This Display Is a Quantum Leap

 
Quantum-dot displays promise to be cheap, beautiful, 
and energy efficient, but some major hurdles remain.

One of the first working full-color quantum-dot displays was shown off at a conference this week by a startup company that is working to commercialize the technology.

Quantum dots are nanoparticles made of inorganic materials that very efficiently emit a specific color of light (depending on the size of the dot) when they're excited either by a beam of light or by an electrical current. Quantum-dot displays promise low power consumption and rich, beautiful color, much like organic light-emitting diode displays (OLEDs). But QD Vision, the company that demonstrated the prototype display, believes they will also prove less expensive to make than OLEDs at the huge scales favored by display manufacturers.

This week, QD Vision demonstrated a four-inch quantum-dot light-emitting diode (QLED) display at the Society for Information Display's Display Week conference in Los Angeles. The company's cofounder and chief technology officer, Seth Coe-Sullivan, cautions that the display is an early prototype, but says it rivals the efficiency and quality of colors in an OLED display. He says there are some engineering hurdles that the company will have to clear before bringing the display to market, which will take three to five years. Reaction to the company's demonstration was positive but cautious.

The hope is that QLED will provide a sharper, more power-efficient alternative to today's dominant technology, liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), without being more expensive. The way LCDs work—by filtering light from a backlight to create colored subpixels—entails throwing out some light, thereby dimming the picture and wasting power. OLEDs, which use electrical current to excite materials that emit red, green, and blue light, have rich, bright colors and waste less power. But so far, OLEDs can't compete on price. This is because the display industry makes LCDs on huge glass panels, sometimes as big as a garage door, and then slices them up into whatever size is needed, for economies of scale. OLEDs can't be made at this scale—too much material gets wasted, and it's too expensive.

Companies that make OLED materials and manufacturing equipment, including Dupont and Kateeva, are working on methods for printing these devices at large scales with less waste, but Coe-Sullivan hopes printed QLED displays will leapfrog over OLEDs.

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Software Transforms Photos Into 3-D Models

 
Photofly uses overlapping photos to create high-detail
3-D copies of anything from bugs to Mount Rushmore.

Ever wished you could take an object in a museum home with you instead of settling for some photos?
The design software company Autodesk will release free software next week that could turn those snapshots into your own personal replica from a 3-D printer. Called Photofly, the software extracts a detailed 3-D model from a collection of overlapping photos.
"We can automatically generate a 3-D mesh at extreme detail from a set of photos—we're talking the kind of density captured by a laser scanner," says Brian Mathews, who leads a group at the company known as Autodesk Labs. Unlike a laser scanner, though, the equipment needed to capture the 3-D rendering doesn't cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. An overlapping set of around 40 photos is enough to capture a person's head and shoulders in detailed 3-D, he says.
The software, which will be available for Windows computers only, uploads a user's photos to a cloud server for processing and then downloads the results. The 3-D rendering can be viewed as a naked wire-frame model of the captured scene or a version with realistic surface color and texture. The colored models can also be shared for viewing in an iPad app, while the underlying wire frame can be exported in standard 3-D design formats for editing.
Models produced from a well-taken set of photos will be spatially accurate to within 1 percent or less, says Mathews, high enough quality to be used for professional design projects. "You could send that model from your photos to a 3-D printing service to physically re-create what you saw, perhaps at a different scale," says Mathews. In recent years, the cost of 3-D printers and printing services has fallen, with hobbyist machines like the MakerBot and consumer services such as ShapeWays that will print out 3-D models in a variety of ceramics, plastics, and metals.

