Daily Tech News

LifeStraw Personal Water Filter LifeStraw is the award-winning personal water filter, designed to provide you with safe, clean drinking water in any situation. The ideal water filter for hiking & camping, travel, emergency preparedness & survival, LifeStraw makes contaminated or suspect water safe to drink. LifeStraw Buy One, Give One:  for every LifeStraw water filter sold, a child in Africa receives clean water for an entire school year The LifeStraw personal water filter, a "Best Invention of the Year" (Time magazine) winner, enables users to drink water safely from contaminated water sources. LifeStraw is ideal for homeowners during emergencies such as local flooding which can contaminate drinking water supplies. LifeStraw is also ideal for campers and hikers who may be drinking from rivers or lakes and are unsure of the water safety. Because LifeStraw is lightweight and compact, it is also great for travelers who do not want to rely on the quality of local w...

Just strap a projector to your ceiling and you're good to go. Augmented reality tech like Microsoft's Hololens and  the upcoming Magic Leap  are undeniably cool, but they do have a downside. You have to wear some chunky thing on your face to use them. That's a problem it looks like Amazon might be out to solve. The web-commerce giant just patented two different technologies that could help bring holograms to the living room with out the cumbersome specs. The first, a patent for " object tracking in a 3-dimensional environment ," is all about being able to track movement in a room. Unlike Microsoft's Kinect, which sits atop a TV and just looks forward, the system Amazon outlines would be able to track the movement of a user's hands throughout an entire room with as little as one ceiling mounted node. Meanwhile, a patent for a " reflector-based depth mapping of a scene ," pairs a single ceiling-mounted projector with a de...

Mid-air holograms that respond to human touch Researchers from Tsukuba University in Japan have created holograms that respond to human touch. Involving femtosecond lasers, which can stimulate physical matter to emit light in 3D form, the research could eventually lead to the creation of holograms that humans are able to interact with. The computer-generated holograms, called Fairy Lights (some are shaped like multicolored pixies), are quite small, occupying a maximum volume of 1 cm 3 , but could be scaled up using larger optical devices. By touching the mid-air light displays with a finger, a holographic heart breaks in half and returns to whole when the finger is removed, the word "Love" turns to "Hate" with a touch, and a floating box can be "checked" with a finger. Through a series of lenses and mirrors, the researchers followed two methods of rendering their mid-air graphics made up of plasma voxels: through spatial light modulation, and by the ...