WASHINGTON (AFP) – Researchers at a US Navy laboratory have unveiled what they say is “significant” evidence of cold fusion, a potential energy source that has many skeptics in the scientific community.

The scientists on Monday described what they called the first clear visual evidence that low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), or cold fusion devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists say are indicative of nuclear reactions.

“Our finding is very significant,” said analytical chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss of the US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California.

“To our knowledge, this is the first scientific report of the production of highly energetic neutrons from a LENR device,” added the study’s co-author in a statement.

The study’s results were presented at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The city is also the site of an infamous presentation on cold fusion 20 years ago by Martin Fleishmann and Stanley Pons that sent shockwaves across the world.

Despite their claim to cold fusion discovery, the Fleishmann-Pons study soon fell into discredit after other researchers were unable to reproduce the results.

Scientists have been working for years to produce cold fusion reactions, a potentially cheap, limitless and environmentally-clean source of energy.

Paul Padley, a physicist at Rice University who reviewed Mosier-Boss’s published work, said the study did not provide a plausible explanation of how cold fusion could take place in the conditions described.

“It fails to provide a theoretical rationale to explain how fusion could occur at room temperatures. And in its analysis, the research paper fails to exclude other sources for the production of neutrons,” he told the Houston Chronicle.

“The whole point of fusion is, you?re bringing things of like charge together. As we all know, like things repel, and you have to overcome that repulsion somehow.”

But Steven Krivit, editor of the New Energy Times, said the study was “big” and could open a new scientific field.

The neutrons produced in the experiments “may not be caused by fusion but perhaps some new, unknown nuclear process,” added Krivit, who has monitored cold fusion studies for the past 20 years.

“We’re talking about a new field of science that’s a hybrid between chemistry and physics.”

The harmful chromium compounds found in the groundwater at sites receiving waste from former textiles factories, smelters, and tanneries have been linked to cancer, and excessive exposure can lead to problems with the kidneys, liver, lungs and skin.

The research team, led by Dr Doug Stewart from the School of Civil Engineering and Dr Ian Burke from the School of Earth and Environment, has discovered that adding dilute acetic acid (vinegar) to the affected site stimulates the growth of naturally-occurring bacteria by providing an attractive food source. In turn, these bacteria then cleanse the affected area by altering the chemical make-up of the chromium compounds to make them harmless.

“The original industrial processes changed these chemicals to become soluble, which means they can easily leach into the groundwater and make it unsafe, says Dr Burke. “Our treatment method reconverts the oxidised chromate to a non-soluble state, which means it can be left safely in the ground without risk to the environment. As it is no longer ‘bio-available’ it doesn’t present any risk to the surrounding ecosystem.”

Chromate chemicals have previously been successfully treated in situ in neutral Ph conditions, but this study is unique in that it concentrates on extremely alkaline conditions, which are potentially much more difficult to treat.

The current favoured method of dealing with such groundwater contaminants is to remove the soil to landfill, which can be costly, both financially and in terms of energy usage. The Leeds methods being developed will allow treatment to take place on site, which is safer, more energy efficient and much cheaper.

Dr Stewart says: “Highly alkaline chromium-related contaminants were placed in inadequate landfill sites in the UK right up until production stopped in the 1970′s – and in some countries production of large quantities of these chemicals still continues today. The soluble and toxic by-products from this waste can spread into groundwater, and ultimately into local rivers, and therefore will remain a risk to the environment as long as they are untreated.”

Current environmental regulations mean that before the team can test out its research findings in the field, they need water-tight proof that their methods can work, as it is illegal to introduce any substance into groundwater – even where it is contaminated – unless it has been shown to be beneficial.

“From the results we have so far I am certain that we can develop a viable treatment for former industrial sites where chromate compounds are a problem,” says Dr Stewart. “Our next step is to further our understanding of the range of alkalinity over which our system can operate. As society becomes more environmentally-aware, new regulations demand that past mistakes are rectified and carbon footprints are reduced. By designing a clean-up method that promotes the growth of naturally occurring bacteria without introducing or engineering new bacteria, we are effectively hitting every environmental target possible.”

