dottocomu

Japan gets countdown traffic lights

One gratifying feature of many pedestrian crossings at large intersections in Japan is that they feature a segmented LED "hourglass" LED next to the lights themselves, with red-lit segments disappearing to indicate the time until you can cross. Now Nagoya is trialling the next-gen of the same approach, with a numeric display above/below the obligatory standing/walking pedestrians. The benefit versus the old version (apart from the fact that we think they look cool) is the fact that you can now tell how long it'll be until the lights change in either direction, rather than simply from red to green as in the past. Presto--relief for impatient people everywhere, provided those numbers count down pretty fast; we'd go spare waiting 50 seconds to cross the road.

[Via Slashdot Japan (Japanese); photo from Yahoo Japan]

Laser-powered, mid-air 3D image projector

We first got wind of this from, of all things, the dotmatrix news board in a Tokyo taxi last night; last time we rely on one of them for our latest tech news, as we see that Pink Tentacle has the details up already. Shame on us.

The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) has built a system that projects 3D images in mid-air; as PT explains,

Until now, projected three-dimensional imagery has been “artificial” — optical illusions that appear 3D due to the parallax difference between the eyes of the observer. Prolonged viewing of this conventional sort of 3D imagery can cause physical discomfort.

The newly developed device, however, creates “real” 3D images by using laser light, which is focused through a lens at points in space above the device, to create plasma emissions from the nitrogen and oxygen in the air at the point of focus. Because plasma emission continues for a short period of time, the device is able to create 3D images by moving the point of focus.

Ideas for uses include floating adverts and pyrotechnics; no news on when the tabletop version is coming out, though.

[Via Pink Tentacle]

Toto’s networked Intelligence Toilet

Not so much a technotoilet as a whole-room system, Toto and Daiwa House’s Intelligence Toilet—no, not a derogatory term for the CIA—combines a loo with a built-in urine analyser, a blood-pressure cuff housed in the counter next to the throne, a set of scales built into the floor in front of the sink, and a body-fat meter above it that you grip after washing. The data gets “provisionally saved in the Intelligence Toilet” before being transferred via a home network to your PC, where it’s stored and graphed using a piece of software that’ll also use the data to give you dietary advice and so forth. All this will apparently set you back Y380,000-Y560,000 ($3,550-$5,230) on top of the price of a usual toilet (”usual” in Japan meaning “costs $3,000, has warm water, massage and dryer attachments, and maybe even an SD card slot”).

[Via Nikkei BP (Japanese)]

(Crossposted to Engadget)

Amaztype Amazon visualiser

Via Shift Blog, an amazing Amazon visualiser called Amaztype. Input a search term and it will build a collage in the shape of the word you input using cover art from Amazon. All the images are clickable, too. Smart.

amaztype

NTT's 333GB-per-second fiber optics

Unsurprisingly for a telecoms company, NTT is constantly coming up with new ways to pump more stuff down its wires. This time, they've invented a system that can send over 1,000 wavelengths of light simultaneously down a fibre optic line, which means 2.67 terabits of throughput per second. To put that in context, a DVD takes up something like 4GB and we're talking about shifting 334 gigabytes of that each second. NTT reckons it will have this commercialised and up and running in about five years.

[Via Slashdot Japan“]

Sharp's brain-training dictionary

Electronic dictionaries hit the ground at the rate of about two a week in Japan, but Sharp's latest, the PW-A8300, gets a mention for being something of a limo in the fleet: it includes 90 dictionaries, brain-training maths exercises, and mortgage payment and pension calculators, plus an expansion slot for adding additional dictionaries. The puzzling thing is the decision not to go for an accepted memory-card standard and allow you to store text files and custom dictionaries on it, and indeed MP3 files, as Sony has. The price tag also harbours a nasty surprise, at Y47,250 (around $450).

[Via K-Tai Watch (Japanese)]

Rendering @Home for animated films

Japanese animation studios Shirogumi and Buildin have announced that their next feature will be partially rendered using spare cycles on volunteers' PCs, using NTT Communications' Cell Computing Birth system. Participants download a piece of client software and register; the software is intended to make them feel "part of the process" as they see the frames that are being worked on cycle across their screen. It's also possible to sign up for the two genome projects already being run on the system. Looks like NTT com has gone and built itself what's effectively an "anything@Home" system, though the range of projects it can be used for is presumably going to stay limited while cycles are donated with no remuneration (or are we being too cynical?).

