Technology Trends

The vast majority of us is used to interact with 2D objects, such as a computer screen. But how do you deal with a volumetric display, such as an architectural model? In this short article, “Gestures control true 3D display,” Technology Research News (TRN) writes that researchers from the University of Toronto have devised a method which involves a multi-finger gestural interaction with the 3D display. The users, who carry ‘markers’ on their fingers which are tracked by cameras, can pick, manipulate or control objects existing in the 3D environment. As the TRN article was only wetting my appetite, I’ve done my own research on the subject. And among other facts, I discovered that these computer scientists won the Best Paper Award at the 17th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST 2004). Read more…

Here is what says TRN.

Researchers from the University of Toronto have put together a system that allows for direct gestural interaction with virtual objects contained in a volumetric display.

The researchers’ method involves using fingers to gesture in the space around and on the surface of the volumetric display. The user’s finger positions and postures are tracked by a set of four cameras.

The interface includes two-dimensional menus projected on the surface of the display and a browser for selecting three-dimensional objects used to construct models. The browser uses a grid that contains three-dimensional images of objects like cubes, spheres and pyramids.

Using finger gestures, users can point at objects, make gestures to trigger commands, and manipulate three-dimensional models projected in the display, including moving, rotating and resizing the models or portions of the models.

It’s time to look at pictures, which will explain better the concept.

This research work, from Tovi Grossman, Daniel Wigdor, and Ravin Balakrishnan, has been presented at the 17th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST 2004), which was held in Santa Fe in October 2004.

Here are two links to the Proceedings of this conference and to the abstract of the researchers’ paper,”Multi-finger gestural interaction with 3d volumetric displays.”

Volumetric displays provide interesting opportunities and challenges for 3D interaction and visualization, particularly when used in a highly interactive manner. We explore this area through the design and implementation of techniques for interactive direct manipulation of objects with a 3D volumetric display. Motion tracking of the user’s fingers provides for direct gestural interaction with the virtual objects, through manipulations on and around the display’s hemispheric enclosure. Our techniques leverage the unique features of volumetric displays, including a 360° viewing volume that enables manipulation from any viewpoint around the display, as well as natural and accurate perception of true depth information in the displayed 3D scene. We demonstrate our techniques within a prototype 3D geometric model building application.

Here is a link to the full paper (PDF format, 10 pages, 4.77 MB)

For even more information, you should check the University of Toronto’s Dynamic Graphics Project.

Sources: Technology Research News, December 29, 2004/January 5, 2005; and various websites

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• Displays
  
  
• Future
  
  
• Human Computer Interface
  
  
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Transparent electronics is an emerging technology which aims to produce invisible electronic circuits. Now, researchers from Oregon report they made a major advance in transparent electronics. Their zinc-tin-oxide ‘thin-film’ materials are amorphous, physically robust, chemically stable and cheap to produce at just above room temperature. These new materials and transistors offer many new possibilities for consumer electronics, transportation, business and the military. Even if these transparent transistors don’t show up inside your next computer, they might soon appear in flat panel screens, flexible electronics devices you’ll carry with you, and even in your car windshields. But it should take some time. Read more…

Before going further, please remember that the following quotes are written in PR jargon. So read them with a grain of salt…

Researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) and Hewlett Packard have reported their first example of an entirely new class of materials which could be used to make transparent transistors that are inexpensive, stable, and environmentally benign. This could lead to new industries and a broad range of new consumer products, scientists say.

This is a significant breakthrough in the emerging field of transparent electronics, experts say. The new transistors are not only transparent, but they work extremely well and could have other advantages that will help them transcend carbon-based transistor materials, such as organics and polymers, that have been the focus of hundreds of millions of dollars of research around the world.

It’s time for more ‘technical’ details about these zinc-tin-oxide thin film transistors.

They are amorphous, meaning they have no long range crystalline order, which helps to keep processing costs a great deal lower. They are also physically robust — hard to scratch, chemically stable, resist etching, and have a very smooth surface. They are made from low cost, readily-available elements such as zinc and tin, which raise no environmental concerns.

“What has been most surprising, however, is that we can make high quality oxide transistors with these new materials at just above room temperature,” said John Wager, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at OSU. “Simply put, that’s shocking. Most integrated circuits made today, by comparison, are produced at temperatures between 700-1,100 degrees centigrade.”