More information: The research, part funded by The Royal Society, is published online in the Journal of Ecological Engineering doi:10.1016/j.ecoleng.2008.12.028.

Source: University of Leed

The work is being published in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) the week of March 2, 2009.

The team, led by Scripps Professor Carlos Barbas, III, Ph.D., tested the vaccination method – called covalent immunization – on mice with either melanoma or colon cancer.

The scientists injected these mice with chemicals specifically designed to trigger a programmable and “universal” immune reaction. They developed other chemicals, “adapter” molecules,” that recognized the specific cancer cells. Once injected into the animal, the adapter molecules self-assembled with the antibodies to create covalent antibody-adapter complexes.

“The antibodies in our vaccine are designed to circulate inertly until they receive instructions from tailor-made small molecules to become active against a specific target,” Barbas says. “The advantage of this method is that it opens up the possibility of having antibodies primed and ready to go in the time it takes to receive an injection or swallow a pill. This would apply whether the target is a cancer cell, flu virus, or a toxin like anthrax that soldiers or even civilian populations might have to face during a bioterrorism attack.”

Only those mice that received both the vaccine and the adapter compound generated an immediate immune attack on the cancer cells that led to significant inhibition of tumor growth. This is the first time that such a covalent vaccine has been successfully designed and tested – typically, antibodies do not bind to chemicals in this covalent fashion.

The current breakthrough builds on work the Barbas laboratory has been engaged in for the past few years on chemically programmed monoclonal antibodies, a new class of therapeutics that the group invented. In this type of therapy, small, cell-targeting molecules and non-targeting catalytic monoclonal antibodies self-assemble to target pathogens. Monoclonal antibodies are produced in the laboratory from a single cloned B-cell – the immune system cell that makes antibodies – to bind to a specific substance. Three clinical trials are now under way by Pfizer to test the therapeutic effectiveness of this new type of therapy in cancer and diabetes. The antibodies in the antibody-adapter complex are monoclonal antibodies engineered to link themselves to adapter molecules.

The Search for the Ideal Vaccination

The practice of vaccination has been extraordinarily successful in controlling certain diseases, but there are drawbacks. Vaccine development can be an educated guessing game – in the case of the flu, for example, scientists must study worldwide outbreak patterns to anticipate which type of flu might strike a particular area. In addition, the most common vaccination strategies use whole proteins, viruses, or other complex immunogens – not just the specific part of the macromolecule that is recognized by the immune system – to elicit an immune response, which makes for wasted immune activity. Then there is the body’s own kinetics – the time it takes to mount a disease-relevant immune response to immunogens limits the speed with which immunity can be achieved. Finally, age-related declines in the ability to mount strong immune responses to biological-based vaccines present another challenge to the effectiveness of such vaccines.

Barbas’s chemical-based – rather than biological based – approach to vaccine development addresses many of these challenges.

“Our approach differs from the traditional vaccine approach in the sense that when we design an antibody-adapter compound we know exactly what that compound will react with,” Barbas says. “The importance of this is best exemplified with HIV. In current vaccines, many antibodies are generated against HIV, but most are not able to target the active part of the virus.”

In the near term, Barbas will apply his covalent vaccination approach to HIV, cancer, and infectious diseases for which no vaccines currently exist. A particular focus will be creating adapter molecules specific to these diseases.

“We believe that chemistry-based vaccine approaches have been underexplored and may provide opportunities to make inroads into intractable areas of vaccinology,” Barbas says.

In addition to Barbas, co-authors of the paper, “Instant immunity through chemically programmable vaccination and covalent self-assembly,” are Mikhail Popkov (who is first author), Beatriz Gonzalez, and Subhash C. Sinha, all of The Scripps Research Institute.

Source: Scripps Research Institute

http://www.physorg.com/print155239090.html

Robots, both large and micro, can potentially go wherever it’s too hot, cold, dangerous, small or remote for people to perform any number of important tasks, from repairing leaking water mains to stitching blood vessels together.

