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Sail Boats with Wings

0 comments By Kate Filed in competitions, design, technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , August 23rd, 2010 @ 10:21 am

Credit: Christophe Launay

In 2004, I had the privilege of visiting some Airbus aerospace engineers in Bristol, UK to see their latest project: a sail boat named Invictus. They had designed the catamaran with a  rigid sail–it looked and acted like an airplane wing–to compete in the international C-Class catamaran championships. It was quite a sight, seeing a sail that looked like it had been lopped off a jet and propped upright on a double-hulled boat.

Invictus didn’t win that competition, and it didn’t win the most recent one in 2007, but the team is going for it again. This week, the championship regatta was scheduled to kick off in Bristol, RI, but due to high winds the race has been postponed. When the winds let up, no doubt the teams from the UK, Canada, France, and the U.S. will hit the water and show what their boats are made of.

If you want to know more about this competition, check out my Gizmodo article here. I also wrote about the boats for The Economist in 2004. The story is here, but it’s behind a paywall, so I’ve pasted it below.

Winging it

The world’s most high-tech regatta, the Little America’s Cup, has just started

Dateline: BRISTOL

A BOAT in an aeroplane hangar is an odd sight. Odder still is that instead of having a floppy fabric sail, this vessel–a catamaran–sports a rigid wing which appears as though it has been chopped from an aeroplane, propped upright, and tethered to the hulls. But Invictus, as the boat is named, is not as out of place as it looks, for it was designed by aerospace engineers and will be sailed by John Downey, a retired Concorde pilot.

A so-called C-class catamaran, Invictus is Britain’s entry in the Little America’s Cup–a sailing competition being held off the coast of Rhode Island from September 16th to 26th. Invictus, and Ronstan, an Australian boat, will be trying to take the cup from the American defender, Cogito.

C-class catamarans are the whippets of the yachting world. The relaxed membership rules of the category (maximum dimensions and sail area are prescribed, but little else is) have made C-class cats an experimental designer’s dream. The result is vessels that can reach 30 knots (56kph) in a 15-knot wind–the sort of wind speed expected off the coast of Rhode Island at this time of year. In the proper America’s Cup, by contrast, competitors would be lucky to reach 10 knots in such conditions.

The chief feature that distinguishes a modern C-class from a normal catamaran is that solid, wing-like sail. Just as an aircraft wing provides lift when air flows past it as the plane flies, so a solid sail provides lift as the wind blows past it–except that the “lift” drives the vessel forwards, because the sail is held upright at an angle to the wind. It is this lift-like force that can carry a boat forward faster than the wind that is propelling it.

Such forward-directed lift is not unique to a solid sail. A fabric sail also works at least partly in this way (the billowed curve induced in the fabric by the wind acts as an aerofoil). But conventionally rigged vessels cannot travel as fast as C-cats because canvas, and its modern replacements, have disadvantages over solid sails.

First, unlike a fabric sail, a rigid sail does not need to waste time finding its shape before lift happens. Second, a fixed sail’s carefully designed shape produces lift at a much smaller angle to the wind than does a fabric sail. That means a C-class vessel can make small, rapid turns–an ideal feature for a race in which the boats zigzag their way up and down a fixed course.

Third, a rigid sail supports itself. That means the tension in the cables that attach it to the hulls is minimal. As a result, the hulls, and the bracing between them, do not need to be as strong (and therefore as heavy) as would otherwise be the case. Indeed, the vessel itself weighs little more than the two people who crew it.

Add flaps, which provide extra lift in gentle winds in the same way that they stop a plane from stalling when it is landing, and put a 15° twist in the sail to account for the fact that the wind at the top of a sail moves faster than the wind at the bottom, and you have the ultimate sailboat. Which of the three competitors is the ultimate ultimate will soon become clear.

Portrait of the Science Writer as a Young Woman

0 comments By Kate Filed in competitions, science, technology, writing Tagged with , , , , , , August 17th, 2010 @ 1:05 pm

A friend was going through some old papers and came across an article in the Kansas City Star about a local kid who made good by winning an internship at The Economist. Yup, that’s my smiling face! I was giddy! I couldn’t have asked for a more amazing introduction to writing about science.

So how am I doing with those interest and goals mentioned in the piece? Well, I’m definitely writing about solid-state lighting and foldable displays. I don’t have a book about the periodic table in the works, but I still like the idea. The big disappointment is that I’m not actually an astronaut right now. Yeah. That’s a dream that’s never going to die.