Video

Autodesk's is the first consumer software capable of producing models accurate enough for 3-D printing, says Mathews. Similar projects, such as Microsoft Research's PhotoSynth, and an app based on the same technology that enables a cell phone to convert its photos into 3-D models, only capture 3-D data good enough to add an extra dimension to the content of photos, says Mathews. The same was true of a previous version of Photofly. "Generating accurate geometry from what we see in the photos is far more exciting."
Photofly runs through several steps to distill an accurate model from a collection of photos. First, it calculates the position from which each photo was taken by triangulating based on the different views of certain distinctive features. Once the camera positions have been determined, the software goes through a second round of more detailed triangulation, using contrasting views to generate a detailed 3-D surface for everything visible.
"This technology and the popularity of cameras and cell phones means there are now a couple billion sensors out there that anyone can use to create 3-D content," says Yuan-Fang Wang, a computer scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and founder of VisualSize, which is working on technology similar to Autodesk's.
Wang says the technology has become robust and simple enough for the consumer market, but there are still limitations that may frustrate some people. "An object cannot be too plain, because the software has nothing to compare, or too shiny, and it cannot be moving much," he says. Because few ordinary users have experienced the technology yet, it is still unclear how people will handle that, or just which applications will prove popular, Wang adds.
Photofly can be used on objects large and small, from bugs to buildings, and can also handle photos from different sources. A video shows a model of Mount Rushmore created from a variety of online images taken by many different people.
After seeing a demo of the technology at the TED conference earlier this year, paleontologist Louise Leakey has been using Photofly in Kenya to capture early human bones at high detail. The models provide her team with a way to collaborate with distant colleagues and to record accurate measurements of specimens, such as the spacing and size of teeth, without actually handling them (see a video of a specimen captured by Leakey).
Autodesk will also explore using Photofly to capture 3-D models of buildings to speed retrofits designed to boost their energy efficiency. "You can take a bunch of photos and very quickly have a model to make the key measurements needed to figure out what needs to be done to make a building greener," says Mathews.

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A Worldwide Nuclear Slowdown Continues

 
Aftershocks from Fukushima shake political confidence
in nuclear—and provide a boost for renewables.

The bad news from Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant continues to reverberate around the world, dimming nuclear energy's future and boosting the fortunes of low-carbon power sources. Last week's decision by Japan's prime minister to scrap plans for 14 new reactors is just the latest sign of a global nuclear slowdown, and the technology faces renewed scrutiny even in countries with pronuclear governments, including the U.S., China, and France.

"Due to both the time needed for integrating the lessons learned from Fukushima in new reactor designs and the likely hesitations of the public and decision makers, the deployment of nuclear power will be delayed," says Jan Horst Keppler, principal economist at the Nuclear Energy Agency, a Paris-based arm of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

What has not changed, says Keppler, are the drivers that were fueling new reactor construction: concerns over energy security and climate change. In the past, nuclear technology has been perceived as the cheapest option. But with nuclear on hold, governments are looking to accelerate renewable-energy development, and the latest cost estimates from the U.S. Energy Information Agency provide support for that position.

The agency's Annual Energy Outlook, released this month, estimates that new reactors starting up in 2016 will produce power at a cost of $114 per megawatt-hour. Onshore wind turbines, geothermal, and biomass power plants all beat that price, according to the agency's figures (as do gas-fired power plants that capture and sequester their carbon emissions underground).

The potential for renewable energy technologies to scale, meanwhile, was affirmed this month by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which issued a special report predicting that renewable sources could satisfy up to 80 percent of global energy needs by 2050.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also highlighted nuclear energy's comparatively troubled position last week with his call for a high-level debate on nuclear energy's costs, risks, and benefits. "Twenty-five years after Chernobyl and in the aftermath of Fukushima, I believe it is high time to take a hard look at ... strengthening nuclear safety and security," he told reporters at a press conference in Geneva last Wednesday. The discussion by world leaders is scheduled for September's General Assembly meeting in New York.

Germany is also moving to shut down nuclear plants and transition to greater reliance on renewable energy. In 2010, Chancellor Angela Merkel pushed legislation through the parliament extending the operating lives of Germany's 17 nuclear plants—then slated to be shut down by 2022—by an average of 12 years. But Merkel quickly reversed course after Fukushima, ordering the immediate shutdown of Germany's seven oldest plants. Her government is now working to pass legislation that would shutter those plants permanently and reinstate phase-out plans for the rest. "Merkel wants this issue out of the political limelight before the summer recess," says Andreas Kraemer, director of the Berlin and Washington-based Ecologic Institute, an environmental think tank.

