Movement-monitoring garment gives feedback for yoga, sport and dance

                       Since the 1980s keeping fit has become an ever more popular pursuit and these days, the diversity of fitness programs is truly breath-taking and increasingly high tech. With a prototype created by an avant-garde Seattle design lab, exercise looks set to become positively futuristic. Along similar lines to the MotivePro vibrating suit we looked at last week, Move, designed by Electric Foxy, a company that develops wearable technology, is a kind of sensorial tank top that monitors movements during exercise to help people improve their performance, with particular emphasis on movement precision.

The result looks like something lifted from the sleek science fiction movie Gattaca. It includes sensors that are placed all over the garment. With the help of haptic pieces placed on hips and shoulders, information about the wearer's movements is fed back to the application, which then assesses it, and makes necessary adjustments customized to the user. The user receives "nudges" that tell them which part of the body needs adjustment. The application creates a timeline of the performance so that the user can visualize progress over time.
There is also a social networking aspect to the equipment, as the application allows users to share their performance details and get advice and encouragement from friends and experts.
There are several types of exercise that the Move app can be used to improve, especially yoga and Pilates, but also golf, baseball and physiotherapy. Designer Jennifer Darmour adds that expressive movements such as hip hop, modern dance and ballet can also be improved with Move.
For now, exercise aficionados with a flair for futurism can only use Move to exercise their imagination. Jennifer told Gizmag that her creation is a concept product at this stage and not available to purchase.

The video below shows Move in action.

Australian Hill House rides a wave of grass

                            Australian architect Andrew Maynard has come up with an unorthodox approach to capturing the sun in winter and excluding it in the summer. One of his latest creations, Hill House, is an urban family home in Melbourne that appears as if it is riding a wave of grass. The family home extension has been built upon the footprint of what once had been the back yard, without obstructing or losing the original building. Seemingly perched above a rolling hill, the new building faces the sun and the box-shaped structure above acts as a passive solar eave, cutting out summer sun, while letting the winter sun flood in.

The unusual design for a family home was Maynard’s answer to building on a small and narrow urban block of land. The result transforms the roof into a garden and the garden into an insulated living space. The ground level features a large open living area with modern kitchen, lowered eating area, wood furnishings, polished concrete flooring and large glass windows that open out into the internal garden space.

A spiral staircase in the center of the ground floor leads to the new master bedroom, bathroom and rooftop retreat, while the original home has been transformed into the children’s bedroom and bathroom quarters. In addition, a long side passage wraps around the internal courtyard and links the new living quarters with the old family home. The passage seamlessly joins the old with the new, while creating a private internal garden space and direct access to the back entrance and new living zones.
Overall, Hill House is a great example of an unusual makeover that successfully transforms the entire appearance and functionality of a traditional town house.

 

New cavity-filling materials kill bacteria and regrow tooth tissue

                                         When a dentist drills out the decayed section of a tooth that has a cavity, it’s important that they also remove the bacteria that caused the decay in the first place – or at least, that they remove as much of it as possible. If they don’t, the bacteria can get reestablished, causing the filling to fail. Now, scientists from the University of Maryland’s School of Dentistry have developed a new cavity-filling system that they say will not only kill virtually all residual bacteria, but also help the tooth to regrow some of the tissue that was lost to decay.
The system consists of a primer that is applied to the surface of the drilled-out tooth, an adhesive that is then applied to help the filling bond to the tooth, and the filling material itself. The three substances contain ammonium and silver nanoparticles, plus they have a high pH, all of which have been shown to kill bacteria.
“The reason we want to get the antibacterial agents also into primers and adhesives is that these are the first things that cover the internal surfaces of the tooth cavity and flow into tiny dental tubules inside the tooth,” said lead scientist, Prof. Huakun (Hockin) Xu.
Some people may be wary of the technology, however, as silver nanoparticles have been linked to health problems such as immune system deficiencies.
The filling material itself additionally contains calcium phosphate nanoparticles, which promote the regrowth of tooth minerals. While it isn’t clear if this could ultimately allow the tooth to completely rebuilt itself, it should at least help the drilled section to heal over. Although the longevity of fillings made with the material hasn’t yet been tested, Xu’s team believes that they should last considerably longer than traditional fillings.
So far, the primer, adhesive and filling material have been tested on biofilms made from saliva provided by volunteers. Trials utilizing the teeth of lab animals and human participants are being planned.