As you probably guessed by now, this technology is a nascent one. But researchers are very optimistic about future uses, for example with gas sensor systems.

These sensors are used extensively in automotive and other mechanical applications, and the new zinc-tin oxide transistors might allow the creation of a new type of gas sensor whose sensitivity is electronically controlled over a wide dynamic range.

In the field of transparent applications, there should be uses in consumer electronics, transportation, business and the military. Automobile windshields could transmit visual information. Glass in almost any setting could also double as an electronic device, possibly improving security systems or transparent displays. The military is extremely interested in research of this type because of possible uses in sophisticated technology or fighting equipment.

For more information about transparent electronics, you should visit John Wager’s home page at Oregon State’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Here is a direct link to his research activities.

The latest work done by Wager and his colleagues has been published online by Applied Physics Letters on December 23, 2004. Here is a link to the abstract of this paper named “High mobility transparent thin-film transistors with amorphous zinc tin oxide channel layer.”

A previous paper about these see-through transistors was published last year by the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics. Here is a link to this full paper, named “Spin-coated zinc oxide transparent transistors,” from which the above illustration was extracted.

Sources: Oregon State University news release, via EurekAlert!, December 28, 2004; Applied Physics Letters, Volume 86, Issue 1, January 3, 2005; Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, Volume 36, Number 20, October 21, 2003; and various websites

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In this must-read article, MIS, from Australia, asserts than in 10 to 15 years, we’ll be unable to use today’s technologies to build electronic devices always smaller and more powerful. Instead, three disruptive technologies will converge and deeply change our lives: nanotechnology, sensors and wireless technology. The author explains how this will influence molecular computing or quantum information processing. She also describes future advances in robotics, including nanobots. And the transportation industry will welcome the arrival of skycars, which are under development today. But will we travel anymore when holographic videoconferencing tools will be available? Please take a moment to check this fascinating article or read more below…

If nanobots and skycars sound more like sci-fi than a sane view of the future, then you may need to reprogram your mindset. Helene Zampetakis reports on the technology that will shape our lives in the decades to come.

A trio of disruptive technologies will converge over the next five to 15 years to overtake our incumbent systems and create new competencies that will profoundly change the way we organise our lives and the way we do business.

The driving principles behind modern technology are running out of steam: it is becoming prohibitively costly to continue to shrink technology, while Moore’s Law, which postulates the doubling of computer power every 18 months, is reaching its physical limits under current processes.

Luckily, help is coming with the convergence of three technologies.

But research that is underway today is expected to usher in a new technological era. Dubbed ‘embedded connectivity’ by Bob Hayward, vice-president and research fellow at Gartner, it will draw strength from nanotechnology, sensors and wireless technology.

The embedded world of the future will harness the power of billions of microprocessors on a single device, wirelessly connected to others, that can read the environment and react accordingly. Scientists portray a future in which we attach these devices to our bodies to communicate, set them loose on our streets to do menial tasks, and embed them in the commonplace objects of our lives to address our daily requirements.

The underlying foundation for this new era of embedded connectivity is nanotechnology, which is based on the manipulation of molecules less than 100 nanometres in size. “Nanotechnology means that rather than taking a chunk of silicon and carving it down to size, we build from the bottom up by assembling single molecules and atoms,” says Dr Terry Turney, director of CSIRO’s nanotechnology centre.

Zampetakis then looks at electronic circuitry and how it will be transformed by molecular self-assembly technology. She also describes future quantum information processing and wireless networks of sensors.

Now, let’s look at what she says about robotics.

It will be at least 20 years before we see microscopic ‘nanobots’, the much-hyped molecular manufacturing systems that have generated sci-fi like fears of mutating swarms running amok. But miniature robots are in fact under serious investigation.

In 2000, for example, MIT’s Bioinstrumentation Laboratory unveiled the Nanowalker, a sugar-cube sized prototype of the first autonomous nanorobot. The Nanowalker is able to move with great precision at a speed of about 4,000 steps a second and communicate wirelessly to a central computer.

Nanorobots will eventually construct materials atom by atom to create products that do anything from surveillance to in vitro navigation.

Larger robots will also be present and will become more independent.

Currently robots operate in controlled environments designed around them, such as car assembly plants, but the next generation of machines will be designed to function in a less structured world and to cope with unexpected changes to their environment.