Clock Towers of San Francisco

0 comments By Kate Filed in Uncategorized, photography, technology, writing Tagged with , , , , , , , , , June 24th, 2010 @ 2:39 pm

In a departure from my normal high-tech writing ways, I’ve written a piece about antique clocks. The story was inspired by an antique clock repair shop a few blocks away from my apartment and its owner, a man named Dorian Clair. Dorian is the kind of guy who will answer all the questions you ask, and then go on to answer unasked ones as well. Before I knew it, he was telling me stories about the history of San Francisco’s tower clocks and how he takes care of them. It turns out that Dorian watches the clocks at the Ferry Building and the pendulum clock at UCSF Medical Center. He also built the clock in the tower that overlooks the Bay Bridge viaduct.

The piece is about my attempt to get him to take me up into these clock towers. In it, I include a smattering of clock work, clock history, and Dorian’s history. I had a fantastic time researching and writing this piece, and I’m happy to have it appear in the Bold Italic, a new online publication that features unique people, places, and things to do in San Francisco.

You can read the story, All Along the Watchtower, here: http://thebolditalic.com/kategreene/stories/268-all-along-the-watchtower

3D Television to Drive OLED Display Production?

1 comment By Kate Filed in Uncategorized, technology Tagged with , , , , , , May 26th, 2010 @ 12:16 pm

image

From the tone of the SID 2010 keynote from Sang-Soo Kim, VP of Samsung Mobile Display, the company is betting the public’s interest in 3D television will help create a market for bold and beautiful OLED displays*.

In the talk, Kim contrasted the 3D capabilities of active-matrix OLED (AMOLED) displays with those of LCDs, in particular playing up the fact that the “fast response” time of AMOLEDs is “a great benefit for 3D TV applications.”

I have mixed feelings about OLED displays and 3D being so closely tied together. While it’d be great to finally have affordable OLED screens–a technology that has been promised for years– I’m less than enthusiastic about the industry’s push for 3D.

I’ve tried 3D and don’t like it; something about it just doesn’t jive with my visual system, but that’s my personal issue. My objective concern in tying OLED displaysto 3D is that both  products and markets are untested. If 3D TVs don’t take off, what happens to the promise of OLED displays?

Even without the nose-punch gimmicks of 1950’s 3D films and with the advances in optics technology, there’s still reason to suspect that the 3D novelty will wear off, especially considering it makes some people physically ill.

From a Reuter’s story:

And while new digital 3D technology has made the experience more comfortable for many, for some people with eye problems, a prolonged 3D session may result in an aching head, they said.

“There are a lot of people walking around with very minor eye problems, for example a minor muscle imbalance, which under normal circumstances, the brain deals with naturally,” said Dr Michael Rosenberg, an ophthalmology professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

He said in a 3D movie, these people are confronted with an entirely new sensory experience.

“That translates into greater mental effort, making it easier to get a headache,” Rosenberg said in a telephone interview.

Regardless of the success of commercial 3D displays, Samsung has still made meaningful plans for AMOLED production. It has announced a $2.2 billion investment for a generation 5.5 fabrication facility, the type of plant that deposits OLEDs on pieces of glass big enough to make multiple laptop- and television-sized displays. According to Kim, the new facility will start mass production in 2011.

But to truly drive down the price of OLED displays and make them mainstream, manufacturers must produce a higher yield, which requires making more displays on larger pieces of glass. This will only come with generation 8 and 10 factories, and these are still years and billions of dollars of investment away. Samsung’s Kim is optimistic, though, and proclaimed, to the excitement of many attendees at SID2010, that AMOLEDs would be “mainstream technology for premium televisions by 2015.” I just hope forecast holds, with or without the success of 3D.

————–

*Some background on OLEDs: Organic light-emitting diodes were discovered in 1987, and first commercialized ten years later. They can be used to make ultrathin displays that are extraordinarily bright with whiter whites and darker darks than other types of screens. In an OLED display, each pixel emits its own light, as opposed to an LCD screen in which a backlight shines through some twenty layers of optics and filters to produce light.

The problem with OLEDs is their manufacturing. There have been some technical challenges in scaling up OLED displays to the size that makes it cost effective to invest billions of dollars in their production. Because of this, OLEDs are only used in mobile phones and slightly bigger form factors like this expensive  11-inch Sony display.

An Imaginary Interface

0 comments By Kate Filed in technology, video Tagged with , , , , , May 25th, 2010 @ 10:58 pm

Today, Technology Review is running a story of mine about a type of interface for mobile phones in which a person gestures with her hands instead of tapping buttons or icons. The gestures, which could trace simple line drawings like a graph or directions, for instance, are detected by a small camera and sent to the screen of the recipient of your call. It’s essentially a way of supplementing a phone conversation with gestures in the same way you would in a face-to-face conversation.  The project is pretty cool, and it may get more people thinking about how we will interact with devices when they shrink down to almost nothing (and lose their displays as a result).

