Category: Possible inventions

It seems that people appreciate an increasingly wide range of avante-garde wristwatches.

Today’s invention is one such: consisting of a strip of gel on a paper substrate. This has gradations marked on it corresponding to the hours of the day.

A drop of dye is placed at a start-point on the strip at a known time in the morning. This moves along the strip at a known rate by the familiar process of chromotography. It passes the gradations and thus indicates the time.

This can be disposed of at the end of the day and a new strip watch wrapped around one’s wrist.

Today’s invention provides a way for people who feel surrounded by security cameras to detect their blindspots and thus maintain some privacy (presumably such spots are by definition of no significance for actual security).

It is essentially a torch which projects a bright, conical beam and which can be attached to the outside of a security camera housing. The beam’s lightcone might be adjustable to be just wider than the normal angle subtended by a camera lens. By aligning it with the housing’s long axis, the beam can be made to shine wherever the camera is ‘looking’…thus leaving unsurveilled regions in comparative darkness.

The torch would move with any motion of the camera and it would also be possible to see where several cameras’ viewfields intersected.

The stories older people tell reflect their wide and often interesting experience (and social reminiscing is good for mental health) but sometimes they can be repeated too often -to the same people.

Today’s invention is a game in the form of an iphone app. which makes the best use of their stories for everyone’s enjoyment whilst minimising the unwanted repeats.

A group of storytellers sits down and notes, using a pulldown menu of the names of their friends and relations, everyone who is present. Each player has prerecorded some short stories, jokes etc into their machine (together with a rough transcript of each -or just keywords).

One player starts playing his recorded story (he can only choose one that the others present have heard no more than x times in the last y years, for example). The machines are networked and so the currently speaking one passes its transcript wirelessly to the others in the group and keywords within it prime some of their stored stories to be ready to be played next. When one is finished, the other players attempt to play their next related story. The fastest to press ‘play’ then proceeds. This helps tune people’s reflexes and the playback approach avoids the embarrassment of forgetting punchlines etc.

Whoever is the last one with stories still to tell is the winner. There might even be a way for stories to be rated so that only the most interesting and popular are available for frequent reuse.

Despite disliking golf, I can’t seem to stop thinking about it.

Today’s invention is a camera system which sits atop the flag at a green and makes a panoramic movie of the area within, say, a 10 m radius. It also records temperature and relative humidity (if these are relevant to the dynamics of putting).

When a ball drops into the cup, the last 20 seconds of action on the green and relevant environmental data are stored. Some of this footage will show putts, from a range of distances, which were successful.

Over time, a huge number of these trajectories is stored for each green. For training purposes, players can later access, via a handheld device, a view of the green indicating the path which they should attempt to make their ball follow from its current location.

There has recently been much discussion, in the news media, about the new era of piracy in which we find ourselves -not the digital ‘piracy’ invented by greedy media moguls but the real thing -complete with AK47s and speedboats. (According to the BBC, piracy cost the world $60 – 70m in 2008, so I’m not clear why this is even seen as an important issue, given that banking costs the world this amount every few minutes).

The pirates’ modus operandi is to board vessels without warning and hold their crew and cargo for ransom.

Today’s invention is a way to provide the crew with more notice of an attack. Each ship travelling in a region subject to piracy (maybe a few hundred vessels) would be equipped with a set of cameras capturing both visual spectrum and infra red images. These would constantly scan the ship’s surroundings and beam images to a webpage for the ship in question.

These pages would be displayed 24/7 on screens in prominent locations…(perhaps in railway stations and supermarkets, where large numbers of people have nothing better to do than watch displays as they wait).

This crowdsourced vigilance would result in mobile phone calls to a displayed number in the event that enough people detected some suspicious behaviour and acted to warn the ship in question. Prizes for accurate warnings might be offered.

It seems that bacteria do something called ‘quorum sensing‘: they emit chemicals which allow them to indirectly count how many of their little brethren are present.

