Intel Research Day: pick of the projects

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

I’ve already written about Dispute Finder, a neat little service which is up and running – albeit shakily – right now. But Intel’s Research Day in Mountain View, California hosted some far more ambitious and long-term projects too. Here are my favourite projects from the rest of the show: research being what it is, some of them will probably never be heard of again, but others may well find their way into real-world products in the next few years.

Oh, and just to ramp up the excitement, I’ll take you through my top seven in reverse order.

7. Location Awareness with LED Visible Lighting

This is one of those ideas whose appeal lies in its sheer simplicity. In short, it’s a system that warns you when you’re too close to a car in front – or when a car is too close behind you. The clever part is that it works out the distances involved by triangulating the beams from LED headlights and tail-lights.

It’s a fast system, and accurate – the showcase stand included a live demo with some toy cars, tracking their locations in real time to a precision of under an inch. It can even track multiple cars at once. (more…)

We’re the world’s best, promise!

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

We see bold claims from manufacturers all the time, and we usually take them with a pinch of salt. If enough evidence is presented and/or we can back them up with our own tests, we’re willing to accept some of them; others vary from laughably untrue to those we’d love to believe but just don’t quite add up. But at the very least we need the full facts before we decide.

LG’s newest 22in TFT, the W2252TE, is a case in point. Heralded in its press release as “the world’s most energy efficient monitor”, it claims to offer “a 45% reduction (40W) in power consumption, leading the way in environmentally friendly computer screens”.

Inevitably, the question arises: a 45% reduction over what? (more…)