/ News
Electronic Skin Lights Up When Touched
Supple Skin: Built on plastic the new electronic skin contains arrays of pressure sensors, thin-film transistors, and organic LEDs.
A team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, has developed the first user-interactive “electronic skin” that responds to pressure by instantly emitting light.
“The goal is to use human skin as a model and develop new types of electronics that would enable us to interface with our environment in new ways,” explains Ali Javey, an electrical engineering and computer science professor at Berkeley and leader of the e-skin research team.
The electronic skin is made up of a network of sensors placed on thin plastic substrates that can spatially and temporarily map pressure. Javey describes the network as an array of 16 by 16 pixels, each one equipped with a carbon-nanotube thin-film transistor (TFT), a pressure sensor, and an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) on top. When the sensor detects touch, the TFT powers up the OLED, which then emits red, green, or blue light. The harder the pressure, the brighter the light will be. The end product is a thin, flexible material that can be placed on top of all sorts of surfaces.
Takao Someya, creator of a different type of electronic skin and an associate professor at the University of Tokyo’s Quantum Phase Electronics Center, was particularly impressed with the team’s use of carbon nanotubes. “One of their great achievements is to demonstrate feasibility of carbon nanotube field-effect transistors for large-area, flexible electronic applications,” he says.
Javey, who has been working on developing the e-skin for the past five years, has high hopes for his new material. He’d like to create user-interactive wallpaper or a dashboard that responds to cues such as the driver’s eye or body movements. When asked to describe how the interactive wallpaper would work, Javey referred to the scene in Minority Report in which Tom Cruise controls a computer by moving his hands. “That’s the direction we’re heading to—a new type of interfacing,” he says. “Getting rid of the keyboard, getting rid of display, and become in sync with our surroundings so that you don’t have these physical components sitting around. It’s part of the table; it’s part of the wall.”
In Javey’s proposed system, light sensors would read hand and body motions, and pressure sensors would respond to different degrees of touch. But there’s a good deal of work that must be done before we’ll be seeing interactive wallpaper, he says. “We know how to make complex systems on tiny silicon chips, but on plastic it’s a whole different story,” Javey says. “It’s still not a very complex system we have shown, but it’s still one of the most complex systems we have to date on plastic.” He adds that his team is interested in integrating light sensors as well as data-processing and wireless-communication capabilities onto the substrates.
“This is an inspiring development in the plastic device technology, which is likely to make many everyday experiences more stimulating,” says Nicholas Kotov, a professor at the University of Michigan who is working on flexible, stretchable electronics.
John Rogers, a materials science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says “the work illustrates the extent to which research in nanomaterials, once confined strictly to fundamental study on individual test vehicles, is now successfully moving toward sophisticated, macroscale demonstrator devices, with unique function. The results provide more evidence that the field is headed in the right direction.”
Source: http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/devices/electronic-skin-lights-up-when-touched
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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