China is devoting serious money and manpower to high speed rail lines. Evidence of this trend is shown in the newly opened Wuguang Rail line, linking Wuhan, (in the heart of central China,) to Guangzhou, on the southeastern coast.
And it goes wicked fast, too! The Wuguang has set a record for high speed trains by zooming along at 394 kilometers an hour, or 245 mph! Amazing.
According to Chinese officials, the new rail line cost 15 billion dollars and took four years (!) to build. These cats make big moves and quick! China seems to be where it’s at in terms of massive growth in a short term period. Must check it out.
For more information on the Wuguang Rail, there’s a nice article in Technology Review.
Hiroyuki Shinoda and his team of researchers from the University of Japan have developed a more fun(ctional) system of touchable holography. One that allows you to feel the holograms as they are projected! How do they do it?
Watch:
A curved mirror allows the hologram to float in space. Microjets of air provide the touch sensation, and a few hacked wiimotes offer hand tracking for true interactivity. Swoon. Want times ten.
It is interesting to note that as wonderful and complex as our epidermis (skin) is, it only allows for three “inputs” of sensation. Skin can feel fluctuations in temperature, pressure differences, and pain. That’s it. Any combination of those three inputs can give you the feeling of lazing in a hammock in a warm tropical lagoon, or marching across the dry arctic tundra, or being plunged into an icy stream.
You can fool the human body into thinking that it is experiencing these things rather easily, due to our skins easily-fooled nature. Fool the skin and fooling the mind is a snap.
That makes designing virtual systems for humans to interact with a bit simpler. As you can see, puffs of air can be interpreted as a balls bouncing on ones palm, or a small animal walking around.
As these systems increase in sophistication, we head into some seriously interesting times. What this could do for teaching! Especially autistic kids.
A learning curriculum based not on text and imagery but on physical sensation could be sensational. I’d love to learn like that.
For more information on Touchable Holography, click here.
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