[Via ITmedia (Japanese)]

iki iki Monitor sets out to breathalyze sneaky smokers

The problem of smoking among Japanese high school students may not be about to bring the country toppling, but it’s certainly in the news after a prominent rookie baseball pitcher got himself suspended from school last week for smoking in a pachinko parlour (the gambling wasn’t a problem, apparently). Kanematsu Wellness has set out to assist in the good fight with its iki iki Monitor (”iki” means “breath”, in case you were wondering), which measures levels of carbon monoxide in your breath to determine whether you’re a light, heavy or non-deathstick user. It even comes with a carrying case for portability, so kids, watch out for lightning raids next time you sneak off for a smoke behind the bike sheds. One iki iki Monitor will set you back Y65,000 (about $620), or the price of 240.7 packs of Japanese cigarettes.

[Via ITmedia (Japanese)]

[Crossposted to Engadget]

Clocking on with King Jim's QR code clock

A product that is both a timely update to the venerable punch-card and a tool to further enslave us to our corporate masters, King Jim's Clock On CLQ1 is the world's first clock to display the time as a QR code. The idea is to have peons scan the codes into their barcode-reading cellphones and clock in by sending the information contained therein to HQ using a Java app. Unfortunately for the creatively-minded among you, the clock itself is radio-synced and therefore manual meddling with the time settings is out.

The Clock On is mainly intended for outsourced staff, medical care workers and home teachers who're hard to keep track of, we're told. (Memo to King Jim marketing dept.: idea of tracking teachers in this way does not scale; meditate on word "home"). No information on pricing, or whether the QR codes can be hacked to show you working a 9 to 5 in a Chiba nursing home while you sit drinking beer under a tree somewhere.

[KING JIM Product page (Japanese)]

[Via Slashdot-J (Japanese)]

600GB hard disk from Logitec

Logitec continues to supply all our beefy storage device needs with the LHD-TB600FU2 (hey, and FU right back with your silly naming conventions), a dual-300GB beast that can either operate as two separate drives (with the ability to back up the one you're using to the other at the press of a button on the front) or as a single volume. It comes both FireWire and USB2.0-ready, too, and likes Macs and Windows machines. Only drawback is that there's a degree of accompanying sticker shock and backstrain risk: it weighs in at a hefty Y113,400 and 4.2 kg.

[Via Impress PC Watch(Japanese)]

Fujitsu's UBWALL personal/public info terminal

Proving that while newsflow on RFID tags may have abated somewhat recently Japan's quest to chip everything continues apace, Fujitsu has come up with a display wall with eight embedded RFID readers and WiFi that they envisage being placed in public facilities such as shopping centres and cinemas to offer information and beam out content such as movie trailers, coupons with free offers, and so forth. The idea is that swiping a chipped card or phone over one of the readers would get you personally-tailored information, so that big general displays can do double duty as personal information terminals. Given for example that Japan Airlines is offering smart mileage club cards, we can imagine walking into an airport terminal and swiping our card over the information board to get a blowup of which gate our flight leaves from, whether it's on time, and so forth.

[Via K-tai Watch (Japanese)]

Omron announces face recognition for cellphones

With Japan cellphone leader NTT DoCoMo constantly finding new things to do with the Felica smart wallet chips in its phones, and 2nd and 3rd-placed KDDI and Vodafone poised to follow suit later this year, it's not surprising that security for the e-money/commuter pass data in handsets is a hot issue. Current approaches focus on conventional password protection, with Fujitsu throwing in fingerprint scanners on some of its phones as an alternative. Now Omron is making its own move on the arena with a face-recognition system that will match a phonecam snap of your face with 80 points on a stored photo within one second. No news about when this will hit the shelves, as it seems they're still trying to find a taker for the technology. The only thing that worries us is whether it's possible to scam the system Mission-Impossible style by holding up a photo in front of the lens.

[Via Japan Corp News]

802.11b wireless optical mouse from Elecom

While wireless mice may be two a penny these days, examples with a range of 30 metres are something of a rarity. Elecom's M-D6UR uses 802.11b WiFi instead of the usual Bluetooth or infra-red to get you that range boost, with the caveat that using it on a steel desk will apparently cut that down to 10 metres (you need to use wood for best results). Anyway, a must for anyone whose monitor of choice is a giant wall-mounted LCD. We know you're out there somewhere. Price is around the Y6,000 mark; battery life is 30 hours, and the USB 1.1 receiver slots neatly into the back of the mouse when not in use.

[Via Impress Akiba Hotline (Japanese)]

Buffalo's new TeraStation LAN hard disks

Buffalo has announced a couple of friends for the 1-terabyte TeraStation networked hard drive it announced last November. The new additions are a 1.6-terabyte version sporting four 400GB drives (for those of you incapable of simple arithmetic), gigabit Ethernet and four USB2.0 ports, which weighs 7.2kg and will set you back Y264,100 (about $2,555)--which is more than twice the Y106,300 for the 1TB version. There's also a 640-gigabyte TeraStation mini, sporting four 160GB drives and a slightly friendlier price tag of Y85,000 ($822).