The German government has already identified renewable energy as the future, setting plans to boost renewable generation to 50 percent of electrical consumption by 2030 (from 17 percent last year) and to 80 percent by 2050. But which form of renewables will win is still in question.

Under last summer's legislation, a new nuclear-power tax was expected to subsidize large offshore wind farms. But with last summer's nuclear extension on the rocks, Merkel's legislation could now shift support to more distributed forms of renewable energy, says Kraemer. This includes onshore wind turbines and power generation from biogas (methane produced from manure, food wastes, and biomass).

Germany's accelerated nuclear phase-out may also threaten plans in Eastern Europe by undermining support for subsidies. As Kraemer notes, German taxpayers contribute a third of European development funds, and may balk at contributing to new reactors on their borders.

The deepening nuclear debate over nuclear energy in France, meanwhile, may have global implications. France generates 80 percent of its electricity with nuclear, and its state-owned firms are world leaders: Paris-based EDF is the largest operator of nuclear power plants worldwide, while Areva is the largest provider of nuclear services and technology.

Even France's allegiance to nuclear appears to be loosening, however. Late last month, Paris-based oil and gas multinational Total announced that it would invest $1.38 billion in solar power by purchasing 60 percent of U.S.-based solar-panel producer SunPower.

EDF says it is moving forward with plans to build a reactor in Normandy. But even EDF is hedging its bets, observes Emmanuel Guérin, a climate and energy expert at Sciences Po, France's elite university of political science and economics. As Total was buying SunPower last month, EDF was securing the remaining shares that it didn't own in subsidiary EDF Renewable Energies. "It's clearly an indication that EDF doesn't want to be outside the bet on renewable energies," says Guérin.

At the same time, France's Socialist Party, previously staunchly pronuclear, is debating its position. Several candidates vying to take on Nicolas Sarkozy in the presidential election next year have called for France to begin shifting from nuclear to renewable energy.

China and the U.S. are also showing signs of strain over the issue. China's government has temporarily suspended approval of new reactors, and is talking about shifting the balance between its nuclear and renewable energy plans. Chinese officials have said that they may double their goal for solar power from five gigawatts to 10 gigawatts by 2015.

In the U.S., nuclear investment plans are wavering. Last month, NRG Energy wrote off its $481 million investment in a two-reactor project in Texas, blaming potential delays in nuclear approvals and competition from power generators fueled by cheap natural gas. This month, an Areva subsidiary halted construction of a facility in Newport News, Virginia, that was to forge large components for nuclear reactors, while North Carolina legislators rejected a bill to streamline the financing of new reactors. In a conference call with financial analysts earlier this month, the CEO of Duke Energy, a utility proposing to build new reactors in the state, blamed the nuclear crisis in Japan for the political defeat.

Japan is taking the hardest look at nuclear, as Tokyo Electric Power—Fukushima Daiichi's operator—continues to wrestle with dangerous radiation levels in its bid to cool the reactors and spent fuel pools at its stricken plant. Last week it was revealed that nuclear fuel in one reactor had melted and sunk to the reactor's bottom, and that Tokyo Electric Power had withheld radioactivity readings in the first days of the crisis, keeping the government and public in the dark and putting plant workers at risk.

Japan's prime minister, Naoto Kan, is looking to renewable power and energy efficiency to replace some nuclear energy. But in the short term, he faces a power-supply crisis that got worse last week when two reactors at the coastal Hamaoka nuclear plant, southwest of Tokyo, were shut down at Kan's request pending tsunami-protective upgrades.

Chubu Electric Power, the utility that owns Hamaoka, may struggle to meet peak demand this summer without the reactors, which generate over 3,600 megawatts of power. Tokyo Electric is counting on 1,000 megawatts from Chubu to meet its own summer peak, and even with that help, it is facing at least a 5,000-megawatt supply shortage this summer, according to the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan.

