I found this on MSNBC today and it got me thinking how people might be controlling mobile devices (should they still exist) in the coming years. The article talks about eye movement control of mobile phones and portable music players being researched by engineers at NTT DoMoCo is Japan.

The experimental system uses sensors and chips that detect electrical current produced by movements of the wearer’s eyeballs. NTT DoCoMo believes wearable control technology will be adapted for mobile devices that download music, play video games and allow users to shop online and keep up with their e-mail. The new technology may also enable cell phone cameras to read bar codes used in Japan to get product information, download music and coupons when the user simply looks at the codes, researchers said.

Also on show was a new minimalist phone system is the form of a ring. To listen to it you stick your finger in your ear and the vibrations travel through your bones to and from the ear piece. Looks to be a bit clonky right now but I guess it’s only a prototype.

Finally there was a device shaped like a wrist watch which you tap to control other devices.

There is an interesting trend in technologies to interface with various devices right now, be it in surgery, aerospace, gaming or mobile telecoms. I’m not sure if the above options will ever make it to market but they do point the way to a future sitation where mobile devices become more “ideal” and, in time, a situation where they cease to exist totally, while their functions remain or are even enhanced.

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I guess we think that today we are right at the leading edge of innovation and earlier civilisations had more trivial challenges than we do. But, have you ever wondered how the Greeks or Romans might have dug tunnels through a mountain of solid rock, sometimes as much as 1000m long, from two ends with both teams meeting up in the middle? Maybe not. Recently someone, perhaps with a slight sadistic tendency, challenged me to put forwards an explanation. How could the Greeks, without GPS, surveying instruments, dynamite, magnetic compass and even much in the way of mathematics have possibly been able to achieve this feat? After a lot of thinking I separated the problem into three components:

1. How to ensure both teams start at and stay at the same elevation?

2. How to ensure that both teams align in the same direction so that they can work towards each other?

3. How to dig through solid rock without dynamite? 

After a lot of further though and TRIZ thinking around use of easily available feild and substance resources this is where I ended up:

Let’s think about problem 1 first. What resources do we have which could provide a common level. One possible resource is the field of gravity and the substance water. If you are able to dig a channel with water in it around the mountain, the elevation of the water surface must be the same at either end. The channel would then be used to set the height of two pillars, giving an elevation eyeline for the diggers on either end of the tunnel. That was my solution to problem 1.

On to problem 2. This is a problem of alignment. What simple detection fields might be available? How about optical, maybe that could work? If you could position a sighting point at the top of the mountain, compoesed of two poles of plumb lines and use this to align two poles on either side of the mountain then these could provide a reference point for each team digging through.

Finally on problem 3, the problem here is how to separate rock. One technique which can easily split rock is to drill holes into the rock and drive wooden plugs into the holes. Once the wooden plugs are in place if you pour water over them, they will expand with considerable force – more than enough if positioned correctly to split and separate rock.

Identifying and executing these three solutions is non-trivial today so imagine what it must have been like 2,500 years ago. Maybe the Greeks were pretty smart after all. For some further information on other hypotheses and to judge how I did with my possible solutions, click on this link. Also, if you ever wondered how they moved the Stonehenge rocks click here.  

 

Tunnel of Samos

I saw this on Guy Kawasaki’s blog “How to change the world”,  which is a really good read anyway around innovation and technology. Guy visited the Palo Alto Research Centre at the end of 2007 and had a good look round the site. I liked the personalised workstations and early prototype iPod in particular. Also worth checking out is Guy’s video, The Art of Innovation

Guy Kawasaki

Here’s a thing. How did the ancient Britons move massive rocks to build Stonehenge? Did they need hundreds or thousands of people to move them from the Welsh hills to Salisbury plain or could one person have done it all? In this video one guy moves massive stones and even his son’s house on his own. watch?v=lRRDzFROMx0