[Via ASCII24 (Japanese)]

Logitec's 5cm x 5cm portable hard drive

OK, so given the size we hardly need to state that it's portable; Logitec's new drive is 50.8 x 50 x 10.5 mm, weighs 35g, and comes with a neckstrap, so even if you habitually wear nothing but a g-string you can still carry it around without much fuss. Drive size is 2.2GB, connection is by USB2.0; should cost Y18.690 in Japan when it comes out later this month.

[Via Impress PC Watch (Japanese)]

Tokyo University's wraparound scanner

Tokyo University's Quantum-Phase Electronics Centre has come up with a scanner in the form of a flexible plastic sheet containing organic diodes that can be placed against an object to scan it. This makes it possible to get a perfect scan of both pages of old and fragile books without mauling them, for example. It also doesn't require the amount of light needed by a conventional scanner, as the organic photodiodes pick up reflected light from the object being scanned, though you do need the object directly under a fluourescent light to get a good image.

[Via Slashdot J (Japanese)]

[Some background reading which refers to the Tokyo U work here]

The PicoServer, sensor control in a pack-of-smokes form factor

Japanese firm Package Technology is coming out with a 42 x 23.5 x 61 mm box called the PicoServer that's essentially a web/mail server with an Ethernet port and three sockets for sensors (one out, two in). Suggested uses include hooking up a heat sensor and have it mail you when Widget No. 24 is overheating before it blows up half the neighourhood, or using it to control your lighting or gas (gas?!) at home; the possibilities for fun are endless. Out in Japan on November 9 for around Y40,000 ($375).

[Via ITmedia (Japanese)]

[crossposted to Engadget]

Tokyo's videophone police boxes

Latest innovation by the Tokyo police force is videophone kiosks in koban (police boxes) so that you can talk to a cop face to face if everyone happens to be out on patrol (or gone for the night). Looks like they're going one step further, too--this kiosk we snapped the other night was in a diminutive hut under a road bridge that didn't seem to have anything else in it. The kiosks do let you do things like calling up and printing out information such as maps to a particular address or the to nearest station or bus stop, but we suspect this cellphone thing that one or two people in Japan seem to have these days might make them a touch irrelevant for most folks.

[Crossposted to Engadget]

Roland's digital accordion

The accordion isn't an instrument you might think would lend itself to the digital realm, but Roland has worked on developing a system of air-pressure sensors (they call it Physical Behavior Modeling, which sounds like something else entirely, but never mind) to allow the same type of play as the real thing, and have modelled the reeds within the instrument that are usually a pain to adjust. You also get the ability to play a range of non-accordion sounds and (using a footpedal) connect to sequencers and other stuff via MIDI.

[Product page]

The Ubiquitous Communicator

Japan’s second attempt this week to prove that the PDA is still with us comes from the Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory, part of the T-Engine Forum that develops the TRON OS. The Ubiquitous Communicator packs in a lot of goodies: RFID reader, fingerprint sensor, Bluetooth, WiFi, 2-megapixel camera on the back and another 300,000-pixel unit on the front for videophone calls, mic and speaker for VoIP calls, and so forth. There’s a catch, as you might expect; the first production run models will cost something above Y300,000 ($2,700), though the second run should see that come down to about the same price as a high-end digital camera, which should help the quest for, er, ubiquity.

[Via ITmedia (Japanese)]

Japan mulls P2P for patient info

P2P filesharing gets a bad rep from the recording and and movie industries, who&re apt to paint it as a technology that doesn't have any legitimate uses. However, the Japanese government's National Institute of Communications and Information Technology is experimenting with a P2P network that links up 16 hospitals and allows them to do high-speed searches and transfers of encrypted patient information and high-quality 3D moving images. The aim is to avoid doubling up on medical tests, avoid the risk of double-dosing patients with drugs, and make sure that a patient&s medical history is immediately available even if they switch hospitals. We assume they've built in a feature to stop interns from using it to swap J-Pop albums in their free time.

[Via ITmedia (Japanese)]

[Crossposted to Engadget]

Mitsubishi€'s vitamin-boosting fridge

Among the slew of new household products Mitsubishi has just announced are several refrigerators that will boost the vitamin C content of your vegetables by 10% during storage (though not if you leave them in there for a year or two, we presume). The trick is that instead of plunging your legumes into total darkness the &Delicious Vitamin Boost Light Power Vegetable Compartment& uses coloured LED lights at frequencies that don't "stimulate germination", and they have some graphs and photos of a cabbage to prove it works.

