain-Controlled Robotic Arm Fast-Tracked, Could Be Available in Just Four Years. Usually when we report on DARPA's robotic, brain-controlled prosthetic arm, we're reporting on news from the lab. Soon we'll be reporting from clinical trials.
On Tuesday the Food and Drug Administration said it would fast-track the DARPA device, pushing it through the approval process with priority assistance in order to get it to amputees—many of which are returning from combat zones—as soon as four years from now. There are really two headlines here; first, the DARPA arm is a modern marvel that's taken several years, $100 million, and some of the best minds in prosthetics design, robotics, and brain-machine interfaces to develop.
It marks a technological leap—a prosthetic arm that is robotically controlled via a chip in the brain, making it more like a real limb than any approved prosthesis before it. In the FDA's defense, its job is not easy. For DARPA's arm, that means four or five years rather than a decade spent in the FDA approval pipeline.
[LA Times] Light Touch projector makes any surface a touchscreen. A previously little-known company from the UK called Light Blue Optics has demoed a projector at CES which allows users to interact with the light image as if it were a touchscreen. The Light Touch throws a 10-inch image at WVGA resolution at incredibly short distances thanks to the holographic projection technology involved. At the same time the infra-red touch sensitive system allows users to interact with social networks, multimedia sharing and any other applications that can use the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth support in the device to connect to the Internet.
It comes with 2GB of onboard flash memory, a microSD card slot for expanding the storage and the battery life will last 2 hours. Expect to hear more from this one on the OEM front as interest grows. UPDATE: Two years on and although Light Blue Optics doesn't seem to have come up with the goods, others have. . - Prodigy projection keyboard iPhone case turns any surface into a keyboard. Efficiency enthusiast mods Honda Innova to get 214mpg (photo) // Current. To Our Faithful Current.com Users: Current's run has ended after eight exciting years on air and online.
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