Now MIT researchers, led by Professor Sidney Yip, have proposed a new theory that might eliminate one obstacle to those goals — the limited speed and control of the “artificial muscles” that perform such tasks. Currently, robotic muscles move 100 times slower than ours. But engineers using the Yip lab’s new theory could boost those speeds — making robotic muscles 1,000 times faster than human muscles — with virtually no extra energy demands and the added bonus of a simpler design. This study appears in the Nov. 4 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

In this case, a robotic muscle refers to a device that can be activated to perform a task, like a sprinkler activated by pulling a fire alarm lever, explains Yip, a professor of nuclear engineering and materials science and engineering.

In the past few years, engineers have made the artificial muscles that actuate, or drive, robotic devices from conjugated polymers. “Conjugated polymers are also called conducting polymers because they can carry an electric current, just like a metal wire,” says Xi Lin, a postdoctoral associate in Yip’s lab. (Conventional polymers like rubber and plastic are insulators and do not conduct electricity.)

Conjugated polymers can actuate on command if charges can be sent to specific locations in the polymer chain in the form of “solitons” (charge density waves). A soliton, short for solitary wave, is “like an ocean wave that can travel long distances without breaking up,” Yip adds. (See figures.) Solitons are highly mobile charge carriers that exist because of the special nature (the one-dimensional chain character) of the polymer.

Scientists already knew that solitons enabled the conducting polymers to conduct electricity. Lin’s work attempts to explain how these materials can activate devices. This study is useful because until now, scientists, hampered by not knowing the mechanism, have been making conducting polymers in a roundabout way, by bathing (doping) the materials with ions that expand the volume of the polymer. That expansion was thought to give the polymers their strength, but it also makes them heavy and slow.

Lin discovered that adding the ions is unnecessary, because theoretically, shining a light of a particular frequency on the conducting polymer can activate the soliton. Without the extra weight of the added ions, the polymers could bend and flex much more quickly. And that rapid-fire motion gives rise to the high-speed actuation, that is, the ability to activate a device.

To arrive at these conclusions, Lin worked from fundamental principles to understand the physical mechanisms governing conjugated polymers, rather than using experimental data to develop hypotheses about how they worked. He started with Schrödinger’s equation, a hallmark of quantum mechanics that describes how a single electron behaves (its wave function). But solving the problem of how a long chain of electrons behaves was another matter, requiring long and complex analyses.

This research was funded by Honda R&D Co. and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency/Office of Naval Research. Yip and Lin’s collaborators on the work are Professor Ju Li at Ohio State University and Professor Elisabeth Smela at the University of Maryland.

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on November 9, 2005 (download PDF).

URL: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/muscle.html

In recent years, demonstrations of memory’s failures have convinced many scientists that human memory does not store the details of our experiences. However, a new study from MIT cognitive neuroscientists may overturn this widespread belief: They have shown that given the right setting, the human brain can record an amazing amount of information.

In the study, the results of which could have implications for artificial intelligence and for understanding memory disorders, people viewed thousands of objects over five hours. Remarkably, afterward they were able to remember each object in great detail.

“Visual long-term memory capacity is much higher than previously believed and shown,” said Aude Oliva, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and senior author of a paper describing the work, which will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Sept. 8.

Co-authors include MIT graduate students Timothy Brady and Talia Konkle, and George Alvarez, a former postdoctoral associate in brain and cognitive sciences and current assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University.

Oliva and her students showed subjects nearly 3,000 images, one at a time, for three seconds each. In tests the same day, they were shown pairs of images and asked to select the exact image they had seen earlier.

Subjects were tested with three types of pairings: two totally different objects; an object and a different example of the same type of object (e.g. two different remote controls); and an object and a slightly altered version (e.g. a cup that is either full or half-full).

Against all expectations, subjects’ recall rates on the three types of memory tests were 92 percent, 88 percent and 87 percent, respectively. “To give just one example, this means that after having seen thousands of objects, subjects didn’t just remember which cabinet they had seen, but also that the cabinet door was slightly open,” Brady said.

While a previous study from the 1970s showed that people could remember many individual images, scientists assumed that people could only remember abstract descriptions of the images (for example, “a photo of a wedding”), but not details about each one.

The new results suggest that visual capacity is several orders of magnitude higher than the older study implied. “If you encode a lot of detail for each object, you need a lot more space,” Alvarez said.