[Via Mycom PC Web (Japanese)]

[Crossposted to Engadget]

Kyocera's sunflower solar power peripherals

Give a Japanese marketing man a product first thing and come lunchtime he'll be itching to make a limited edition out of it. So it goes with Kyocera's latest, a less clumpy, more homey set of peripherals to help you integrate solar power into your house. Heavily influenced by the Microsoft ClipArt school of design, the connector and transformer shed numerous pounds and inches versus their predecessors and come decorated with sunflowers. Limited to 100 units each; best of luck shifting them, guys.

[Crossposted to Engadget]

[Nikkei BP (Japanese)]

A fingertap away

NTT DoCoMo may have succeeded in coming up with a wacky interface that we actually want. Their UbiButton controller is a watch-type device with a chip on the back in contact with your skin; tap your fingertips together lightly and it picks up the shock. By tapping out different patterns (it detects only the shock, not the strength) the idea is that you could turn lights and appliances on and off, for example. The fingertip-sized UbiChip that forms the guts of the device can be put into pretty much anything provided it's in contact with your skin--so you could turn on a Bluetooth headset by tapping your earlobe rather than fumbling for a button, or tweak the volume of your cellphone by tapping your face. Sounds silly, sure, but it's not enough to get people laughing and pointing at you (unless that's the kind of face you have already). We'd love a wristwatch remote that controlled everything in the room, personally, rather than the stack of black obelisks we have at the moment. That said, remembering all the riffs to tap out for the commands could get tough beyond a certain point.

[Crossposted to Engadget]

[Via ITmedia (Japanese)]

Cooling PCs with a heartbeat

Japanese firm Eamex (Japanese product page) has developed a pump that they say could form the basis of anything from artificial hearts to liquid cooling systems for laptop computers. It uses a plastic that expands or contracts when a small amount of electricity is passed through it, on the same principle as artificial muscles. In a laptop, it achieves cooling performance that's 2X-3X better than conventional pumps, creates no sound or vibration, and can be made smaller and cheaper than anything around at the moment. And as the manufacturer notes, the operating frequency of 1Hz is close to the pulse of the human heart. Despite our status as willing passengers on technology's heady voyage toward the future, the idea of our laptop sitting there with its innards pulsing creeps us out just a bit.

[Via Slashdot Japan (Japanese)]

RFID-tag location system

We're in danger of turning into an RFID blog if the news continues to feature nothing but stories of things and people being chipped. Latest: NEC has developed an employee location system using RFID tags that it will begin shipping from October. Chipped workers are tracked through the office, with information appearing to the viewer about whether they're at their desks, in a meeting, etc. It also offers different communications methods according to location: phone or chat if the person is at their desk, voice or email if they're away. The sensor information is processed by a piece of middleware called Wink@Ripple; someone obviously got the "name" and "password" fields mixed up again. A 50-user solution is expected to ship for about Y4 mn.

[Via Nikkei IT Pro (Japanese)]

Is it a car? Is it a train? No, it's UglyVan

"Dumpy" isn't a word we have much call to use, but there's none more appropriate to describe JR Hokkaido's Salamander 901 Dual Mode Vehicle, which takes all that's ungainly and squareish in bus and train design and amalgamates it into one great big yellow thing. To be fair, this is only a prototype, and its bus-with-bits-on looks derive from the fact that it is, in fact, a bus with bits on. The real thing, as envisaged by JR Hokkaido's crack team of Photoshop wizards, is considerably sleeker. As you will by now have guessed, it traverses either road or rail with equal ease, and is aimed at doing the sort of stuff you'd expect, like cutting down on the amount of hanging around involved in a morning commute, allowing JR Hokkaido to spend less money on laying down tracks, and so forth. Most of the regional JR companies aren't all that profitable, especially if they lack bullet trains and operate rural lines in places with minimal population density (e.g., Hokkaido).

[Via NIKKEI NET (Japanese)]

Chip your kids

Japan has seen several high-profile attacks on children in or around schools recently, and there's a natural trend toward keeping closer tabs on their movements. The latest system aimed at assuaging parental fears involves having kids swipe a school ID card containing an IC tag over a reader at the school gate: doing so sends a mail to a parent's cellphone to confirm they've arrived (presumably they'll have to have someone standing over the reader to prevent wayward pupils being swiped in by their friends). As a report goes to the homeroom teacher if someone hasn't checked in, the process of discovering no-shows and starting the process of finding them should be speeded up. The future doesn't look much fun for kids if they have to be chipped and tracked everywhere they go, though.

