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The Awesome Technology Thread
Samphis
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Humanity has always astounded me with the ability to be so ridiculously brilliant and yet stupid at the same time. Let's focus on the brilliant.
Bomb-resistant fabric.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/blast_proof-fabric-defies-belief/zetix-blast+proof-fabric-resists-multiple-car-bombs-makes-our-heads-explode-330343.php
Transparent Aluminum (technology from Star Trek that we can use today!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_aluminum
Does anyone else have any cool examples of awesome technology from throughout the ages? Modern or ancient?
Bomb-resistant fabric.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/blast_proof-fabric-defies-belief/zetix-blast+proof-fabric-resists-multiple-car-bombs-makes-our-heads-explode-330343.php
Transparent Aluminum (technology from Star Trek that we can use today!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_aluminum
Does anyone else have any cool examples of awesome technology from throughout the ages? Modern or ancient?
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I never knew transparent aluminum was real, but that Wikipedia article is a bit sparse. The bit about the transparent ceramic armor was cool, though.
1. The first thing to break the sound barrier was invented in China over 2000 years ago
2. Frozen Smoke
3. The first concept of a "robot" is from the 4th Century BC, Asimov is turning in his grave :P
4. The fact that the guy who invented Air Conditioning just took the system in a fridge and stuck it on a wall.
and thats it, i don't know much about inventions really. But I hope some others post some really cool stuff.
What?
edit: it didn't look like that a second ago.
The Novint Falcon 3d mouse thingy with 3d force feedback
I love the fact that I will probably have a 3d television in my living room before I die, as well as some nice 3d controllers. Imagine the next Wii with 3d support? Although nintendo being slow on hd adoption, they probably won't adopt 3d quickly, which is too bad.
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MMOG Comic, Quests, and News. www.thebrasse.com
Particularly the fabric. I'm so making clothes out of that stuff.
I want a 3D displays so bad. More specifically, I want 3D content to go with them. As it is, there are ways to watch things in 3D but there's just no content there.
How does this kind of 3D display technology work? I know all about stereoscopy and why things look 3D or don't, but I can't imagine how a TV would simulate that effect.
Something tells me you wouldn't get much benefit from bomb resistant fabric as clothing. You may just end up like this:
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/usermovies/782.html
Instead of this:
http://www.answers.com/topic/ut-gibs-jpg
There was a student about 15 years ago who dropped out of his senior year to go into business after he accidentally discovered what would happen to aluminum when heated to an incredibly hot temperature (like 1100 C). He wasn't the smartest kid ever but he was determined to research it, and eventually found it that it had very unique properties.
He eventually went into business as the most successful developer of body armor for the United States Armed Forces in the late 90s.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
I know.
I don't care. I still want bomb-resistant clothing. That would be awesome.
http://d3olab.com/
I think this stuff, the cloth, and the frozen smoke are exactly what we need for modern suits of armor. For fighting bears.
I'm damn interested in finding out as well. My guess is something to do with polarity, but I can't figure out a way to make each eye see a different polarity without having special glasses on.
My investigation begins...
EDIT: My 5 minute research reveals they're acomplished using hyper thin parallax barriers which are tracked and positioned using either eye tracking software (unlikely for those tvs) or they're positioned in such a way that you have a viewing cone-shaped area where the stereoscopic effect will work.
Interesting.
China invented the Whip? Cause that snap you hear as you use a whip comes from breaking the sound barrier and I'm pretty sure thats the simplest and earliest thing that did it.
Yeah, it is basically similar to that cheap (edit**) effect you see sometimes where you get an animated image when you tilt a piece of paper... I have seen a lot of bookmarks like this, basically as you change your angle of view, you see a different image. The 3d effect works similarly so that each eye is seeing a different image. It does impose some angle of view restrictions, but I have seen one of these in person and it wasn't really an issue, although for the life of me I don't understand why it isnt more picky. Maybe the tech is totally different from what I imagined.
In practice, the display I saw would 'break' into a double image if you stepped off center, but would then reform back into the 3d when you went abit further off center. So there were many viewing angles possible, not just straight on, but you would have to put chairs in the 'sweetspots' or something, heh.
This was maybe 5 years ago at a comp USA that had one hooked up to a computer which at that time was running one of the 3d demos that came with the Nvidea stereoscopic drivers (which also supported this type of monitor). The tech in the sharp I linked could be totally different for all I know.
**Edit: By cheap effect, I mean the bookmarks are cheap (and often mis-aligned). The 3d effect on the one monitor I saw was very very nice.
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MMOG Comic, Quests, and News. www.thebrasse.com
And where is my flying car?
Also, that image above, with the fan blowing on the noodles, reminds me of the stupid things people patent.
I figured it must have something to do with the viewing angles, but I thought it would have to be really, really, super-picky about the angle if that were the case.
Needs less veiled thread assassination.
That's just Thanko, they're crazy.
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MMOG Comic, Quests, and News. www.thebrasse.com
well, thinking about the way our vision works, it'd be pretty easy to circumvent the problem that autostereoscopic bookmarks have (i.e. that, when viewed from an angle, the picture becomes horribly distorted to the point where it'd be unviewable)
If the problem would be that you're viewing two images from such an angle that the differences would super impose over one another and cause blurring, then the solution would be as simple as to alternate between displays. Our eyes are already used to it - it's a harmless effect. Interlaced television has been around for... well, as long as television has been along. So they could theoretically, unless I'm not thinking this through well enough (which is possible since I've been awake for 48 hours now), simply interlace the image and draw half of it on each slated parallax barrier.
What would happen is that, from a certain angle, the image would transform into 3D, but from every other angle, rather than becoming a horrid blur that is indistinguishable, it'd simply become a 2D image.
...hm, thinking about that, you could maybe have fields of interlacing going at once. Like, more than two. So that several angles could have stereoscopic views independent of one another. I wonder if that's how they accomplish it with these monitors.
I still have a soft spot for HMDs. Whenever there's a lot of 3D content available and I can get a good, affordable one that looks exactly like Geordi LaForge's visor, I will be all over them.
I would probably settle for a good, affordable one.
I saw this episode of Modern Marvels about two months ago titled "Bulletproof," and it was the most amazing episode of the show I had seen. Right at the end of it, they were going over a material that scientists are developing that is a liquid that transforms to a solid when an amount of magnetism is applied to it (which they intend to use in future bullet proof vests). I don't know what it is called but if anyone here happened to see that episode and remembers (or just knows), could you remind me of the name?
Also, I'm not sure if this counts, but lasers make me all nerdgasmic inside. Laser magician, and laser graffiti.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
Hmm... a quick google search reveals Chinese scientists doing this using nanoparticles.
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2003/111903/Jolts_turn_liquid_to_solid_111903.html
Isn't there something similar except that instead of a current, the material's flexible unless it's hit by something with some serious kinetic force, at which point it hardens.
Yeah. Non newtonian substances.
cornflower + custard for example. you can walk on it quickly, drown in it if you walk slowly.