Robotics research today centres around embedding these devices with fuzzy logic skills using sensors that will allow them to perceive and respond. Dr Peter Corke, autonomous systems team leader at CSIRO, says we could expect to see this class of machine delivering mail or medication or stacking store shelves at low cost to replace human labour in five to 10 years from now. Larger versions could be used down mines; and indeed this research is principally funded by the mining industry, along with organisations interested in flying robots that can inspect assets such as power lines.

And after decades of science-fiction stories, skycars will finally be there.

These will let us travel “when and where but especially how we wish”, according to Mark Moore, personal air vehicle sector manager for NASA’s Vehicle Systems Program.

NASA’s area of focus is a skycar (or personal air vehicle — PAV) designed not for getting about the city, but for travelling at high speeds for distances of between 160kms to 800kms. That would allow people to live in regional areas and commute into urban airfields for work.

Over the next decade Moore expects to see flying cars priced at less than US$100,000 using automated functionality based on NASA’s EquiPT (Easy-to-use, quiet Personal Transportation) technology set.

Moore says an obstacle to PAVs has been the intensity of training required to fly them, so automation is critical. The goal is to have the vehicle controlled by a computerised brain that senses and responds to weather conditions or other crafts in the vicinity, and compensates for technical failures.

And did you know you could order a skycar today? Moller International, based in California, is developing the M400 Skycar and hopes it will be certified by 2006. And you can purchase a 4-passenger Skycar today for a cool $995,000!

But will we travel with the arrival of the next generation of videoconferencing tools?

The synergy of vastly increased bandwidth, three-dimensional video projection and interactive holography systems is expected to change the way we collectively communicate, according to James Anderson, country manager of Polycom.

Videophones as a standard business tool are a decade away but it will be more like 20 years before research from bodies such as MIT’s Spatial Imaging Group or 3D visualisation company, Actuality Systems, yields practicable holographic videoconferencing. By then, however, “we’ll be looking at life-size holograms in 3D that can move around the room in full motion”, says Anderson.

Finally, Zampetakis looks at changes in information technology likely to happen in the next five to ten years.

Now, I have a question for you. Is this message from the future a one you like? Personally, I do.

Source: Helene Zampetakis, Managing Information Strategies, Australia, December 17, 2004; Moller International

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Here is December, and countless articles are published every day about gifts for the holiday season and forecasts about the year to come. Red Herring chose, cautiously, to focus on technology in the Top Ten Trends for 2005. By limiting itself to predictions for only next year, the online magazine doesn’t take much risks. However, the link above will lead you to no less than ten different stories. Some trends started this year, such as the war for searching files on your desktop or for putting double cores on computer chips. Other articles talk about Internet telephony, the battle for your digital home, fuel cells or biotech advancements. But the one which caught my eyes is about baby boomers and the exploding market for the global medical devices market, which could reach $160 billion worldwide next year. Read more…

Just for fun, here is the introduction of the Red Herring article looking at some past predictions.

Laying out technology trends is a treacherous undertaking. Those predictions can end up haunting the luminaries who pronounced them after they’ve proven to be ridiculous. Just consider these: Bill Gates was quoted in 1994 saying, “we’ll have infinite bandwidth in a decade’s time.” And George Gilder proclaimed in the pages of Forbes in 1992, “just as the old integrated circuit made transistor power virtually free, the new all-optical network will make communications power virtually free.”

Now, let’s jump to “Baby boomers left to their own devices,” aptly subtitled “As an aging population continues to seek the fountain of youth, the medical equipment market promises answers.” Here is the opening paragraph.

Living longer is no longer the goal. Living longer, while looking and feeling young, is now baby boomers’ big wish — and the market’s command. As more than one-quarter of the U.S. population, 40- to 60-year-olds represent huge potential profits for successful treatments.

Below are selected excerpts.

Along with cosmetic improvements, spine conditions are getting a lot of attention, as herniated discs, misaligned vertebrae, degenerative disc disease, and spinal fractures are quite common among the elderly. The boomers are a large and savvy group that demands solutions, however expensive they may be, according to Frost & Sullivan analyst Alpesh Gandhi. “Baby boomers are more aware of a lot of the products and procedures,” he says. “They do more research and are more aware of what treatment they need.”

And the market for these medical devices is huge.

The global medical devices market is currently estimated at between $135 and $145 billion, according to Frost & Sullivan figures. The high estimate for 2005 is $160 billion. That makes it even bigger than biotech, which is now between $110 and $120 billion and is expected to grow to nearly $128 billion in 2005, according to Frost & Sullivan analyst Vikram Wadhwani.

