Invention Of The Day – Page 196 – Just another break-step productions sites site

#931: SuggesT

It seems that economists have determined that people will increase their tendency to act in accordance with a word printed on the inside of a T shirt (even if no-one else can see the word).

Today’s invention is therefore a small, inward-facing electronic badge which lights up when one’s head penetrates (and stretches slightly) the neck hole of a t shirt.

Worn on the inside of the shirt, the badge would flash up a single word eg ‘cooperative’ or ‘clever’ and thus help the wearer achieve their best possible interactions during the challenges of the day ahead.

#930: FilmFill

Animation is now often performed by computers semi-automatically. An artist supplies first and last key frames and the machine interpolates as best it can.

Foveola is a shape recognition engine which embodies an effective measure of similarity.

Supplying the system with a small shape will automatically generate a list of all shapes in the database which are sufficiently alike, in order of similarity.

Today’s invention is to employ this to create animated movies. If the user enters a start and an end shape, they are regarded by the system as key frames. For example 9 might retrieve 8,E,F and 0 might retrieve 9PRF.

This then allows the following ‘film’ sequence to be created automatically, by reversing the second sequence and joining both together to fill in the gap between key frames: 98EFRP90.

#929: DrugSlugs

Bullets are designed to do damage, often to a human target.

Today’s invention is a new form of bullet with the opposite intent. Medics on a battlefield would be equipped with a (white+red cross-labeled) rifle. This they would use to fire a very low velocity round at soldiers who had been wounded.

The medical projectiles fired would contain anaesthetic and perhaps even some coagulent or active medicine. This would potentially allow a wounded soldier to save their own life by crawling clear of danger or stabilise them so that their retrieval could be delayed until it was safe for medics to attend and evacuate their comrade.

#928: Kease

I’m so sick of IT security; but slightly less sick of that than the effects of its absence.

Today’s invention is to use passwords which consist of groups of characters on a keyboard which fall easily to hand eg 234tv bhumo.

Obviously, one would reorient the keyboard in order not to weaken the protection too much, whilst avoiding having to indulge in the usual finger stretching contortions.

#927: Freesnel

I was recently talking to an academic about creating ultra-cheap Fresnel lenses (ie << $100 per 1m sq). There is inevitably at least one patent in this field, but I believe the following isn’t infringing on that.

In a similar way to the form of old-style LP records, a sheet of plastic (transparent) would have one of its surfaces cut with a needle-like tool moving in a spiral path.

The angle of the cutter relative to the surface would change with time in order to generate the required refractive profiles in the groove.

This could make use of low-grade plastic (maybe even recycled material, initially repolished). No need for any injection moulding tooling; at most a pc controlling a relatively simple spiral cutter.

#926: Sitphony

The recording of music performances is nearly as much of an art form as the music itself.

Now that it’s getting harder to make money from digital media, today’s invention offers an additional route to selling music by adding some extra value.

A recording studio or auditorium would be equipped with an array of seats. Each would be occupied by a person wearing a pair of microphones near their ears. The sounds recorded would be stored as two separate channels. These data would then be downloadable by music buffs (with equipment capable of playing one channel per headphone speaker).

The quality and cachet associated with being able to choose one’s seat at a performance of this type would command a premium price. People might even choose to ‘visit’ the same classic performance in different locations and help to draw a map up of the most popular seats.

#925: WaitRates

When travelling to work, using a cross-country train, there are often areas to which wireless broadband has, so far, failed to stretch (a fact which Vodafone omits to mention in their sales literature).

Today’s invention is wireless hub located in a station which knows about my journey and the blackspots I can expect to encounter (It might even correlate the tickets sold with the anticipated bandwidth requirements of the travellers’ journeys).

It then allocates those with large expected outages with massive bandwidth whilst waiting, so that their browsers can download all their tabbed sites ultra-fast before setting off. Those with small blackspots will get correspondingly lower bitrates whilst waiting.

#924: HingeTones

People increasingly have mobile phone ringtones that drive me just a little nuts, especially when they take an extra second or two to answer when sitting next to me on the train.

Today’s invention represents a tiny particle of revenge, as well as a way for those of us who hate phones to express our (introverted) personalities.

It is a sound effect which fires up when one’s laptop is opened (or closed). This would create a kind of aural ecosystem in a big office environment…a bit like the dawn chorus, signifying that everyone’s work day had begun.

It might take the form of a recording of one’s child giggling, or a creaking castle door or birdsong or whatever. In any case, a market would be created something like that for ringtones. One’s machine might even select the opening soundtrack based on the time of day (or the gps-determined location).

Come to think of it, context-based based ringtones, may be a better idea…

#923: MovieMug

Today’s invention is a novelty in the form of a personalised cup.

The base of the cup is made so that when the liquid has been drained to a certain degree (perhaps by using a moulded-in straw), the remaining pools in the base look like someone’s face.

Clever moulding of the base, before attaching it to a standard cylindrical wall element, could even result in the appearance of a sequence of different faces, or changes in expression of the original one, as it is drained.

This would in effect provide the cup with a kind of internal film show mechanism.

#922: Swerview

It seems that when a ball is seen in peripheral vision as spinning it appears to be moving in the direction of the spin more than it actually is. Combine this illusory motion with the normal gravitational acceleration and baseball’s famously hard-to-hit curveball is the result.

This effect must also occur in other sports, eg soccer, when a goalkeeper has to cope with spinning freekicks which appear to dip much more than aerodynamics suggests. (This, rather than any drag related phenomena, may be the main reason why professional bowlers in cricket sometimes scratch the ball on one side).

Balls used in sports all seem to have some kind of surface texture which shows up the direction of their spin. Today’s invention is therefore sports contact lenses which blur the periphery just enough to make marks or seams on the ball in their particular event so diffuse as to be just undetectable. Peripheral vision already provides low levels of detail perception.

The keeper or batter can still locate the ball very accurately in space but can’t see its (rotating) internal surface texture and is thus not fooled by the apparent motion illusion.