[Via the Nikkei Shimbun (Japanese)]

Tokyo aerial photo website

Sites with aerial photos of Japan have thus far been almost nonexistent, unless you had the inclination to spend thousands of dollars a year renting the data. The Decore site, however, is free and allows you to search for aerial photos of Tokyo by address, landmark, or train station (flags showing these can be toggled on and off); once you're in roughly the right area you can click in the photo to recenter. Better still for any mobloggers in the audience is that the URLs include longditude/latitude info, making it simple to add links to aerial photo shots to your moblog posts.

Caveats: (1) Only works with IE6.0; (2) they appear to have a rather draconian linking policy (i.e., you're supposed to notify them of each link), so we'll have to see how they respond to bloggers; (3) the photos appear to all date from 2001, so putting in the coordinates for one of Tokyo's snazzy new developments may get you a photo of a hole in the ground.

Photo is of Tokyo Tower from more or less directly above.

[Go: DECORE (Japanese only)]

Sharp's sub-1mm e-book reader

Sony and Matsushita may be meeting with a lukewarm reception for their recently released e-book terminals (something which Sony at least must be getting used to recently), but that isn't slowing the race to develop the next generation. Sharp claims it will have a paper-thin (i.e., under 1mm) reader in shops by 2007. It's working on a colour "LCD paper" that doesn't need a light source, apparently by upping the amount of light the paper reflects. Sharp already has tie-ups with 7000 content providers for the Zaurus Town site it offers to users of its handhelds, so it sounds like it could slide into the e-book (or rather e-newspaper and e-manga) market with relative ease. It's instructive that Sony is apparently soon to bring two Japanese national newspapers into the content fold for its Librie e-book reader, too: its self-destruct after 90 days content policy would certainly be easier to swallow if you were downloading the morning paper rather than the latest Haruki Murakami novel.

[Via Fuji Business News (Japanese)]

Welcome to the Cyber Dome

Contributing nobly to the great genre of device that stops children from rioting in museums, Matsushita Electric Works has come up with a 3D display system that processes MPEG or AVI video files and throws them onto a 1.8 m diameter dome screen.

You need a different video for the left and right "eyes", and yes, you do need to wear a pair of funny glasses to get the 3D; it also requires three networked PCs working behind the scenes to stop your flat video going all bendy when it hits the screen.

You can ignore all that dry stuff, though, because they hint that it may be possible to play games on it, which would justify its existence at a stroke.

[Via Nikkei press release wire (Japanese)]

The eco-friendly cellphone antenna

NTT DoCoMo is putting up a FOMA antenna with a difference in the depths of Chiba prefecture. Built entirely from recyclable or reusable materials, it relies on solar and wind power and is cooled by a heat exchanger that doesn't put out any carbon dioxide. The area around the so-called EcoTower is paved with recycled tiles instead of asphalt or concrete.

DoCoMo already has a few of these towers up for its 2G service, but this marks the first 3G version. We assume that playing up its eco-friendliness is partly an attempt by to mollify rural residents who've been vocally opposing cellphone antennas recently, though unfortunately it's still going to put out those waves that everyone worries about.

[Via K-Tai Watch (Japanese)]

The fastest cabler in the East

Tests of everyday man's worth to society steadily evolve and diversify; where once exposing oneself to physical danger (and surviving, obviously) was enough, successive generations have found themselves required to do everything from making witty quips in the drawing room to getting Windows out of safe mode. In Japan, a society docile enough to be termed "peace-addled" by some of its more activist elements, the latest of these pacifist tests of manhood has emerged: broadband cable installation. And we have to agree; this is man's work. Or rather, it falls into that category of tasks that wives and girlfriends daily snare us into performing because they involve lying on the floor inhaling dust and running cables under things.

Hence, the Advanced Info-Communications Promotion Community's Info-Communications Wiring Technology Forum this year featured teams of eager cablers working on a mockup of bits of a house, vying for supremacy in smartly-pressed boiler suits (everyone liked the contest itself, though exhibitors rated the forum a resounding "average" elsewhere, according to the refreshingly honest report on the AICPCIWTF website). We assume that things like speed, neat bundling, and the ability not to panic in confined spaces were all factors in assessing the winners, though information on that score is scant. In any case, they competed with the noble aim of making cable TV and DSL safe for future generations. Several competitors were also heard to make witty quips in the drawing room after the contest, and one exposed himself and was later arrested.

Someone announce a gadget, for goodness' sake! We're starting to lose it!

[Via Nikkei ITPro (Japanese)]

Fuel cell laptop from Toshiba on the way

Bloomberg reports that Toshiba is to release a methanol fuel cell laptop with 10 hours of battery life later this year. Be careful trying to fly with one, though:

The Toshiba micro fuel cell will last about 10 hours, or about twice as long as most new rechargeable lithium-ion batteries currently available. Lithium-ion batteries account for about $2.7 billion of the $4.5 billion market for rechargeable batteries, according to Paris-based market research firm Avicenne Developpement.