Nearly half of medical devices revenues, about 45 percent, represent the U.S. market — the world leader. Several factors help the U.S. dominate. Europe is slower to adapt new products where distribution is more complex, U.S. patients and doctors are more open to newer technologies, and technology that’s developed in other countries, namely Japan, eventually migrates over to the U.S. because it is a better market, according to Mr. Gandhi.

Red Herring adds that the approval process by the FDA is shorter for medical devices than for drugs, so it’s easier to make money for the companies investing in non-surgical solutions for example.

Another trend is finding non-surgical solutions, says Robert Bellas, a general partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, which invests heavily in seed-round medical device startups.

A big market for less-invasive procedures offers alternatives to cosmetic surgery. One startup that Morgenthaler helps fund through its incubator, The Foundry, is Thermage, based in Hayward, California. The company’s product, Thermacool, has been approved by the FDA and is being used by dermatologists and plastic surgeons. Thermage claims its non-surgical device uses radio frequency to increase the amount of collagen below the skin’s surface, promising similar effects to those of facelifts and liposuction, minus the downtime.

For more information, please read the whole collection of Red Herring articles — today and next year.

Source: Red Herring, December 13, 2004

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This is almost certain, according to Ian Pearson, a futurologist working for British Telecom. In fifteen years, local area networks will be replaced by body area networks. As writes BBC News Online, “when technology gets personal,” you can expect a “pervasive ambient world” where “chips are everywhere.” Not only we’ll be surrounded by intelligent objects in the streets, but we’ll wear clothes made of nano-engineered smart fabrics or we’ll carry implants. Pearson thinks that we’ll use wearable technology that runs on body heat such as intelligent electronic contact lenses functioning as TV screens when we are in the subway for instance. Of course, this raises interesting questions about our privacy. Pearson adds that security should be integrated into the design of these future devices. He’s obviously right, but as usually, making money will always have a higher priority than protecting privacy. Read more…

Here are the opening paragraphs of the BBC News Online article.

In 2020, whipping out your mobile phone to make a call will be quaintly passé. By then phones will be printed directly on to wrists, or other parts of the body, says Ian Pearson, BT’s resident futurologist. It’s all part of what’s known as a “pervasive ambient world”, where “chips are everywhere”

Inanimate objects will start to interact with us: we will be surrounded — on streets, in homes, in appliances, on our bodies and possibly in our heads — by things that “think”. Forget local area networks - these will be body area networks.

I’ve already covered MP3 jackets here, but there’s more to expect from “smart fabrics.”

These “smart fabrics” have come about through advances in nano- and micro-engineering — the ability to manipulate and exploit materials at micro or molecular scale.

At the nanoscale, materials can be “tuned” to display unusual properties that can be exploited to build faster, lighter, stronger and more efficient devices and systems.

The textile and clothing industry has been one of the first to exploit nanotechnology in quite straightforward ways. Many developments are appearing in real products in the fields of medicine, defence, healthcare, sports, and communications.

Of course, wearable technology raises important questions regarding our privacy.

If our clothing, skin, and “personal body networks” do the talking and the monitoring, everywhere we go, we have to think about what that means for our concept of privacy. Mr Pearson picks up the theme, pointing out there are a lot of issues humans have to iron out before we become “cyborgian”. His main concern is “privacy”.

“We are looking at electronics which are really in deep contact with your body and a lot of that information you really don’t want every passer-by to know. “So we have to make sure we build security in this. If you are wearing smart make-up, where electronics are controlling the appearance, you don’t want people hacking in and writing messages on your forehead.”

Will he be heard? Time will tell.

Finally, for more information about Pearson’s thoughts, you can read all the articles he published on this British Telecom web site, “Views of the future.” My only regret is that these articles are not dated — at least explicitly.

Sources: Jo Twist, BBC News Online, December 6, 2004; and British Telecom ‘Views of the future’ web site

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• Future
  


• Nanotechnology
  


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Flexible displays based on various forms of organic LEDs (or OLEDs) will allow us to carry roll-up TVs one day. But there are still significant hurdles, according to Electronics Weekly in “Organic LEDs are on the way.” One major obstacle is the life expectancy for such screens, still far below from the 10,000 hours limit considered to be the basis for a commercial distribution. But there is a bigger issue. On OLEDs displays, the different colors vanish at different rates. So you’ll lose blue three times before red or green. Another very long and well-documented article on displays from Military & Aerospace Electronics, “Display technology leaps to the next generation,” adds that there is still a massive $1 billion per year poured in OLED research, and that 14-inch OLED displays are already working in labs. Read more…

Before looking at these articles, here is something you might one day roll out from your pocket or your purse.