Touchy wearer walks around in darkness until touched by a human hand

If you see what appears at first glance to be a short version of Robocop stumbling through the streets of Tokyo, worry not folks it will likely be Eric Siu or one of his friends using Touchy. The wearer of the head-mounted camera is effectively in darkness until someone touches him, at which point the automated shutters blinding the wearer open briefly and he can once again view the world around him. If the person maintains touch for ten seconds or more, the built-in camera snaps an image and then displays it on a small screen to the rear of the helmet.

"The project adopted the culture of still photo taking, not video recording," said Siu when Gizmag asked why the camera took stills only. "I see the camera as a social device, and the project turns a human into a camera as a suggestion for social healing. To me, a camera has better social capability than a camcorder, since a camera records a particular memorable moment instead of a flow of time. In a group photo, we stand still to wait for the moment to appear, a moment that we are connected in the photograph."
Siu told us that the helmet has a hacked webcam to the front that feeds a 2-megapixel CMOS sensor, producing stills at either 640 x 480 or 1600 x 1200 pixels in JPG format. The storage of snapped images and subsequent display on Touchy's 3.5-inch, 320×240 pixel LCD touchscreen display – on the back of the 6.4 x 8.1 x 9.4-inch (163 x 208 x 239 mm), 2.5-pound (1.17-kg) helmet – are processed using Gumstix hardware.

                                  Details of exactly how the touch sensor actually works are being held back until perfected, but Reynolds told us that the custom-created TouchSwitch "takes advantage of bioelectric phenomena that is observable when two people touch." "The underlying principle is to treat the skin like an antenna which detects the contact made by the encounter of other humans," he explained.

"When Touchy is worn on the head, a portable device built into the helmet constantly observes the skin for signs of human touch. Contact of any variety works: hand shakes, hugs, punches, accidental collisions, high-fives, caresses, nudges, hand-holding, and so forth. TouchSwitch uses an electrical model that does not require a ground reference voltage, and this differentiates it from off-the-shelf touch sensors." The wearer is not able to activate the shutters by his own touch. The shutters in front of the wearer's eyes are controlled by an Arduino board and opened and closed using a pair of step motors. The onboard battery will power Touchy for around two hours. The following video shows Siu as he wanders through the streets of Tokyo, occasionally being allowed to see the world when physical human contact is made:

Determine if you're addicted to Facebook, with The Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale

It is possible to get addicted to almost anything. The most obvious candidates are things like cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, and food. But anything which causes some kind of obsessive behavior in even one individual has the potential to be addictive. That includes the Web and, in particular, social networking sites such as Facebook. New research from the University of Bergen (UiB) suggests Facebook addiction is not only real but measurable using the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale.
A research team led by Doctor of Psychology Cecilie Schou Andreassen classifies addiction to Facebook as "a subdivision of Internet addiction."
The Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale comprises six statements which are meant to be answered with (1) Very rarely, (2) Rarely, (3) Sometimes, (4) Often, and (5) Very Often. Answering with a 4 or above for four or more of the following statements may suggest an addiction to Facebook.

• You spend a lot of time thinking about Facebook or plan use of Facebook.
• You feel an urge to use Facebook more and more.
• You use Facebook in order to forget about personal problems.
• You have tried to cut down on the use of Facebook without success.
• You become restless or troubled if you are prohibited from using Facebook.
• You use Facebook so much that it has had a negative impact on your job/studies.

A total of 423 students (227 women and 196 men) were tested against the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale, and the results have been published in the Psychological Reports journal.
A brief overview of the results suggests that Facebook addiction is more likely to affect younger people, people who are "anxious and socially insecure," and females. Those who are "organised and more ambitious" are less likely to be at risk of developing an addition to the site.
In the spirit of research, I put myself through the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale and passed with flying colors ... meaning I am not addicted to Facebook. In fact, I scored 1 or 2 on all six statements. However, if I was tested against the Web as a whole the result would likely be very different.
With Facebook preparing to IPO and approaching 1 billion users, who even in 2010 were spending a combined 16 billion minutes on the site, this research is rather timely.