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A Car Battery at Half the Price

 
A startup hopes to commercialize anovel 
design that features fluid electrodes.

Last year, the battery startup A123 Systems spun out another company, called 24M, to develop a new kind of battery meant to make electric vehicles go farther and cost less. Now a research paper published in Advanced Energy Materials reveals the first details about how that battery would work. It also addresses the challenges in bringing the battery to market.

A big problem with the lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids is that only about 25 percent of the battery's volume is taken up by materials that store energy. The rest is made up of inactive materials, such as packaging, conductive foils, and glues, which make the batteries bulky and account for a significant part of the cost. 

24M intends to greatly reduce the inactive material in a battery.  According to estimates in the new paper, its batteries could achieve almost twice the energy densities of today's vehicle battery packs. Batteries with a higher energy density would be smaller and cheaper, which means electric and hybrid cars would be less expensive. The paper estimates that the batteries could cost as little as $250 per kilowatt hour—less than half what they cost now.

A conventional battery pack is made up of hundreds of cells. Each cell contains a stack of many thin, solid electrodes. These electrodes are paired with metal foil current collectors and separated from each other by plastic films. Increasing the energy storage requires adding more layers of electrode material—which in turn requires more layers of metal foil and plastic film.

24M's design makes it possible to increase energy storage without the extra metal foil and plastic film. The key difference is that the electrodes are not solid films stacked in a cell, but sludge-like materials stored in tanks—one for the positive electrode material and another for the negative electrode.

The materials are pumped from the tanks into a small device, where they move through channels carved into blocks of metal. As this happens, ions move from one electrode to the other through the same kind of separator material used in a conventional battery. Electrons make their way out of the material to an external circuit. In this design, increasing energy storage is as simple as increasing the size of the storage tanks—the device that allows the electrodes to interact stays the same size. The design also does away with the need to wire together hundreds of cells to achieve adequate energy storage.

The new battery is similar to something called a flow battery, in which two electrolytes are pumped past each other. But conventional flow batteries are about 10 times larger than the new design because they use dilute energy storage solutions, which makes them 

The researchers, led by Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor of materials science at MIT, and a founder of both A123 Systems and 24M, tested various materials for the electrodes, including lithium cobalt oxide, which is commonly used in laptop batteries. They demonstrated that the device can charge and discharge at the rates needed in electric vehicles, Chiang says.
The paper also describes how the researchers address one of the biggest challenges of the design: pulling the electric charge out of the sludge. In an ordinary lithium ion cell, the electrons make their way by jumping through the connected conductive particles in the solid electrode until they reach a current collector. In the new battery, the electrons won't flow through the electrolyte. So Chiang and colleagues mixed nanoscale carbon particles into the sludge; the particles spontaneously form interconnected networks in the fluid to provide pathways for the electrons to escape.

Challenges remain before the battery can be commercialized. The electrical conductivity is still about 100 times less than it should be in a practical system, Chiang says. He's also working on increasing the concentration of active materials in the sludge.

Jeff Dahn, a professor of physics and chemistry at Dalhousie University, notes that to achieve the power levels needed to propel a car, the electrochemical cell would still need to be large: the separator material would have to cover an area of about three meters by four meters. It could be cut into manageable pieces and stacked up, but this could make the system complicated, and even with this approach the cell could be bulky, he says.

"We're making good progress on the technology," says 24M CEO Throop Wilder. "The acceptance of the paper is strong validation of the fundamental principles that drive our development." 24M consists of about 20 employees, and has raised roughly $16 million.

"It's a very clever device," says Dahn. "I don't know if it will ever be more than an idea in a paper, but Chiang has surprised people before."

 

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Do Biofuels Reduce Greenhouse Gases?

 
A new study fuels the debate over 
the impact of growing crops for fuel.