Here is how starts the Electronics Weekly article.

Imagine a TV that is not just thin like a plasma screen, but thin like a birthday card. That lives in a narrow box near the ceiling and has a string you pull to unroll it.

Something from the future?

Not in the labs, but yes for your living room. There are still some significant hurdles to overcome.

The first is display lifetime. OLED materials from all manufacturers have a life which is dependent on both how hard the display is driven, and what environment the material is operating in. A life of 10,000 hours for a display is considered commercially viable.

This may not seem much - under two years continuous use - but comparing it to the 250,000 mile life expectancy of a quality car (8,300 hours at 30mph), puts this into perspective.

But as I wrote above, there is a bigger issue.

Absolute life expectance is not actually the biggest issue with OLED as, unlike LCDs which use colour filters over identical pixels, OLEDs are vulnerable to differential aging.

“The big problem for colour is red, green and blue emitters degrade at different rates,” says Cobb. “Two years ago, one firm was getting through four displays a day on their stand at a show.” They had to swap displays as colour-shift was obvious within hours of switch-on even though the life of its weakest OLED material was rated at 2,000 hours, explains Martin Cobb of Trident Displays.

Here is another example of this differential aging problem.

Cambridge-based display technology firm CDT is developing polymer-based OLEDs which it calls PLEDs. Blue PLEDs have the shortest life on the CDT pallet.

“Blue life has increased eight or ten fold in the last 18 months,” CDT marketing manager Terry Nicklin tells Electronics Weekly. “At the May SID conference this year we showed 35,000 hours lifetime [from 100cd/m² to half brightness for blue, last month we demonstrated 70,000 hours for blue.”

These figures compare with 210,000 hours for red and 200,000 for green, he says.

The Military & Aerospace Electronics article tells us another story — but of course, military have deeper pockets than you and me.

Commercial companies are already pouring $1 billion per year into OLED research, though not necessarily for flexible displays. Companies such as Pioneer, Samsung, Philips, and Dupont are producing glass OLED displays for cell phones, says John Thomas, manager for display technology development at the General Dynamics Canada Vetronics Systems group. But those applications are just an inch or two across.

“There are 14-inch OLED displays out there, and a 12-inch from Sony, but they are just laboratory curiosities,” says Thomas. “Their problems include finite lifetime and differential degradation of materials. It’s not there yet; it’s a new technology and is immature, but it is the one to watch.”

The bottom line is the dominant position of LCDs in all display applications. CRTs are still there but shrinking fast, while OLEDs will dominate research and development for the middle future, he says.

The Army and the Navy don’t think they’ll see OLED applications before at least 2006.

For more information, please check the two articles linked above. They’re both long, but worth reading.

Sources: Steve Bush, Electronics Weekly, November 11, 2004; Ben Ames, Military & Aerospace Electronics, October, 2004

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London is one of the world’s most congested cities. Taking a cab from Heathrow Airport to the city center can easily take two hours. But according to CNN in “Jetpod vision a lift for commuters,” a U.K. company is developing small twin-jet aircrafts which need only 125 meters to take off and 300 meters to land. The first test flights of the Jetpods should take place in 2006. And, in 2010, it should take you just a few minutes to go from Heathrow to Big Ben for a price of about $90, similar to the one of a traditional taxi. The company expects the Jetpods to be used in other cities,such as Tokyo or New York. And it’s also planning personal, military and medical versions of these aircrafts. Read more…

Here are some details provided by CNN.

Perhaps motivated by the misery of traveling to work in one of the world’s most congested cities, London-based Avcen have unveiled plans to develop jetpods — small twin-jet aircraft capable of taking off and landing over much shorter distances than conventional light aircraft.

Using thrust management technology, the VQSTOL (Very Quiet Short Take-off and Landing) jetpod also reduces the noise of a regular jet engine by 50 percent, making it more comparable to a busy road.

And with a cruising speed of 350 miles per hour, the jetpod would be both quicker and quieter than a helicopter.