Traditional models of vision theorize that details necessarily slip away as visual input travels from the eyes to higher processing centers in the brain. The new results may prompt neuroscientists to revise those models to account for how people remembered so many details, Konkle said.

Previous studies had never found that we could hold so many details in memory, in part because they didn’t look for it.

However, the researchers believe that multiple factors play a critical role in how well people remember details. For instance, it makes a huge difference if people are motivated to pay attention to detail, which they were in this study.

“You have to try. You have to want to do it,” Konkle said.

Second, it helps if the objects viewed are familiar. The images used in this study were all everyday items such as remote controls, dollar bills and loaves of bread. The results would likely be different if subjects were asked to remember details of abstract artworks, Oliva said. In future studies, the team hopes to explore factors that affect the level of detail at which memories are encoded.

These results establish a new bound on the size of human memory, and give credence to artificial intelligence approaches that depend primarily on a large memory capacity. The research also has implications for diagnosing memory disorders using more sensitive tests of what is remembered and what is forgotten.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, and a National Research Service Award.

For a demo of the study or more information, see cvcl.mit.edu/MM.

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on September 10, 2008 (download PDF).

CONTACT

Teresa Herbert, MIT News Office
Phone: 617-258-5403, E-mail: therbert@mit.edu
URL: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/vision-memory-0908.html

MIT researchers are developing a new kind of autonomous wheelchair that can learn all about the locations in a given building, and then take its occupant to a given place in response to a verbal command.

Just by saying “take me to the cafeteria” or “go to my room,” the wheelchair user would be able to avoid the need for controlling every twist and turn of the route and could simply sit back and relax as the chair moves from one place to another based on a map stored in its memory.

“It’s a system that can learn and adapt to the user,” says Nicholas Roy, assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics and co-developer of the wheelchair. “People have different preferences and different ways of referring” to places and objects, he says, and the aim is to have each wheelchair personalized for its user and the user’s environment.

Unlike other attempts to program wheelchairs or other mobile devices, which rely on an intensive process of manually capturing a detailed map of a building, the MIT system can learn about its environment in much the same way as a person would: By being taken around once on a guided tour, with important places identified along the way. For example, as the wheelchair is pushed around a nursing home for the first time, the patient or a caregiver would say: “this is my room” or “here we are in the foyer” or “nurse’s station.”

Also collaborating on the project are Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at MIT’s AgeLab, and Seth Teller, professor of computer science and engineering and head of the Robotics, Vision, and Sensor Networks (RVSN) group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Teller says the RVSN group is developing a variety of machines, of various sizes, that can have situational awareness, that is, that can “learn these mental maps, in order to help people do what they want to do, or do it for them.” Besides the wheelchair, the devices range in scale from a location-aware cellphone all the way up to an industrial forklift that can transport large loads from place to place outdoors, autonomously.

Outdoors in the open, such systems can rely on GPS receivers to figure out where they are, but inside buildings that method usually doesn’t work, so other approaches are needed. Roy and Teller have been exploring the use of WiFi signals, as well as wide-field cameras and laser rangefinders, coupled to computer systems that can construct and localize within an internal map of the environment as they move around.

“I’m interested in having robots build and maintain a high-fidelity model of the world,” says Teller, whose central research focus is developing machines that have situational awareness.

For now, the wheelchair prototype relies on a WiFi system to make its maps and then navigate through them, which requires setting up a network of WiFi nodes around the facility in advance. After months of preliminary tests on campus, they have begun trials in a real nursing home environment with real patients, at the Boston Home in Dorchester, a facility where all of the nearly 100 patients have partial or substantial loss of muscle control and use wheelchairs.

As the research progresses, Roy says he’d like to add a collision-avoidance system using detectors to prevent the chair from bumping into other wheelchairs, walls or other obstacles. In addition,Teller says he hopes to add mechanical arms to the chairs, to aid the patients further by picking up and manipulating objects — everything from flipping a light switch to picking up a cup and bringing it to the person’s lips.

The research has been funded by Nokia and Microsoft.

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on September 24, 2008 (download PDF).

URL: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/wheelchair-0919.html

Elizabeth Goldring smiles as she shows a visitor photos she’s taken — and can see — with her blind eye.