Greenhouse-gas emissions from biofuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel, may be lower than many researchers have estimated, according to a new study. The findings could further fuel a debate over whether biofuels actually reduce greenhouse-gas emissions compared to gasoline, and if so, by how much.
Some recent studies have suggested that the indirect effects of biofuels production, such as higher food prices, could encourage farmers to clear forested land to grow more crops—thereby worsening climate change. At least one study suggested that the emissions resulting from such decisions would make biofuels—even advanced biofuels made from cellulosic materials such as switchgrass—worse for the environment than gasoline. These studies use economic analysis to predict the effect of future biofuels production on land use, while attempting to control for other factors that influence farmers, such as the amount of grain stocks on hand and changes in food demand.
The new study, to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Biomass and Bioenergy, uses analysis of historical data instead of economic models. It found no statistical correlation between changes in biofuel production in the U.S. from 2002 to 2007 and recorded changes in cropland use outside of the country. "There is no evidence for indirect land use change," says Bruce Dale, a professor of chemical engineering at Michigan State University, who led the study.
Jason Hill, a professor of bioproducts and biosystems engineering at the University of Minnesota, says that it's not surprising that the study found no correlation, given that there are many competing forces that influence crop use. "It's difficult to distinguish the signal from the noise," he says.
Indeed, another study, due out in July, draws different conclusions from an analysis of historical data, says Wallace Tyner, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University, who is one of this study's authors. He says that the data shows a large increase (27 million hectares) in the amount of land under cultivation for key crops from 2006 to 2011, a time when biofuels production rapidly increased. Most of the land was cultivated for corn, soybeans, and rapeseed, all biofuels crops. Tyner attributes the increase to biofuels production and factors such as growth in demand from China. But he says the only way to estimate how much of that increase in cropland was due to biofuels production would be to run an economic simulation. Using one such model, he recently estimated that the share of the increase from U.S. biofuels production was about 2 million hectares.
Given the lack of scientific consensus around the impacts of land use changes on greenhouse-gas emissions—and the likelihood that there will always be some uncertainty in the estimates—some researchers have recommended policies that account for a range of possible impacts.
They think, for example, that policymakers should weigh the risk that a biofuel will increase greenhouse-gas emissions against the risk of not using the biofuel, and using gasoline instead. This would resemble the way that regulators weigh the risks and benefits of new drugs, says Michael O'Hare, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley.
Others, including representatives of the biofuels industry, argue that policymakers should ignore the effect of land use change until there is better research. They also say that if indirect effects of biofuels are to be estimates, studies of indirect effects of gasoline production should also be considered when comparing gasoline and biofuels.
For example, a recent study suggested that factoring in the impact of land use changes from mining oil sands in Canada could increase estimates of carbon-dioxide emissions. Including such emissions could make gasoline look worse than it does now, and make biofuels look better.

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The Invisible iPhone

 
A new interface lets you keep your phone in 
your pocket and use apps or answer calls by
tapping your hand.

Over time, using your smart-phone touch screen becomes second nature, to the point where you can even do some tasks without looking. Researchers in Germany are now working on a system that would let you perform such actions without even holding the phone—instead you'd tap your palm, and the movements would be interpreted by an "imaginary phone" system that would relay the request to your actual phone.

The concept relies on a depth-sensitive camera to pick up the tapping and sliding interactions on a palm,  software to analyze the video, and a wireless radio to send the instructions back to the iPhone. Patrick Baudisch, professor of computer science at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, says the imaginary phone prototype "serves as a shortcut that frees users from the necessity to retrieve the actual physical device."

Baudisch and his team envision someone doing dishes when his smart phone rings. Instead of quickly drying his hands and fumbling to answer, the imaginary phone lets him simply slide a finger across his palm to answer it remotely.

The imaginary phone project, developed by Baudisch and his team, which includes Hasso Plattner Institute students Sean Gustafson and Christian Holz, is reminiscent of a gesture-based interface called SixthSense developed by Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry of MIT, but it differs in a couple of significant ways. First, there are no new gestures to learn—the invisible phone concept simply transfers the iPhone screen onto a hand. Second, there's no feedback, unlike SixthSense, which uses a projector to provide an interface on any surface. Lack of visual feedback limits the imaginary phone, but it isn't intended to completely replace the device, just to make certain interactions more convenient.

