Fog with bite
Now we are used to touchscreens, are we ready for mist-screens? A tabletop computer called MisTable projects images onto a thick curtain of fog, allowing people to interact with the 3D projections by sticking their hands right in. 鈥淚t feels like you鈥檙e just interacting with this virtual object,鈥� says Sriram Subramanian at the University of Bristol, UK. You can also drag floating images down to a horizontal display, and share them across the tabletop. MisTable will be presented this month at the Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference in Toronto, Canada.
Ask Cortana, 鈥淲ho鈥檚 your daddy?鈥� and she鈥檒l say, 鈥淭echnically speaking, that鈥檇 be Bill Gates. No big deal鈥� Microsoft鈥檚 answer to Apple鈥檚 Siri digital assistant, called Cortana, shows some personality in The Wall Street Journal, 2 April
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Glowing robot horde at your fingertips
Hundreds of palm-sized glowing robots stand ready to do your bidding. Built by Javier Alonso-Mora of Disney Research in Zurich, Switzerland, the dayglo 鈥減ixelbots鈥� scurry along the ground in swarms coordinated by someone using a tablet or gesture-sensing camera. Simply draw with your finger on the tablet and the army of pixelbots aligns accordingly. Or, if using the gesture sensor, you can smile and the robots shift to form a smile back at you.
NYC apartment rented by Bitcoin
Add real estate to the list of worldly goods you can acquire with Bitcoin. The Bapple agency last week finalised a rental deal on an apartment in the Nolita neighbourhood of New York鈥檚 Manhattan Island. The lease, which began on 1 April, was paid for entirely with bitcoins. Jeff Goolsby, the agent who closed the deal, says there would have been fees and delays if the transaction had been done using US dollars via a cheque or bank transfer. The Bitcoin investor who rented the apartment remains anonymous.