The illustrations below show some of the models envisioned by the company. You’ll find more details on this page (Credit for illustrations: Avcen).

Now, how will we use these flying cabs?

Requiring just 125 meters to take off and 300 meters to land, Avcen hopes busy city centers will embrace the jetpod, building elevated runways above harbors, roads and railway tracks to handle arrivals and departures from “park-and-fly” terminals located in the suburbs.

With the jetpod able to make up to 50 landings a day, Avcen also believes its ability to make multiple journeys will keep prices down.

For instance, a journey from London’s Heathrow Airport to the city center, a matter of a few minutes by jetpod, might cost around $90 — comparable to an existing taxi fare.

The first aircrafts should be tested in 2006 and enter the flying market in 2010. And as you saw above, Avcen is also developing personal, medical and military version. I bet that many hotshots in London will be happy to pay $1 million to get a Jetpod and avoid the infamous London traffic jams.

Sources: Simon Hooper, for CNN, November 18, 2004; Avcen Aviation website

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This seems as a far-fetched idea, but scientists from the City University of New York think that “superfast trains of the future could glide over fluffy tracks like snowboarders over snow,” according to “Trains get fluffy,” an article published by Nature. They compared the lift forces experienced by red cell blood cells moving through our veins to the ones produced in snowboarding by skiers. And they concluded that the forces in presence were similar, and could be applied to high-speed trains. As long as you go fast enough, even a train can run on feathers, adds PhysicsWeb. The researchers think the future fluffy tracks, capable to support 50-ton trains, could be built by using goose feathers, like the ones found in pillows. So far, they don’t have a prototype for the tracks, but they already bought the pillows. Read more…

Let’s start with Nature.

In snow, this lift is created by air between the tiny ice crystals. When the snow is compressed by the weight of a board, the air is pushed out from the porous snow, exerting an upwards pressure on the board. This cushion of air means that there is very little friction slowing the snowboarder’s motion.

The same forces allow red blood cells to glide smoothly along our capillaries. A loose mesh of sugar-coated proteins on the vessel walls gets squeezed by the passage of a red blood cell, pushing out fluid from between the protein strands.

But why applying red cells blood and snowboarders’ behaviors to a high-speed train?

To find out whether the forces generated would be enough to support a whole train, team leader Sheldon Weinbaum, of the City University of New York, and his colleagues measured the lift force created when snow inside a cylinder is compressed by a piston.

During the first one and a half seconds or so of squeezing, there was a surge in upwards pressure as air was pushed out of the porous snow. Within a couple of seconds, this pressure dropped virtually to zero, as most of the air had drained away. This is why light, fluffy snow can support the heavy load of a snowboarder, provided that she doesn’t linger for longer than about a second.

It’s time to turn to PhysicsWeb for more technical details.

To measure the pressures that develop during snowboarding, Weinbaum and colleagues used a piston cylinder apparatus that was capable of reproducing the dynamic forces experienced by a moving snowboard. They calculated that the air trapped in the snow can easily support the weight of a 70-kg snowboarder. They also found that the pore pressure underneath a snowboard with a surface area of 5000 square centimetres is about 1.4 kilopascals.

Extrapolating these results to the case of a 50-ton high-speed train, Weinbaum and co-workers calculated that 9.8 kilopascals of pore pressure would be needed to support a train that was 25 metres long and 2 metres wide. According to the scientists, a porous material with a permeability of 10^-8 metres squared or smaller — such as goose down — could be used as a track that was capable of supporting the weight of the moving train.

You’ll find additional diagrams in the PhysicsWeb article. But the conclusion belongs to Nature.

The track would consist of two side walls, filled by fluffy material with the same bouncy properties as goose down. Goose down itself would be too costly for filling miles of track; but there are plenty of synthetic substitutes, like those used to fill cheap pillows.

Because the train would only be supported when travelling at high speed, so Weinbaum and colleagues suggest that the vehicles should have retractable wheels that run along the track side walls when the train slows down or as it gathers speed from a standing start.

Will we ever see such trains? As the researchers admit,  ”It’s a far-out idea.” But they do have the pillows.

For more information, the research work has been published by Physical Review Letters under the title “From Red Cells to Snowboarding: A New Concept for a Train Track.” Here is a link to the abstract.

Sources: Philip Ball, Nature, November 10, 2004; Belle Dumé, PhysicsWeb, November 10, 2004

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