[snip]

The potential use of micro fuel cells to power mobile devices will be limited for several years because of regulatory restrictions on transporting them on aircraft, Takeishi said.

[Read: Bloomberg.com article]

The healthy home of the future

Hitachi, Matsushita Electric and a consortium of other firms have started work on a system of wirelessly networked devices that watch your health as you go about your daily business, with the intention of catching health problems in their early stages. Hitachi is making a mat that slides under your futon and measures pulse, breathing, and snoring while you're asleep; Matsushita is working on an unspecified device that allows the "easy measurement of the thickness of flab on your stomach and other areas" (a networked pair of calipers?), Toto will bring out a toilet that measures salt and sugar levels in your urine as you piss; and Mitsubishi is working on a system that analyses the data, while Fujitsu Prime Software Technologies contributes the communication format that will link everything up. These should start appearing on the market around 2006.

[Via Nikkei IT (Japanese)]

The hospital inside

Scientists at Kyoto University are developing microscopic devices that should someday eliminate the jabbing with needles, peeing in cups, and waiting around for test results that make hospital visits so uncomfortable. The Implantable Hospital Device will consist of micromachines that can monitor things like blood chemistry constantly and transmit the accumulated data via a wireless antenna to a hospital monitor. We hope they find time to develop a secure way of sending the data while they're at it, though; it wouldn't be much fun to have the state of your bodily fluids Bluesnarfed as you walk about.

[Via Nikkei BP (Japanese)]

The sci-fi sleep solution

Incense, music, pillows made from spaceage foam: the arsenal of tools available to the pursuer of untroubled slumber is already fairly well-stocked. But such things pale into insignificance before the sheer integration of Matsushita Electric Works' vision of the ultimate sleep room. Their "Emit Sleep System" controls all of the devices in your bedroom (lighting, bed, air conditioning, stereo, massage chair, curtains) to make sure that your Z's are of a quality that has so far been the province of science fiction. For readers who happen to be in Tokyo, head to the "suimin' ROOM" on the second floor of Matsushita's National Living Showroom in Shiodome--though you'll need to have a Japanese speaker with you for the 30-minute consultation before you get to actually experience the delights of their full-on sleep solution (which unfortunately lasts only another 30 minutes), and you'll have to pay Y2,000 for the privilege. Matsushita envisages having products on the market in 2005 and earning Y5 bn from this as a separate business in 2007, incidentally. They have no plans yet for one of those sci-fi beds that tips you up and slides you into your clothes in the morning, unfortunately.

A radio station on your shoulder

UK readers may recall with nostalgia the radio Outside Broadcast vans that you used to (and can still, in fact) find outside sporting events, bristling with antennae and hooked up to a sheaf of cables running to the commentary box inside the stadium. However, following that most Japanese principle that anything large exists only to be made smaller, and anything small smaller still, the outside broadcast van (minus the vehicular bits, obviously) now fits into a brick that you can hang from a shoulder strap. NEC's mobilestudio is a 10 x 25 x 23 cm box that comes in orange and sky blue as well as the obligatory black, and houses an ISDN router, amp, mike sockets, and a slot for an NTT DoCoMo FOMA 3G data card. The use of the cellphone network obviously means that you can broadcast from pretty much anywhere, though the fact that 3G waves don't go around corners all that well leads us to wonder how good this is indoors. We hope the battery's replaceable, too, as it only lasts an hour.

The biggest question, though, has to be why one of these is strictly necessary when every radio station in the world is set up for phone-ins and there are noise-cancelling headsets like theBoom on the market (the higher-quality audio that comes from NEC's proprietary MPEG-4-variant codec, perhaps?). Especially since a mobilestudio will set you back Y990,000 (US$9,000), or Y2 mn if you go for the fully-loaded version, and you need two--one outside and one at the studio--to actually use the system. Ironically, many Japanese TV stations are already using FOMA videophones to get quick, rough-and-ready on-the-spot reporting, without the need for a 3kg lump hung over your shoulder.

[Via K-Tai Watch (Japanese)]

802.11b for cellphones coming soon

Japanese component manufacturer Alps Electric has announced a miniature 802.11b wireless LAN chip that it says should be appearing in an unspecified cellphone soon. Power consumption, one of the main hurdles to putting 802.11b in cellphones, looks like it won't be a problem, as the new chip only draws about a milliwatt (around 50 milliwatts was the previous norm, so Alps says). They're planning to get the chip into PDAs and digital cameras too, but it looks like talks with the phone manufacturers are furthest along at the moment.

