Announcing Our 2010 Technology Showcase Participants

Squidarella Color Changing Umbrella

With a Squidarella in hand, it is guaranteed that you will stand out from the crowd. The unique color change technology used by designers SquidLondon transforms these umbrellas into walking pieces of art and creates an interactive experience whilst you walk in the rain. 

The umbrella starts out in black and white. As the rain starts falling on the umbrella, each drop will cause the colorful design to show through. Eventually when the whole umbrella is wet it will have morphed into the vibrant colorful version that you can see above. When the rain stops and the umbrella dries the colorful design will slowly fade back to white, ready for your next rainy adventure....  

 Green Exchanger

Homeowners! We have a BIG problem. There are 120 million homes in the U.S. and 80% have clothes dryers. Dryers have three types of heat loss: loss of heat generated, the removal of heated interior air, and the infiltration through the 4” vent line. The heat generated goes right-out-the-window! The whole time the dryer running it is removing the heated interior air, and when the dryer is not in use cold air comes back in the vent line. This is bad news. How bad? The average cost-of-use per home is $50/month, or $600/year. Gone. Then we pay again to generate the same amount of heat with the household heating system. We’re paying twice for the same amount of heat! It gets worse because this figure does not include the energy and money lost to the removal of heated interior air and the infiltration through the 4” vent line. 

The Green Exchanger provides a means to correct all three heat losses and allows for recovery and reuse of this heat source to supplement and lower household heating costs. This unit provides for filtration, heat exchange, and to precipitate condensation to allow for the recovery and reuse of the lost heat. This is not just Green, its sound Green-Economics. We’re currently paying twice and hurting the environment. This wasteful practice MUST be stopped!     

Report on Green Exchanger from Planet Eureka! International Innovation Network

Xerox Silver Ink

 
Xerox Scientists Develop "Silver Bullet" Needed to Replace Silicon Circuits with Low-Cost, Durable Plastic Xerox to jump-start industry commercialization by providing printed electronics materials that easily print on plastics, film and textiles.

With the development of a new silver ink, Xerox scientists have paved the way for commercialization and low-cost manufacturing of printable electronics. Printable electronics offers manufacturers a very low-cost way to add "intelligence" or computing power to a wide range of surfaces such as plastic or fabric. This development will aid the commercialization of new applications such as "smart" pill boxes that track how much medication a patient has taken or display screens that roll up to fit into a briefcase.

Xerox Scientists Develop Silver Ink to Print Plastic Circuits

Polymer Coating with Green Applications

A) Oil (clear liquid) is added to treated glass slide.  B) Water (red liquid) is then added and under cuts the oil.  C) with slight aggretation the oil floats on the water surface and is removed.  D) water fully wets the surface. 

DuBois Chemicals, Inc. of Cincinnati, Ohio has partnered with Dr. Jeffery Youngblood of Purdue University’s Material Science Department and the Purdue Research Foundation to complete the development and commercialization of an innovative material with several sustainable applications.  This new material, as reported in the New York Times, renders a surface easy oliophobic (oil hating) and hydrophilic (water loving).  The result is a surface that resists fogging and is easy to clean, and in some cases self-cleaning.  Less chemical, hot water, and labor will be needed to keep surfaces clean.  In addition to developing general purpose cleaners for institutional and possibly consumer use, DuBois is focused on applying this technology to specialty products that minimize the total cost of operation in the metal finishing, food, transportation, paper, and water treatment industries.  Preliminary results show potential use for use as filter and membrane treatments to increase the efficiency of oil/ water separation. 

Bruce Dunham, DuBois Chemical’s Innovation Manager, will be demonstrating the material and is interested in partnering with organizations that can help maximize the use of this incredible new material. We believe if your organization drills for, refines, transports, stores, uses oil, remediates, or cleans-up oil, you could benefit and DuBois is seeking your input.  

New York Time's Article "A Clear Coating, With Green Applications"

Zebra™ 3D Pressure Mapping System

The Zebra sensor and an example of a pressure map output from one of the sensors

SensorTech developed the Zebra™ System as an outgrowth of its smart polymer sensor technology.  Prior to Zebra Systems, it was impractical to measure the distribution of pressure over a 3D surface area.  Zebra Sensors come in various thicknesses and spatial resolutions that can be flexed, machined, or thermoformed to conform to a given 3D surface area.  Discrete, real-time pressure measurements can be transmitted and recorded to a computer or data acquisition system.