The demonstration comes more than 20 years after Goldring, a senior fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and colleagues began work on a “seeing machine” that can allow some people who are blind or visually challenged to access the Internet, view the face of a friend and much more.

The team has moved from Goldring’s inspiration, a large diagnostic device costing some $100,000, to a $4,000 desktop version, to the current seeing machine, which is portable and inexpensive. “We can make one for under $500,” Goldring said.

Although the device can be connected to any visual source, such as a video camera or desktop computer, Goldring especially enjoys using it with a photo camera. “When someone has a diminished sense, the inability to express yourself with that sense can be frustrating,” she said. By taking photos, “I feel I’m able to express myself visually with my blind eye, and there’s value in that, I think.”

Further, “it’s light enough that I really want to take it with me when I go for a walk.” (Goldring, who is visually challenged, has enough sight in one eye to permit mobility.)

Goldring’s idea for the seeing machine began with a visit to her optometrist. At the time, she was completely blind.

To determine if she had any healthy retina left, technicians peered into her eyes with a scanning laser opthalmoscope, or SLO. With the machine they projected a simple image directly onto the retina of one eye, past the hemorrhages within the eye that contributed to her blindness.

She was indeed able to see the test image. So she asked if they could write the word “sun.” “And I was amazed that I was able to read a word!” Goldring said.

She went on to use the device for other visual experiences. For example, video of her doctor was transmitted through the SLO, and for the first time she saw his face.

But although the SLO held promise for the broader blind public, it had serious drawbacks – including its prohibitive cost. Goldring determined to develop a more practical, accessible machine.

She began collaborating with people such as Rob Webb, the SLO’s inventor and a senior scientist at the Schepens Eye Research Institute, Harvard University, and dozens of MIT students. Those involved in the current machine are Yifei Wu, an MIT senior who began the work as a freshman and has been instrumental in developing the seeing-machine camera; Brandon Taylor, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab; and Quinn Smithwick, a postdoctoral associate in the same lab.

The portable device is relatively inexpensive in part because it replaces the laser of the SLO with light-emitting diodes (LEDs), another source of high-intensity light that is much cheaper.

Further, “everything in it is already mass-produced for other purposes,” said Taylor. He also noted that since the seeing-machine project began, “LCDs and other components have gotten much smaller and are readily available.”

The portable seeing machine is about five inches square and mounted on a flexible tripod that makes it easy to carry. A digital camera is attached to the top. The visual feed from the camera travels into the seeing machine to a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) illuminated by LEDs. (This is the same kind of LCD common in cameras and TVs.)

The visual data is then focused into a single “point” that travels into the eye. “This is not magnification,” said Smithwick. “What makes this work is focusing the data into a tiny spot of light.”

What’s next? Goldring aims to show the new machine to other visually challenged people and looks forward to their feedback. Plans are underway to test it at the Low Vision Clinic at the Joslin Diabetes Center’s Beetham Eye Institute in Boston.

This work was supported by NASA and by MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, and Council for the Arts.

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on January 14, 2009 (download PDF).

CONTACT

Elizabeth A. Thomson, MIT News Office
Phone: 617-258-5402, E-mail: thomson@mit.edu
URL: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/camera-blind-0113.html

In many developing countries, electricity is unreliable or unavailable and water must be carried by hand, so conventional modern washing machines are not an option. Washing clothes can take up a significant amount of time, and doing laundry in open streams or lakes can add to water pollution, so the availability of a human-powered washing machine could make a big difference to the quality of life.

A pedal-powered washing machine that MIT students and staff built mostly from bicycle parts and empty barrels could solve many of these problems, and at the same time could be built locally and thereby create jobs.

Under development for almost four years, the new machine — dubbed “bicilavadora,” combining the Spanish words for bicycle and washing machine — got its most rigorous workout last month when a team of MIT students took the latest prototype to an orphanage in the slums called Ventanilla outside Lima, Peru. With 670 resident children, the home generates enough laundry to keep the washer perpetually busy.

“The orphanage was like an oasis in the slums of Ventanilla,” says Lisa Tacoronte, a junior in mechanical engineering who worked on the project. As the MIT team worked to set up the machine, “many of the children would watch us work, ask us questions at the same time or try to help us by holding things, or handing us tools while we built it.”