GE to launch 100-watt equivalent LED replacement bulb

 

                             GE Lighting has announced that it is getting in on the 100 W-equivalent LED replacement act. The 27 W Energy Smart LED bulb joins its range of incandescent bulb replacements that already includes 40 W and 60 W equivalents. And like an incandescent bulb, GE claims its LED bulb emits light evenly in all directions. But how does the 100 W equivalent stack up performance-wise?
The key figure is the bulb's lumen output, which is a measure of how much light the bulb emits. Connected to a 120 V supply, a traditional 100 W incandescent light bulb has a lumen output of 1750 lumens (lm), for an efficacy of only 17.5 lm/W. Here's where the term "equivalent" begins to look a little sketchy, as the quoted output of GE's bulb is 1600+ lm. If you ignore the plus (what other option is there?), that's the exact same output as Switch Lighting's 100 W-equivalent LED lightbulb (the world's first) we looked at a year ago, but 150 lumens short of an actual 100 W incandescent's output. Still, it's certainly in the same ballpark.
With a power consumption of 27 W, GE's Energy Smart bulb has an efficacy of about 60 lm/W. Clearly, that is vastly superior to a 100 W incandescent, but it's actually significantly worse than Switch Lighting's equivalent product. The efficacy of 100 lm/W we quoted at the time now seems to be a little high, with Switch Lighting's website now stating an efficacy of over 80 lm/W - still 20 lm/W better than GE's lightbulb, which is significant.
One area GE's product scores over Switch Lighting's is in the bulb's color temperature. The color temperature of a light source describes the warmness or coolness of its appearance. Expressed in Kelvin, a light source's color is compared to the appearance of an ideal black body radiator at certain temperatures. Because black body radiators glow in cooler colors at higher temperatures, a light source that is said to have a higher color temperature signifies a cooler appearance.
Let's again use a 100 W incandescent bulb as our basis for comparison - with its color temperature of 2870 K, which is warm and yellowish in appearance. Switch Lighting's 100 W equivalent has a color temperature of 4100 K, whereas GE's has a color temperature of 3000 K - much closer to the 100 W incandescent original. Since these products are touted as replacements, GE's bulb does a better job in this regard. That said, some may prefer the cooler white of Switch Lighting's bulb (cooler light sources are thought to be preferable in warmer climes, for instance).
Similar to Switch Lighting's product, GE's Energy Smart bulb has a very respectable lifetime of 25,000 hours. Assuming you use one for three hours per day it should last nearly 23 years. Interestingly the lifespan is significantly lower than heavier-duty LED light sources designed for commercial use which are often quoted at 50,000 or even 100,000 hours. In any case, compared to the typical 1000 hour lifespan of a traditional 100 W incandescent, these things last an age.
Thus far there's no word on launch date or price.

Free-floating catamaran suite provides a unique escape in nature

               This tiny cabin is a free-floating catamaran suite designed by Dutch architect, Marijn Beije. The design was conceived with the hope of luring a younger and more city-focused group of people back into nature, and offers a unique new way to sleep under the stars. Guests can enhance their experience of nature by relaxing in this fully furnished floating eco-lodge, complete with bedroom, bathroom and rooftop deck.

               The sustainable retreat was built using FSC-certificated wood, and features four places to sleep, plus a kitchen area, toilet, shower, two terraces for relaxing, rooftop hammock and a crow’s nest for bird watching. The retreat also features solar panels and LED lighting throughout. The sleeping quarters are furnished with two beds that face out onto the river, where the large curved floor-to-ceiling windows allow guests to star gaze while being gently rocked to sleep. The floating eco-logde has been built with durability in mind and is weather resistant so it can withstand the elements. Compact in size, the lodge can easily be transported and immersed into a diverse range of landscapes without disrupting the surrounding environment. While it's probably not a great idea to let the house free-float along a river, the lodge would be best suited to being connected to a pontoon or fixed jetty. If you’re not so fond of floating on the riverbank, perhaps you’d prefer to perch the lodge high amid the treetops – as suggested by Beije, the retreat can easily be transformed into a fully self-contained treehouse or the perfect bird watching hut.

