Aiding the Blind: Kinecthesia - Oct 2011 - YouTube

Two Students from the University of Pennsylvania have modified a Kinect to help the vision impaired to become more aware of their environment. The project is called Kinecthesia and functions as a radar-like device, but instead of using sound, the device uses the Kinect's cameras to map out the environment and translate it into a sensation the blind can understand.

Eric Berdinis and Jeff Kiske, juniors of the University of Pennsylvania majoring in Computer Engineering, has garnered attention in the 2011 Google's Zeitergeist Young Minds Conference with their application of the gaming peripheral. The project was born from both student's final project for Rahul Mangharam's embedded systems class. The resulting device can be likened to a high-tech walking cane.

The Kinect is a motion detecting gaming peripheral produced by Microsoft. The device is used for the Xbox 360 which can interpret specific gestures and track movement of individuals or objects. The device is composed of an RGB camera, an infrared sensor acting as a depth sensor and multiple-array microphone. It can perform facial recognition, voice recognition and gesture recognition.

Using the Kinect's multiple cameras, Berdinis and Kiske have made a harness that produces vibrations to notify the wearer of coming obstacles. The Kinect is connected to a BeagleBoard, a whole computer in a single board, and fitted in a waistband or belt. The device is ran in Linux and 16 AAA batteries. Since it was still in development the device is not made to run for hours. There are six vibrating motors to guide the user and weighs 1349g as of now.

There are already a number of people hacking their Kinect devices for other applications besides gaming like 3D modeling, controlling robots and using motion capture to automate devices, augment reality, and even produce a low-budget CGIs for amateur movies. Remember the movie Total Recall with the virtual wife? It would be a surprise if no one made one already. The Kinect has made motion capture reachable to consumers and they are very much willing to experiment.

It is great that people are experimenting and applying on technologies readily available for them. Will this open doors on new innovators? Does Microsoft see a new market for their devices?

The project's development can be tracked on their own website at kinecthesia.com. The website also contains the project source code, parts list and assembly instructions.

Acoustic cloak hides underwater objects from sonar

You’ve probably heard of invisibility cloaks that can hide tiny objects, even those visible to the naked eye. Now, researchers have used the same types of metamaterials to create an acoustic cloak, a technology that renders underwater objects invisible to sonar and other ultrasound waves.

A metamaterial is a class of artificial materials that have enhanced properties as a result of their structure.

Credit: L. Brian Stauffer

“We are not talking about science fiction. We are talking about controlling sound waves by bending and twisting them in a designer space,” said Nicholas Fang, a mechanical science and engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and leader of the project.

“This is certainly not some trick Harry Potter is playing with,” he said in a university release.

Fang and his team of researchers designed a two-dimensional cylindrical cloak made of 16 concentric rings of acoustic circuits structured to guide sound waves. Each ring has a different index of refraction, meaning that sound waves vary their speed from the outer rings to the inner ones.

The speed is slower at the outer rings so that’s where sound waves propagate since greater energy is required for them to move to the inner rings. The specially structured acoustic circuits bend the sound waves to wrap them around the outer layers of the cloak.

“Basically what you are looking at is an array of cavities that are connected by channels. The sound is going to propagate inside those channels, and the cavities are designed to slow the waves down,” Fang said. “As you go further inside the rings, sound waves gain faster and faster speed.”

Tests revealed that the acoustic cloak can effectively bend the ultrasound waves around the hidden object.

The researchers submerged a steel cylinder in a tank with an ultrasound source on one side and a sensor array on the other, then placed the cylinder inside the cloak and watched it disappear from their sonar. They also tested other various objects and found the same results.

“The structure of what you’re trying to hide doesn’t matter,” Fang said. “The effect is similar. After we placed the cloaked structure around the object we wanted to hide, the scattering or shadow effect was greatly reduced.”

It is also capable of hiding an object from a broad range of sound waves from 40 to 80 KHz and potentially tens of megahertz with modifications.

Robotic Aquatic Flying Penguins!