Some of these bugs can then be made to do smart stuff in response -like glow. Today’s invention exploits this ability, to provide a simple concentration indicator.

Imagine a cereal plant needs to have the water concentration in its root system monitored in order not to dehydrate. Luminescent bacteria are contained in plastic grids set in the earth (each say 1m^2 in size). This keeps them inside, but allows water molecules to move through its membrane.

A transparent side branch from each grid protrudes vertically up through the soil which allows the onset of local dehydration in that part of the field to be detected as the bacteria inside light up.

In order to maintain the number of bacteria within each grid (since they reproduce exponentially) a robotic microwave emitter roves the field and blasts the side branches at the rate required to keep the number of inhabitants constant.

Personally, I don’t get golf at all, but today’s invention is intended to increase the challenge it presents to its devotees.

Many parts of the world seem to be warming to the idea of using synthetic turf on their putting greens.

My approach is to place a subtly-contoured clay layer on a green-sized tray embedded in the earth. This would be covered by a carpet of synthetic turf and include a cup.

After each competition, the tray could be rotated to some random position (using a tractor) and re-embedded.

This would create much more variety within the game and require players to be able to ‘read’ the 3-D surface of each green more rapidly.

The clay layer could itself be remodelled and returfed at the end of each season.

It’s possible to compound the effects of a ‘difficult’ phonecall by dropping, or slamming down, the handset when one party decides the conversation is over.

Like the inflammatory email sent on a Friday afternoon, this careless gesture is almost always taken by the listener as a sign of petulant disrespect. Spleen venting usually does nobody any good (not to mention the damage to the hardware and the reaction on Monday morning).

Today’s invention is simply an add-on to all existing landline phones in the form of a small, self adhesive resilient, bladder (shaped like a partly-inflated lifebelt and with a single inlet/outlet duckbill valve). This would be centred around the mouthpiece grille, so as not to interfere with the disconnect button near the earpiece.

When the phone unit is set down calmly, the lifebelt becomes slightly flattened as a small volume of air is expelled.

Dash it back into place, however, and the bladder will resist the sudden efflux of air, so that no crashing noise is generated and the phone settles back into its cradle gradually under the weight of the handset, as before.

I sometimes go on at length about my difficulties in buying shoes for my near-spherical feet. Often I visit shoeshops, both online and offline, only to return empty-handed…or at least unshod.

Today’s invention is a new use for rapid prototyping. People with difficult-to-fit feet could stand on a special board at home. This would have fixed lights and markings on it indicating a number of positions to place a camera and take digital photographs of the more ‘challenging’ foot.

These photos would then be uploaded and sent to shoeshops which had equipped themselves with a desktop replicator and software capable of generating a 3-D foot description from a series of images.

This would be used to drive the deposition of a model of one’s foot in heavy, flexible plastic material. Attempts could then be made to insert this model, Cinderella-like, into a number of shoes in the shop.

In the event of success, a purchase could be made online in confidence that the footwear would fit when delivered.

A decade ago, I did some work for the BBC on how they could disguise the faces of people in broadcasts (whilst still retaining the image in each case of a live, moving face).

Since, then the field has moved on and the world is an even less safe place (with security cameras on almost every vertical surface). Recent research has found that we extract most recognition-related information from images of faces when they are around 30 x 30 pixels in size.

Rather than demanding ever more detail, it seems we recognise faces best when they are quite coarsely pixellated (but not too coarsely).

Today’s invention is therefore a new way for overloaded security observers to be presented with eg on-screen crowd scenes, when searching for individual terrorists (or suspects).

Knowing how far away members in a crowd are, it’s possible to pixellate the whole image so that an average sized face occupies 30*30 pixels. This image would then be automatically blurred a little to remove the distractions of the high spatial frequencies present in the edges of the pixels.

It would then be easier for observers to detect individuals more quickly.