The machine was designed to be easy and inexpensive to manufacture, mostly using parts and tools that are readily available almost everywhere in the developing world.

An earlier version of the washing machine, developed by mechanical engineering graduate student Radu Raduta, won first prize in the MIT IDEAS competition in 2005. That resulted in some funding for further development, which led Raduta to improve the design of the machine’s inner drum so that it could be more easily manufactured and transported.

The machine’s outer housing is made from a standard oil drum cut apart and welded back together to make a much shorter barrel, because “a full 55-gallon barrel is more laundry than any human can pedal,” explains Gwyndaf Jones, a D-Lab instructor who worked on the earlier version and who led this year’s Peru field trip. The inner, rotating drum is made from a set of identical plastic pieces bolted together, which can be taken apart and stored flat for easy transportation. That was the key part of Raduta’s design.

“The hardest part to build is the inner drum,” Raduta explains, “because it’s submerged in water, and full of clothing that can have metal buttons, which abrades the inner walls. It has to be stiff enough to keep its shape, but if it’s bare steel it will rust, and paint will peel off.” The key part of his thesis research was figuring out how to make the drum strong enough, cheap enough and easy and inexpensive to ship. His latest version is made from molded plastic panels, and when disassembled it is compact enough to fit in a suitcase — which is how the students took it to Peru for the January trip.

The “motor” of the machine consists of a bicycle frame, minus its wheels, with the chain running forward to a gear at the end of the washer drum’s shaft. “It uses a standard mountain bike gear range,” Jones says. “The highest gear is the spin cycle, and the lowest gear is the wash cycle.”

The test was not a total success: Some water leaked around the edges of the barrel, which could cause rust, and very inexpensive bearings used for the shaft were too stiff. But the basic design was well proven out, and with a few small changes an updated version should be able to handle the intensive workload. Further tests will be carried out this spring by other students.

While crucial pieces such as the inner drum segments were brought along from MIT, others including the outer drum and its supporting structure were built on-site. “We improvised for whatever we didn’t have and often learned how from locals like Wilbur and Gennard,” two of the older orphanage residents, Tacoronte says. “For example, we were unable to cut the two sides for the door on the outer drum that were parallel to the curved surface. Wilbur took up a chisel and went at it with a hammer. The door was done in seconds.”

She found the experience very inspiring. “The more time I spent there and the more amazing people I met, the more passionate and determined I became about finishing the lavadora and making sure it worked,” she says. After the first test run, with the high-gear spin cycle successfully eliminating most of the water from the drum, she says, “The moment they pulled out the merely damp sheets was exhilarating.”

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on February 25, 2009 (download PDF).

CONTACT

Jen Hirsch, MIT News Office
Phone: 617-253-2700, E-mail: jfhirsch@mit.edu
URL: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/itw-bicilavadora-0219.html

“The heart of iPoint 3D is a recognition device, not much larger than a keyboard, that can be suspended from the ceiling above the user or integrated in a coffee table. Its two built-in cameras detect hands and fingers in real time and transmit the information to a computer,”  says Paul Chojecki, a research scientist at the HHI, explaining the technology.

The system responds instantly, as soon as someone in front of the screen moves their hands. No physical contact or special markers are involved. The small device is equipped with two FireWire cameras – inexpensive, off-the-shelf video cameras that are easy to install.

In addition to its obvious appeal to video gamers, iPoint 3D can also be useful in a living room or office, or even in a hospital operating room, or as part of an interactive information system. “Since the interaction is entirely contactless, the system is ideal for scenarios where contact between the user and the system is not possible or not allowed, such as in an operating room,” Chojecki says.

The HHI invention can thus be used not only to control a display but also as a means of controlling other devices or appliances. Someone kneading pastry in the kitchen, whose hands are covered in dough, can turn down the boiling potatoes by waving a finger without leaving sticky marks on the stove. In an office, for example, an architect can peruse the latest set of construction drawings and view them from all angles by gesture control. The finger is the remote control of the future.

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (2009, March 3). IPoint 3D: Using Your Fingers As A Remote Control. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 3, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2009/02/090220075312.htm