The TR story is here. But I also wanted to include a video that illustrates the technology,  as well as a longer version of the written piece that I think provides a little more context to a reader.

The longer version of the TR story is below:

An Invisible Touch for a Screen-less Device

“Imaginary Interfaces” make it possible to interact with a mobile phone that doesn’t have a screen.

Kate Greene

For better or for worse, the main way to interact with a mobile phone is to look at the phone and tap it with your fingers. This isn’t always the most practical approach, however, as it requires focused visual attention. In addition, it limits the size of the device: it must be at least big enough for a person to see without strain and to press buttons and icons without ambiguity. But some researchers are exploring new ways to interact with mobile devices that could allow the gadgets to continue to shrink to the point where they become a part of our clothing or accessories.

One project, called Imaginary Interfaces, has been proposed by Patrick Baudisch, professor of computer science at the Hasso-Plattner Institute in Postdam, Germany and his research student, Sean Gustafson. The main idea is that a person can augment a phone conversation with someone—provide them with a rudimentary drawing of a chart or map, for instance—by simply tracing lines and curves with their fingers in the air. It’s similar to what a person might do in a face-to-face conversation, but the difference is that a small video recorder and microprocessor captures and analyzes the hand gestures, and, via a wireless connection, sends a replicated drawing on a recipient’s computer display.

“Screen devices require a certain minimum size,” says Baudisch, with the limiting factor being human eyesight.  But unlike a device with a screen or even a touch screen, a device that runs an imaginary interface could, Baudisch says, fit into the button of a shirt and be embedded invisibly into clothing. He and Gustafson have built a prototype of an Imaginary Interface device in which the camera is about the size of a large broach, but he predicts that within a few years, components will shrink to the size that allows such system to be significantly smaller.

The idea of doing away with a touch screen, keyboard, or physical input device of any kind has fascinated user-interface designers and scientists for years. In fact, Sony currently offers EyeToy, a video camera that captures gestures for its PlayStation game consoles, and Microsoft is promising its own gesture-based system for the Xbox 360 called Project Natal. Another gesture-based project, called Sixth Sense, has received significant notoriety recently. The SixthSense prototype, developed by Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry, uses a wearable camera to record a person’s gestures and a small projector to create an ad hoc display on any surface.

The Imaginary Interfaces prototype, in contrast, is designed to be used without the immediate feedback of a display. Instead, it relies on the short-term visual memory of the person using it. To use it, a person “opens up” an interface when she makes an “L” shape with her left hand or right hand. This creates a two dimensional spatial surface, a boundary for the forthcoming finger traces.

Baudisch says that a person could use this space to clarify spatial situations such as where a player was when she scored a goal, how a person gets to a building, how an article should be laid out. “Users start drawing in midair,” he says. “There is no setup effort here, no need to whip out a mobile device or stylus.” A paper detailing the setup and user studies will be presented at the 2010 symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in New York in October.

There is, of course, the requirement that at least one person must have a screen available in order to see the midair finger trace, says Andy Wilson, senior researcher at Microsoft who led the development of Surface, the touch screen table top. Wilson and Baudisch have collaborated on projects before, however, they are not working together on the current research. “I think it’s quite interesting in the sense that it really is the ultimate in thinking about when devices shrink down to nothing, when you don’t even have a display,” says Wilson.

It can draw on the fact that people have a natural sense to use their hands to frame space and set context for an interaction, he says. “That’s a quite powerful concept and it hasn’t been explored much,” Wilson adds. “I think they’re on to something.”

Debugging a New Chip

4 comments By Kate Filed in technology Tagged with , , , , , March 25th, 2010 @ 3:48 pm

Updated (9:05 p.m.)*

I’m working on an article about a process called post-silicon debugging, something that chip makers like Intel use to catch problems in chips before they ship them out to computer makers. The goal is to find the sort of bugs that only crop up when a chip is put through the wringer. The wringer, in this case, is a setup that injects electricity into a microprocessor to simulate instructions like spell checking a document. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, not really. The picture below is a testing station for the post-silicon debugging process.

Credit: J. Stinson, Intel

*Update: Thanks to Joel Johnson of Gizmodo, this post has found a large (and informed!) audience. Some background on this picture: I got it from a Stanford researcher, Subhasish Mitra, who got it from Intel. It’s not the focus of my piece, so at the time of posting, I didn’t have a lot of information about the specifics. But since it went up some well-informed folks have chimed in (see comments).