Custom products under development include various medical, automotive, athletic, military and security applications.

This technology R&D has required novel approaches to advanced materials, electronics/programming and manufacturing as it has progressed from university research to the marketplace.

SensorTech Technology and Product Updates  

One of many products based on HoloTouch technology and one of the touchless switches installed at Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Widely patented touchless, holographic HoloTouch® HMI technology is easily customized to your electronic or electro-mechanical device.  Owned by HoloTouch, Inc. , this technology allows people to intuitively control devices by simply passing a finger through holographic images floating freely in the air – no moving parts to fail under use and nothing to actually touch, yielding superior durability and hygiene advantages.  HoloTouch offers licenses of its technology as well as any services needed to create prototypes or product in volume.

Readeo

Readeo offers an ever-growing library of online children's books—with one fantastic twist: read them together whether you're in the same room or thousands of miles apart.

 By combining children's books with video chat, Readeo makes it possible for geographically separated family and friends to keep on the same page with the children in their lives.

Military parents can tuck in their kids at night, grandparents who live far away can tell a favorite bedtime story, divorced parents can share bedtime duties, and parents traveling on business don’t have to miss out on those important moments with their children.

With big-name publishers including Simon & Schuster, Candlewick Press, and others, Readeo is building a bridge between a traditionally off-line activity like storytime, and new-school technology—in a way that connects families across across the decidedly digital world we live in.

Virtual Runway™ and Black Dress Design Studio

Using web 3.0 and virtual worlds to solve real world issues FRI has developed new technology infrastructures using web 3.0 and virtual worlds, that will reduce related fashion industry production landfill wastes and by-products to up to 1/3 over traditional fashion production methods.

Virtual Runway™ recreates the look and feel of a live show with music, 360-degree views of fully-customizable virtual models and both immersive and video capabilities. 

Black Dress Design Studio is the only virtual world-based product design and development for the apparel and soft consumer goods industries.  Easy to learn and use, Black Dress allows fashion designers to capitalize on the way they natively think about their creative work, and to quickly and easily create 3-D models of their designs.  The Black Dress Design Studio itself does all the heavy lifting of the necessary technical design, and concurrently generates a detailed, factory ready technical specification - but only if the design itself can be manufactured by a mass production factory. 
Black Dress saves up to 75% of the design cycle time, slashes wasteful physical samples by as much as 65%, and enables the designer to easily and simply communicate her detailed design vision to her factory of choice.

The TungstenW Carbon Fiber Biometric Wallet

Hard cased, tamper resistant device that protects your cash, credit cards and privacy.  Carbon Fiber is five times stronger than steel.  First used in the aircraft industry, carbon fiber is increasingly being used in many high end products.   

Biometric Reader

The biometric fingertip reader allows only your enrolled fingertip to access the TungstenW Biometric Wallet.  This feature keeps the contents private and secure from potential thieves and others.

Bluetooth Enabled

Easily pairs with your cell phone (including Apple iPhone1) via Bluetooth for added security.  An alarm will sound on both the wallet and your cell phone if you leave either behind and a separation occurs of more than 10’ between the two devices.   You can react immediately to a potential loss or theft.

RFID Protection

The Carbon Fiber case minimizes the risk of electronic theft by preventing scanning of credit cards, passports, driver’s license and other identification cards that contain RFID chips.

1Official Apple Application developer.

HoverCore™

The HoverflyPro flight controller system is based on our core Sensor Data Fusion technology called HoverCoreTM. Lots of data from accelerometers and gyroscopes is useless no matter how fast you sample if the data is not fused effectively to provide stable flight control outputs. Our propriety HoverCore algorithm utilizes parallel processing architecture to independently collect senor data. Then the algorithm utilizes custom digital filtering to extract only the necessary variables from all available data. The flight control algorithm then utilizes the data it needs to generate Pulse-Width-Modulated (PWM) signals to accurately control external ESCs.  All of this happens hundreds of times a second to provide reliable and highly stable flight control.