Last year, Baudisch and Gustafson developed an interface in which a wearable camera captures gestures that a person makes in the air and translates them to drawings on a screen.

For the current project, the researchers used a depth camera similar to the one used in Microsoft's Kinect for Xbox, but bulkier and positioned on a tripod. (Ultimately, a smaller, wearable depth camera could be used.) The camera "subtracts" the background and tracks the finger position on the palm. It works well in various lighting conditions, including direct sunlight. Software interprets finger positions and movements and correlates it to the position of icons on a person's iPhone. A Wi-Fi radio transmits these movements to the phone.

"It's a little bit like learning to touch type on a keyboard, but without any formal system or the benefit of the feel of the keys," says Daniel Vogel, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo. Vogel wasn't involved in the research. He notes that "it's possible that voice control could serve the same purpose, but the imaginary approach would work in noisy locations and is much more subtle than announcing, 'iPhone, open my e-mail.' "

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Bing Gets Friendlier with Facebook

Starting tomorrow, recommendations from your Facebook friends will become a regular part of Web search results, at least if you use Microsoft's Bing search engine. A slew of new Bing features will use Facebook data to make its results more personalized, and to create opportunities to discuss what you are searching for with friends.
 
Search me: Bing will let users ask their Facebook friends for shopping advice through its search results. 
Credit: Microsoft

"All the stuff we've deployed previously for Web search doesn't acknowledge the human, social side of our users," says Stefan Weitz, director of Bing search. "We were looking at it like engineers, and built a purely logic-based experience," Weitz says. Web search should support people's instincts to consult and discuss things with other people. A survey of Bing users found that 90 percent would talk with a friend before they acted on any information they found when searching online for product information, he says.

The new features will push Bing ahead of Google in the race to make search more social. Last month, Google launched +1, its own close analogue of the Like button, with the intention of using it to shape search results. However, +1 is off to a slow start, because it is not hitched to a large social network, giving users little motivation to use it.

Bing's new features primarily use data that comes from the clicks on Facebook's Like buttons. These buttons appear on sites across the Web. The Like button started as a low-cost way to communicate recommendations with friends online, but in recent years, it's been adapted by Facebook to drive the ambitious "open graph" project, whose goal is tointertwine Facebook's network of connections with the Web.

Bing has been using data on the likes of users' friends in its results since October, adding a box featuring relevant links liked by Facebook friends to some search results. Now these likes will have a much more visible effect on search results. The profile pictures of friends will appear next to search results that they have liked. Those likes will also be used to promote pages that otherwise may not have appeared on the first page of results.

For some searches, Bing will also use likes from people who aren't your Facebook friends to recommend popular content. "This is us tapping into latent signals that exist across the Web, but haven't been used for search before," says Weitz.

Other new features are intended to make search into a communication tool that can connect you with existing Facebook contacts or new ones. Searching for people—even those you are not linked with directly—may now return a short bio taken from Facebook profiles. This could include information like the person's location, school, and employer.

When a user searches for a city, Bing will highlight friends that Facebook says are located nearby. This presumably would allow you to connect with people who might have recommendations about places to stay or visit, or friends you might want to inform about your visit.

Bing's product search engine will also include new Facebook features. It will be possible to post a short list of possible purchases to your Facebook wall, to encourage friends to help you choose. "This turns search into a conversation, and makes it a less passive experience," says Weitz.

Bing's new features can only access information if your Facebook privacy settings will allow it.

Research on neurobiology and social psychology helped guide Bing's new direction, says Weitz, who claims the approach will help make decision making easier. Traditional Web search triggers an unhelpful phenomenon known as "decision quicksand," says Weitz. The term describes how people come to think of decisions as more important than they really are because of the complexity of weighing all the evidence. "When you use traditional Web search, your brain thinks everything is really important because there are half a million results you are told are relevant and have to deal with," says Weitz. "What we're doing now is using social signals to simplify that so your brain isn't tricked."