In particular, I heard from John Cloudman, an engineering manager at Intel who has worked in post-silicon debugging. This is what he says about the image:

You have a picture of something called a logic analyzer, which is used to monitor what all the external interfaces of an integrated circuit are doing over time, since the signals are too fast or too broad to be observed with something like an oscilloscope.  The Wikipedia description over a logic analyzer is actually pretty accurate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_analyzer.  Generally, if one is debugging with a logic analyzer setup like this, the processor is running an operating system under relatively normal operating conditions – normal voltage, temperature, frequency.  It would be a relatively rare case to need this complex a setup.

Using Holography and LEDs to Make Art

2 comments By Kate Filed in Uncategorized, design, lasers, technology, video Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , February 17th, 2010 @ 10:45 am

A while back, I had the opportunity to visit the studio of San Francisco artist Christine Remy, who creates holographic portraits and LED sculptures. Much of her art is subtle and contemplative, however, she has two projects that I found striking and even emotionally jarring.  One is a series of holographic portraits that are larger than life. The video doesn’t go into the details (and shows only one portrait), but the holographic series is composed of three-dimensional, animated images of a trio grieving women. As you move around the portraits, you get a different perspective of the women’s faces and their grief.

The other project is a persistence-of-vision piece in which a line of LEDs projects a life-sized image of a girl into air. It’s eerie because you can only catch glimpses of the girl out of the corner of your eye. Her presence if fleeting; it feels like you’re sharing the room with a ghost.

I kept the video short, trying to highlight as many projects as possible, but in doing so, I only touched on the wide range of Remy’s art, her motivation, and the technology behind it. If you’re interested in seeing more of her work, you can go to christineremyart.com. If you’re in San Francisco, I highly recommend a visit to her studio in the Mission District–the best way to experience her art is to see it in person.

The Return of the Raster

0 comments By Kate Filed in lasers, technology Tagged with , , , , January 18th, 2010 @ 3:59 pm

Shameful but true: I own and watch a CRT TV, in all of its big, boxy glory. This might be a sore spot for someone who has recently immersed herself in the study of Displays & Screens, but my reasoning is solid. The TV works, the display area is large, and the picture is beautiful. Also, I invested a fair amount of money in a delightful cabinet to house the set and its peripherals. This TV and cabinet have a few more years to go before I can justify the investment and annoyance of rearranging my living room to accommodate a flat panel display.

So, in light of my adherence to the CRT, it makes sense that I’m happy to report that the old tube technology is finding new life in a new type of display called laser phosphor display. LPD appears to have some of the advantages of more modern displays, but with a fraction of the power requirements. Both CRT and LPD raster images onto a phosphor, but where a CRT uses an electron beam, guided by a magnetic field, to activate the phosphor coating, LPD uses lasers, guided by a mirror.

Wade Roush, a friend and former Technology Review colleague, broke the story of Prysm, the LPD startup last week. I’ll be writing a story for Technology Review about the technology, adding some perspective from display experts and explaining a bit more of the technology. Stay tuned!

I got it in college and went on to buy an expensive (and beautiful) cabinet to hide it in, and just haven’t bothered to upgrade

On Crashing a CES Party

1 comment By Kate Filed in lasers, technology Tagged with , , , , , , January 8th, 2010 @ 2:33 pm

As this year’s Consumer Electronics Show wraps up, I’m reminded of a memorable night at a CES a few years back when I won big on nickel slots and crashed an intense laser TV party at the Palms.

I wasn’t invited to Mitsubishi’s Laser TV party at CES 2008, one of the most anticipated parties at the show that year. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. Before CES, I’d called and emailed Mitsubishi’s PR, and at the show I visited the company’s booth and hunted down on-site PR representatives. Basically, they all gave me the same answer. No can do, they said, if you’re not on the list, you can’t go to the party. To make matters worse, I didn’t even know where the party was, and I didn’t know how to find out.*

It was all quite frustrating to me because I had recently written a rather good article for Technology Review about the actual lasers that were to be used in laser TV. The technology was interesting and impressive to me. Plus, I was curious to see if laser TV would live up to its promise of vivid high-dynamic range, and amazingly crisp images.

On the night of the Mitsubishi party, all seemed lost. I had given up and started to pump nickels into a slot machine when I improbably won $44.70. Was my luck changing? After I collected my cash, I walked outside and saw a line of bus vans with their destinations posted in the windows, and one of them was going to the “Mitsubishi Laser TV” party. Jackpot. The ride was leaving in 10 minutes, the driver told me. So I strolled around for a bit and then joined a group of guys who stepped aboard just as the bus van was leaving.