[Via ITmedia (Japanese)]

Toto's hydroelectric toilet

Leading technoloo manufacturer Toto has added a new only-in-Japan modification to its latest model: it's a toilet that uses hydroelectric power to charge its battery as it flushes. A lot of toilets in this hygiene-obsessive country use an infrared sensor instead of a handle to trigger the flush, but that of course requires either a battery that needs replacing or a hookup to mains electricity, involving the hassle of wiring and so forth. The little hydroelectric generator in the latest version means that the battery lasts about ten years. If you forget to flush, or haven't done so ten seconds after getting up, it'll also take a guess at what variety of waste you've just put into it and flush the appropriate amount of water in response.

[Via Nikkei BP (Japanese)]

A silly idea meets an unfair end

Japanese ISP Livedoor recently announced a minor and seemingly harmless service whereby you sent in fistfuls of CDs (in 50s) to be ripped into mp3 format, and they posted the originals plus a bunch of CD-Rs back to you.

We'll stipulate for the moment that there are people in the world who have Internet access but lack a CD-R drive in their PC, or lack the time to rip an extensive CD collection, and that therefore the service was going to find some market. Whatever. The point of interest comes in the most recent development. The service was shut down on May 12 after protests from the copyright mafia, and has now been restarted with an extra feature: on the online application form, you have to check a box indicating that you have received the permission of the copyright holder to turn their music into mp3s. The site even lists the numbers of JASRAC and other copyright bodies, so you can phone them up to ask for their blessing. Do we assume this is a formality, and that they say "yes"? Or is Livedoor posting this in a combined protest and admission that their service is screwed?

[Via ITmedia (Japanese)]

Epson's rather expensive data-entry keyboard

We doubt you really need one of these, but Epson has come out with what they call a "Business Full Keyboard" that assembles all the keys you'd want to use when entering numbers one-handed, to form a sort of ten-key pad on steroids. A nice touch is that the number pad can be attached to either side of the main section to suit both left- and right-hookers. The design is supposed to minimise the stress caused by hammering away at the keys for hours on end, though regrettably there are no features designed to help you put up with a life that involves punching numbers into a computer all day. Also, at Y68,000 and weighing in at around 2kg, this is heavyweight in all senses.

Compatible with all recent flavours of Windows; out now in Japan.

[Via Nikkei BP (Japanese)]

Photos of NTT's IP videophone

The first prototypes of NTT's broadband videophone (see our first post for details) have been unveiled. Looks like it's doing a moderately good job of living up to those dreams that the airbrushed concept drawings inspired in our fevered heads. Major new details are that the unit includes web-browsing and email, plus USB ports for add-ons such as a forthcoming external keyboard.

Big problem, though, is that NTT has slapped a price tag on the unit that dooms it from the start: Y65,000-Y70,000 yen. If this were repackaged into something a little more feature-rich--perhaps a smaller unit with a more PDA-like slant to it and built-in WiFi, that could be used outside as well--we could maybe see it working. But who's going to pay $600 for what is, in effect, a jazzed-up home phone with a screen?

[Read: NTT's IP Video Phone Prototype Unveiled]

Voice recognition for sushi shops

In another grandiose and satisfyingly expensive solution to an everyday problem, Japanese sushi chain Toriton has installed an IBM voice-recognition system for ordering in its shops. The aim is not, as one might suspect, to enable diners to whisper the names of a few choice morsels into a countertop mike and shortly thereafter see platters of sushi gliding toward them down the conveyor. It's to help out Toriton's harried band of chefs, who are fielding orders and marrying bits of fish to pillows of rice at such a rate of knots that they're screwing up 30 orders a day. Given that having your hands full of toro and sticky rice isn't all that conducive to picking up a ballpen or tapping at a keypad, the company opted to install mikes through which the chefs intone the seat numbers and order details of whatever customers are yelling at them, which then flash up on a screen and spool out of a printer. The result is a mere 10 slips on the path to raw fishy ecstasy every day, instead of 30.

[Via Slashdot Japan (Japanese)]

Satellite TV on mobile devices

Seems that TV is indisputably the next killer app for mobile devices (in the sense that it kills more braincells, if nothing else). Vodafone Japan's launching handsets with analogue TV tuners as fast as it can get them out of the door, and now a company with satellites dedicated to broadcasting for mobile devices is getting ready to launch. Mobile Broadcasting successfully put its first satellite into orbit last month, and says it will have 40 channels of multimedia TV and radio broadcasting ready to go in July this year.

Test broadcasts started up in late April, and hardware manufacturers are apparently in the process of using these to tweak whatever gadgets they have planned. News on these is scarce to nonexistent at the moment--it's not clear if the technology is far enough along that a receiver could be crammed into a cellphone or PDA, or whether we should expect some sort of handheld TV with a few extra bells and whistles.