 

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A Touch Screen that Plays Sticky

The touch screen uses high-frequency vibrations to create a thin layer of air between the glass and the user's finger. The finger slips easily over the layer of air but catches slightly on the glass when the vibrations are turned off. Varying the vibrations as the user's finger moves can cause different parts of the screen to feel slick or sticky.

"It adds a feeling of realism," says Vincent Lévesque, a computer scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. "It's more physical. It feels like there are real buttons that actually exist." Lévesque and colleagues demonstrated a prototype of the device at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Vancouver this week.

The screen is one of a number of new devices that offer complex tactile feedback. Some mobile phones on the market, for example, use vibrations to generate a click or some other tactile signal. But the new device, called a tactile pattern display (T-PaD), is meant to do more than just buzz or click, says Ed Colgate, a mechanical engineer at Northwestern University whose team developed the touch screen.

"We're not just about giving signals," he says. "We're about giving physical sensations like the experience you have when you interact with the real world."

The T-PaD uses piezoelectric discs positioned against a glass plate. When a current is run through the discs, they vibrate at 26 kilohertz and transmit the vibrations to the glass. Lasers track the motion of a user's finger and vary the vibrations accordingly.

For instance, when a finger runs across a button, the vibrations will slow or stop, giving the impression that that part of the screen is sticky. If you drag a file into a folder, you'll feel the screen get sticky as your finger hits the target. Turning a wheel or moving a scroll bar on the screen, you'll feel your finger move over tactile "tick marks." Turning the vibrations on and off very quickly—for instance, every time a finger moves a millimeter across the screen—can make part of the screen feel rough, as if it is covered with a grating.

In a paper presented at the ACM conference, Lévesque and colleagues showed that the tactile feedback allowed people to complete tasks slightly more quickly. The users also generally liked the touch screen, although some complained that their fingers became tired after using it for a while.

"It's actually quite magic when you touch it. It's really neat," says Vincent Hayward, a mechanical engineer at Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, who is familiar with the device. However, he warns that the approach has problems—the prototype is bulky and uses a lot of power. It also provides feedback only while a finger is moving. Tapping on the screen doesn't produce any special sensation. He says that he expects the tactile displays to eventually make their way into consumer electronics. "There's a lot of engineering to be done," admits Colgate. "But it is by no means theoretically impossible."

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Hold that Call, and Focus on the Road

Microsoft researchers could help prevent accidents by automatically putting calls on hold when the road demands more attention. The researchers found that the system could significantly reduce the risk of an accident while driving.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), using a cell phone while driving impairs a driver's reaction time by as much as having a blood alcohol concentration at the legal limit of .08 percent. Most U.S. states have banned the use of handheld phones while driving, and more than half forbid novice drivers and school bus drivers from any cell phone use at all while driving.

Shamsi Iqbal and Yun-Cheng Ju at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, and Ella Mathews at Caltech had 18 pairs of volunteers use a highly realistic driving simulator. One person from each pair was asked to drive a virtual route, while the other asked them questions over a speakerphone. The virtual route featured  construction zones, heavy traffic, and busy residential areas.

In part of the experiment, when the road conditions became tricky—for example, when traffic became denser—the system would cut in, giving an audio alert to both the driver and the caller.  If they failed to stop talking, it would place the conversation on hold. The researchers found that with the system in use, the number of errors made by drivers decreased dramatically, from once every 1.4 minutes to once every 7.1 minutes—a rate even lower than the rate for drivers who weren't on the phone but received no warning.

"This suggests that inventions may not only make driving safer while conversing, but may make driving safer, period," says Iqbal. The results were presented in Vancouver this week at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

The technology needed to automatically detect trouble spots on the road is still in development, says Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft Research scientist who led the study. "The eventual idea is to have a system that can continue to monitor speed and location with GPS and compute forthcoming driving risk based on prior statistics on each roadway and on the current context," he says.