Once at the Palms, we were guided by the kindly, young PR rep who had to endure the annoying (drunk) conversation of the group of men on the bus van. She seemed to seek me out as a fellow sufferer-in-sober-misogyny as we walked into the hotel. It was a good allegiance to make because an ally is often an appropriate substitute for a party invitation.

At the registration desk it was revealed that I wasn’t on the list. I put a quizzical look on my face–furrowed brow and a forced frown–and instantly my PR ally stepped in to “clear it up.”

We took an elevator up to the top floor of the Palms. The doors opened onto a cramped bar that was slightly wider than a hallway. I asked my PR friend if she could introduce me to someone who could talk about the technology behind the TV. She seemed skeptical and then came back with a Mitsubishi executive who avoided using any specifics when answering my questions. After the fruitless interview, I took my reporter’s notebook and explored the rest of the party.

In the main party room, there was one  65-inch laser TVs on display and only a few people left over from the main event–I had missed the official unveiling. Instantly, though, I knew that main room was not where I wanted to be: suited executives sipped cocktails in booths as barely clothed women danced on ledges above them. And the laser TV played on.  I quickly left the room to find something else to look at.

Luckily, there was another laser TV on display in a side room. And the video was 3D. I joined the crowd and was handed a pair of shutter glasses** to watch U2’s 3D concert. Bono kept reaching out to grab me, and I started to get a headache, so I handed in my glasses and continued to explore.

Going up to the mezzanine level, I  looked down at the main room again. The drinking men were gone, but the dancing women were still there. The mezzanine had access to the roof, and this is where I found the party’s producer. He had put all of this together, he told me. He also admitted that he was quite impressed by the laser TV. The thing they’re not talking about, he said, is how energy-efficient laser TV is. I nodded in agreement because I knew that in theory he was right. Soon our conversation dried up and we both just silently looked out on the desert cityscape, watching lights flash from the giant casino-hotel boxes. Finally I excused myself and left the party.

At the base of the Palms, I stood in a line for about 15 minutes to catch a cab. Amazingly, my driver was the same one who had taken me to the show in the morning. I was astonished at the coincidence, but my driver acted like it wasn’t a big deal. I asked him if it had ever happened to him before, trying to prove how astounding a coincidence it was, and he admitted that it had not. Still, he guided the conversation to the book that he was writing and his girlfriend was illustrating, and how he’s only going to be driving a cab for a little bit longer. At my hotel I paid the driver the fare, told the him goodnight, and went up to my room to file a blog post about laser TV.***

*At that time, I didn’t have a strong network of tech journalist buddies who could clue me in.

**The glasses synchronize with an infrared signal that comes from the TV.

***While you can buy Mitsubishi’s laser TV, called Laservue, for about $4, 000, the displays have not significantly shaken up the market. A great source of laser TV updates is here.

Reporter’s Notebook: The Hunt for the Perfect Screen

0 comments By Kate Filed in technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , January 5th, 2010 @ 3:53 pm

(Updated 12:08 p.m. January 8, 2010 to include quantum dots as an upcoming display technology)

My survey of display tech, “The Hunt for the Perfect Screen,” was posted at Gizmodo a couple of weeks ago. It was a fun piece to write because it helped me see how much I’ve actually learned about screens like holographic systems, energy-efficient LCDs, bright and beautiful OLEDs, and lightweight plastic displays and their manufacturing. Most of it is fairly mind-blowing stuff. And it reminds me why I’m happy to be a technology reporter–I get to spend my time looking at the future.

The hardest part of writing the piece, unsurprisingly, was pruning the prose. There are a lot of specific technologies that I left out for the sake of flow and length. Below is a short list of topics that didn’t make it into the article.

I plan to expand on some of these omitted topics in the future.

And now for a reporting outtake. Below is an anecdote on how a company I mentioned in the Giz article got its name.

  • On the naming of Phicot: The company that’s trying to commercialize HP’s plastic electronics manufacturing process is called Phicot. When I asked Carl Taussig of HP what Phicot means, he told that one of the researchers has a son who, when he was an infant, would pick up objects and call them all the same word, something that sounded like “phicot.” A toy truck? Phicot. A book? Phicot. A piece of food? Phicot. The parents started to worry about the child’s intelligence, says Taussig. But when the boy grew up and was able to enunciate better, they learned that he was simply saying, “Look what I’ve got.” Which is also something you might say to people if you have a display manufactured by the company. Cute.
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