MIT undergrad Ben Gulak’s Cambridge-based startup, BPG Inc., has redesigned its electric unicycle — the Uno.
Gulak told Popular Science the Uno now has the ability to transform from a Segway-like configuration with two side-by-side wheels to a more recognizable motorcycle mode. The changes were made to make the self-balancing bike a safer ride.
Just in time for the holidays, BPG is taking $1,500 down payments on the bike now.
Fake newspaper The Onion reports MIT’s Mad Science Research Center’s previous estimates on the debut of its corpse-reanimation technology were about 10 years off.
More New England technology news from the Onion:
Google released their list of fastest rising search terms for 2009 — nationally, Michael Jackson took the top spot. Jacko was followed by some unsurprising terms — Facebook, Twitter, Lady Gaga, Windows 7 — and some things I don’t know what they are — “tuentro,” “sanalika,” “dantri.com.vn” and “torpedo gratis.” Even searching those words just now didn’t really help. I might just need more coffee.
Local results don’t make much more sense. At No. 1, we have “BU student link,” which I figured was about BU student/accused prostitute killer Philip Markoff, but is instead an actual Boston University student services web site.
No. 2: “eCommons.” This one also has nothing to do with killing anybody, and is also a college student service web site — Harvard Medical School’s this time. We might have too many college kids around here.
At No. 3: “Gloucester Daily Times,” which I’ll bet shocked even the Gloucester Daily Times. This is the year after the 2008 Time Magazine story about the “pregnancy pact” that either happened or didn’t, and its interminable fallout.
“Restaurant Week” and “BHCC” at Nos. 3 and 4, respectively, seem reasonable enough, with the recession making expensive restaurants less, and community colleges more popular. “UMB.edu” follows at No. 6, which seems a little like calling someone to ask for their phone number.
“MBTA Commuter Rail,” “7News Boston,” “WBZ TV” and “Coolidge Corner Theater” finish off the list. Nothing weird there, but where’s “David Ortiz“? The guy had a season-opening slump that almost killed half the local population, and then had a positive drug test leaked. I don’t even know who you people are any more.
Business plan competiton season is in full swing — the MIT 100K’s Elevator Pitch Competition, and the Executive Summary Contest is getting started. Researcher/entrepreneur/business plan competition judge Vivek Wadhwa weighs in at TechCrunch, suggesting that losing business plan competitions may be better for startups than winning. Wadhwa calls the competitions a relic of the dot-com era, and compares winners to children whose parents praise them too much.
A quick scan of past winners backs up Wadhwa’s argument — the winners haven’t gone on to become huge successes, while Akamai, Harmonix and Brontes all lost.
Meanwhile, investor/entrepreneur/business plan competition judge Sim Simeonov says he disagrees with Wadhwa but adds his own criticism, saying the competitions move the target from creating a successful business to winning the competiton, and force judges to decide a winner without any kind of VC-style due diligence.
So what does all that mean for Rouzbeh Shahsavari, who recently won five grand for his nano-engineered concrete startup? Who knows? Above, watch Shahsavari possibly doom his startup by winning, and the other contestants ensure wild success by losing the $100k Elevator Pitch Contest last month.
Former UMass Lowell researcher Erin Rapacki has developed a robotic hand to help people in wheelchairs open doors. Rapacki designed the hand with an eye toward simplicity — it cost less $2,000 to make — but it can open 14 different types of doors.
Rapacki presented the project, which she worked on while at UMass, at the IEEE Robotics Conference in Woburn last week. In July, Rapacki left UMass for Mountain View, Calif.-based Anybots Inc., which is developing telepresence robots.
The MIT Media Lab’s Pranav Mistry recounted the history of his SixthSense project at TED India this week. SixthSense started when Mistry took the rollers out of two computer mice (mouses?), attached some pulleys, and made a glove-like hand-gesture interface. Moving through SixthSense’s evolution, Mistry talks about some Internet-synced sticky notes, pens that draw in three dimensions, Google maps that interact with physical objects, and other things that, if said by anyone else, would just be crazy talk.
From there, he explains how he inverted the process, in an effort to “paint the physical world with that digital information.” He started with a projector mounted on his bike helmet that would project pixels onto the physical world. He added a camera and the system eventually shrank down to the pendant we recognize as the current incarnation of SixthSense.
In the video, Mistry demonstrates the system by casually doing things that shouldn’t make any sense: Digitally painting on a physical wall, taking a photo of the Boston skyline by framing it with his index fingers and thumbs, dialing a phone number on numbers projected on his palm, watching video of President Obama’s MIT speech on a print newspaper; reading a tag cloud — “comedian,” “geek,” etc. — that appears on comedian/blogger Baratunde Thurston’s shirt when Mistry meets him; playing a video game on a piece of paper; and copying text and charts from the regular kind of paper and pasting them to his crazy, digital paper, just by picking it up and moving it.
Getting a jump on the year end-lists for 2009, Time has declared its Best Inventions of the Year. Some are impressive, some are scary, and many are things whose inclusion requires an inventive stretch of the definition of the word “invention.”
Before we get to that, only two of the inventions listed have local connections — an electric eye developed at MIT, and an electric microbe developed at UMass Amherst. Does Time know how many things get invented around here? I don’t either, but it’s a lot. I’m not sure how many would make the top 50 for a given year, but I’d imagine more than two. Have these people not seen the Happiness Hat? I was at MIT earlier this year and a robot made me ice cream in 30 seconds. That doesn’t rate?
Meanwhile, among the winners were: a paper airplane, a high-school football offense, and a method to Tweet by thought. All impressive, and they round out a 50-click editorial feature nicely, but cooler than SixthSense? One is a decision not to do something, one is a paper airplane, and one is the worst thing I’ve ever heard.
On the downside, the gas mask bra that won at the Ig Nobel awards a few months back was chosen as one of the five worst inventions of the year.
Tech Review takes a look at a robotic rehabilitation device developed by Northeastern’s Biomedical Mechatronics Laboratory. The NASA-inspired device — video here — is intended to help stroke victims regain muscle movement.
MIT spinout Myomo has developed similar technology, but ran into financial problems earlier this year. Earlier this year, MHT reported on similar technology being developed at MIT for people with cerebral palsy.
Some students at the University of Colorado-Boulder have taken a bunch of iRobot Roombas and made a live-action Pac-Man game.
The game isn’t just some nutty hack, either. The students made it to demonstrate developing for unmanned aerial vehicles. The Pac-Man Roomba is controlled by a player using a joystick — the ghosts are autonomous. The Pac-Man robot eats tape “pellets” along its path, including the special huge pellet that sends the ghost robots running in the other direction; and even acts out the death spiral Pac-Man does when he gets eaten.
This could open up a whole new cottage industry of robots jazzing up old games: PackBot Minesweeper, Predator-drone Space Invaders, Artaic Pictionary, Precision Urban Hopper Q-Bert, crazy robot baseball, Petman marathons, etc. Competitive BigDog/LittleDog racing at Wonderland could bring together animal activists, racing enthuisasts, the gaming industry, the tech community and maybe even the Nascar crowd. I’d like to see that industry networking event.
Pranav Mistry, of the MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group, is reportedly planning to release the code for his augmented reality system, SixthSense.
The computer system, which you wear around your neck, projects information on the world around you, which you can then manipulate with your hands. Pretty soon, you may be able to build your own for about $350. Mistry told a TED India panel this week he didn’t want to subject SixthSense to corporate whims.
After the jump, watch Fluid Interface Group director Patti Maes present the technology to the TED conference in March. (more…)
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