Horvitz and colleagues are developing such a system using traffic accident data from the NHTSA and local authorities. "We splatted that data onto the road network to generate a heat map of trouble spots by densities of points of accidents and fatalities," he says.  "We'd like to one day add data on current traffic conditions," he adds. Horvitz says some of the technology could perhaps be incorporated into a mobile app so that anyone could use it.

There is a lot of interest in developing technologies to address the problem of driver distraction. "People are under tremendous pressure to work as much as they can, and they see driving as wasted time," says Paul Green head of driver distraction at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor. "So if they can work by talking to someone on the phone while driving, then they will just do it."

Having a system that alerts drivers when necessary is less likely to be ignored, says Green. But the flip side is that drivers may become complacent.

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Google to Debut Chromebooks Next Month

Next month, Google will attempt to reinvent the personal computer as little more than a browser and a screen and a keyboard. On June 15, the first lightweight Chromebook laptops, which run the company's Web-centric operating system, Chrome OS, will be available to buy from Samsung and Acer. Google hopes that every category of computer user—home users, businesses, and educational institutions—will buy in to a vision of computing that does away with locally installed software and instead accesses everything through a Web browser.

Google previewed Chrome OS late last year, and gave out notebooks designed to run the operating system in December 2010.

Samsung will sell a laptop with a 12.1-inch screen for $429 dollars, or $499 with built-in 3G wireless. Acer's more lightweight 11.6-inch Chromebook will also be available in two versions, the cheapest being $349. See Google's Web page about the Chromebooks.

Google's product manager for Chrome OS, Sundar Pichai, announced the plans at the final day of the company's annual I/O conference in San Francisco. Pichai suggested that the new Chromebooks will eliminate many of the headaches that users associate with personal computers. "Just to spend your time on the Web today," Pichai said, "you have to deal with all of the legacy decisions made about operating systems in the last 30 years." That means dealing with slow startup times, nagging software  upgrades, and security problems, he said. "We wanted to distill [the PC] down to nothing but the Web."

The two new computers being introduced next month will power on almost instantly, said Pichai, and offer a much smoother experience. "Every time you boot up, you're up and running within eight seconds, and when you open the lid on a sleeping Chromebook, you're connected to the Web faster than you can move your fingers to the keyboard."

Throwing out large parts of the operating system also enables longer, cell-phone-like battery life that lasts all day, he said. Pichai even claimed that a Chromebook purchased next month will become more powerful over time. "Computers are normally great when you first install, but then performance degrades over time," he said. "But because a Chromebook upgrades itself automatically, in a few months your Chromebook will be even faster."

Chrome OS shares the code it uses to handle Web pages with Google's Chrome browser, which is automatically updated to make it perform faster. Pichai showed a version of the popular phone and tablet game Angry Birds, which ran smoothly through the browser following recent improvements to Chrome's handling of animations.

The predecessor to the two computers announced today, a prototype called the Cr-48, was sent to hundreds of thousands of people who volunteered to test the hardware as part of a pilot program. Google's willingness to share an early version of Chrome OS revealed some of the drawbacks of Google's simplified approach to the PC.

Some of the issues identified through the pilot have been fixed for Chrome OS's commercial debut: the devices have a file manager and can handle storage devices like USB drives and digital cameras; they can play MP3 music files and video files downloaded from the Web; problems with the trackpad's performance have also been resolved.

Yet some limitations remain. Google has developed technology that allows websites and services to operate offline, but few providers have taken advantage of them. Even Google's Gmail, calendar, and document-editing Web apps won't work offline until later this summer. Printing using a Chromebook is possible, but is significantly more complicated than with a conventional computer.

Google will make the new Chromebooks available to businesses and educational institutions next month, via a subscription package that bundles leased computers with support. Business customers will pay $28 per user per month, while the education package will be just $20 per month. Chrome's security features—all data on a Chromebook is encrypted by default—and its simplicity compared to a conventional machine may be major selling points to organizations that must juggle hundreds or thousands of machines. At I/O, Pichai also previewed a desktop Chrome OS device—dubbed a Chromebox—made by Samsung that will be targeted at businesses and can drive multiple monitors.

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