[Via K-Tai Watch (Japanese)]

Computer game controls come to cars

Alps has come up with a drive-by-wire system for cars that gives you feedback about road conditions through the steering wheel and pedals. We have a feeling this is something that's been in high-end arcade games for a while (albeit not feeding back anything from a real road surface), so it's good to see that the real world has caught up. We have to admit we're reassured that the system comes from a car electronics company rather than Sega, though.

The advantages claimed (which to an extent are those of all drive-by-wire systems) are that the lack of need for mechanical connections means lighter cars and more freedom to design cabin layouts. They also mention safety, which we presume means that you can use software to do things like smooth out the driving of people who think the brake and accelerator are on/off switches (i.e., a significant proportion of Tokyo taxi drivers). Personally, our main safety concern would be what happens if everything goes down, given the lack of physical connections. We'd like a big red handle hooked up to the brakes just in case.

Alps will be displaying this at its trade show in May, with one of the toys on display a cockpit from which you can drive a radio-controlled car, which sounds rather fun, though it marks a rare instance of someone building a controller that's bigger than the thing being controlled.

[Via ITmedia (Japanese)]

[Press release with more photos (Japanese)]

Toshiba's networked kitchen

This is the day when the machines in your kitchen start talking to each other. Toshiba's rather pinkly and fluffily named Feminity range features a series of Bluetooth-networked appliances controlled by a touch-screen terminal with voice recognition. The whole lot hooks up to the web, so your fridge (which naturally records what's in it, and the best-before dates) can look up recipes, set the microwave for you, and send a shopping list to your cellphone; conversely, you can look up what’s in the fridge via your cellphone to avoid those costly and annoying double purchases of caviar and champagne. The washing machine can be set via the terminal, too, meaning that you can tell it what you’re putting in it and have it do the rest rather than ineptly tweaking endless knobs and having everything turn out a pale shade of pink. Sadly, they haven't yet seen fit to develop a robot laundry basket that sorts the stuff and ships it to the washing machine.

[Via the Red Ferret Journal]

[Product page (Japanese)]

Laptop drives hit three figures

Toshiba today announced the highest-capacity 2.5" drive yet. The company claims that the 100GB unit is tougher than before, quieter, and uses 20% less power. It's also only 9.5mm thick, which bodes well for getting those laptops slimmed down even more.

[Read: Toshiba press release (English)]

Location tracking and video surveillance--for your kids

Peter at Engadget reported earlier on a system using Bluetooth tags to track children at the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. Errant children can be located by sending a text message from a cellphone asking where the tag is.

Japan, of course, has to go one better. The Nikkei Shimbun newspaper reports that NTT and Dainippon Printing have built a system aimed at kindergartens that allows parents to keep a remote eye on their children using a system of RFID tag readers and webcams in classrooms. Parents log into a website and enter their child's details, a server at the kindergarten determines the child's location using an RFID chip built into their nametag, and it then streams video from the appropriate camera back to the parents' PC. Given the price that RFID tags and readers are set to fall to, it sounds like the kind of system that we could definitely be seeing more of in future.

[Via the Nikkei Shimbun (Japanese)]

Update: According to a Kyodo News article, the system costs Y3 mn and includes 80 tags and 4 cameras. We assume that it includes the tag readers, a server, and some cables to, like, hook everything together too.

WiFi goes to the (motor) races

PC Watch reports on what sounds like a trend that could be taking hold at Japanese motor racing events: streaming live video from cameras around the circuit to a ton of WiFi access points so that anyone with a PDA and a wireless card can view the race live, whatever ditch or hospitality tent they happen to be in. At the moment the scale of the back end is such that providing web access alongside the video and audio streams apparently tends to clog things up, but unplugging the web allows pretty satisfactory results, as shown by a recent experiment during the Indy Japan 300 race at Motegi circuit. Future plans include upping the access points to 802.11g from the current 802.11b, which would allow multiple video streams and faster switching between cameras; one of the cool applications envisaged is the ability to specify a particular car that you want to track and switch camera views automatically to follow it.

[Via PC Watch (Japanese)]

Review of Korg's video Kaoss Pad

Sonic State has a hands-on review of Korg's successor to its groundbreaking Kaoss Pad effects unit, which allowed you to do all sorts of wild things with audio using a trackpad-style interface. The new Kaoss Pad Enhancer adds video inputs and 100 video effects, plus 100 combinations allowing you to mangle audio and video at the same time. It will also generate 60 types of graphics based on the audio or video being fed into it--think iTunes visualisations, perhaps--to overlay on the video. Aside from a few quibbles about an external power supply that's probably not the best thing for use in a club, Sonic State think it's the perfect thing for DJs looking to raise their game by adding video to their sets.

[Read: Sonic State review]