                             The floating suite has recently found a permanent home in the Biesbosch National Park in The Netherlands, where it will be available for hire. The builder, APEcolodges, also has plans to sell the eco-lodge on the market.

iZotope Iris - a new sampling re-synthesizer that lets you visually transform sound

If you've ever dabbled in the creation of crazy sound effects for home movies, other-worldly audio to complement the battle sequences in a new alien gaming app or strange new loops for digital dance music, you quickly start to appreciate just what a complicated process sound design can be. What with noise generation, pulse and velocity modulation, parallel and series filters, and various other filters, oscillators and envelopes to contend with, the process can hardly be described as fun. A new sample-based synthesizer suite from iZotope seeks to change all that. Both a powerful tool for design pros and an enjoyable and easy way for newbies to dive in and experiment, Iris allows users to manipulate, tweak and layer sounds using the kind of visual editing tools you might find in graphic design packages and discover otherwise hidden sonic treasures.

iZotope's Iris is as much about what you see as what you hear and adds a whole new level of enjoyment to the serious business of digital sound design. It comes supplied with over 500 patches from the top sound designers and 4 GB of included audio samples to work with, including recordings of insects, animals, machines, vintage synthesizers like the ARP 2500, the EMS VCS3, the Korg PS3100, the Yamaha CS-80, and numerous musical instruments. Users can also drag and drop any .wav or .aiff audio file directly into Iris for manipulation.

The main window offers either a standard sound waveform representation of the chosen audio or a spectral representation of the signal with low frequency at the bottom and high frequency at the top, time is shown left to right across the display and loud events are brighter than quiet ones. There's a slider to adjust the balance from the source waveform pattern to the spectrogram display. At its simplest level, Iris allows users to discover what the crackle of electricity, tubular bells and seagulls sound like when mixed together. Its real power, however, comes from using the suite's intuitive visual drawing engine and selection tools such as Magic Wand and Lasso to highlight and isolate visually interesting portions of the source audio and potentially uncover brand new sounds. You can also go wild and simply draw freehand shapes to affect the time and frequency of the source audio in the spectrogram window using the Brush tool. More shapes can be added, and sections can be completely removed or inverted both horizontally and vertically. Iris allows for zooming in and out of the timeline for detailed tweaking, while the size of the brush tool can be altered and areas with similar harmonic content brought into play. Up to three audio samples can be loaded in and layered at any one time, plus a sub oscillator channel to further enrich and texture the new creation. Once you've knocked yourself out using your eyes to influence and experiment with the samples, patches or audio, a little time can then be spent fine tuning the amplitude and modulation, and further enhance the new sounds courtesy of the included chorus, reverb, distortion and delay algorithms, real-time pitch shifting, amp envelopes, filters and Low Frequency Oscillators (LFO). If you don't have a MIDI controller or keyboard to hook up via your modern Windows or Intel-based Mac computer, don't worry as Iris comes with its own onscreen keyboard (which includes pitch and mod wheels) to audition the sounds. The sampling re-synthesizer also features intelligent root note detection that automatically maps imported audio across the keyboard. Iris is host compatible with Pro Tools, Cubase, GarageBand, Ableton Live and many other plug-ins, and is available now for download from the source link for a recommended retail price of US$249. If you'd like to try before you buy, there's a free-to-download trial version which is fully operational for ten days and contains 23 patches and a small selection of available samples, but doesn't allow any sonic creations to be saved. Once the trial period is up, the software reverts to a limited demo mode. Sound scientists can also add two complementary audio libraries to the package. The Glass library costs US$49 and is a somewhat unusual collection of sounds relating to, well, glass. Bottles, mirrors, marbles, glasses, shards, and even glassblowing torches can all be totally re-imagined through Iris to create new and interesting soundscapes. Similarly, the Wood library represents recorded sonic encounters with all things sourced from trees, including sounds of doors slamming, drumming on guitars and grandma's creaky deckchair. This selection is priced at $29. If you feel like jumping in with abandon, the full Iris suite with Glass and Wood libraries included is also available for a purchase price of $299. The following video gives a short demonstration of the kind of powerful sonic experimentation that's possible with Iris:

OriginOil and Algasol enter algae development deal

                        OriginOil and Algasol, two companies working to develop algae into renewable fuel, have announced a collaboration on growth and harvest technology. The companies hope the partnership will help them reduce cost and improve performance, therefore increasing commercial prospects for algae as fuel source. Harvesting algae is one of the main cost drivers associated with this type of raw material. Algae are microscopic and live in suspension on liquid. When the time comes to harvesting it, the water/algae ratio can be as high as 1,000/1. In order to make it suitable for commercial applications, that ratio needs to be reduced to around 10/1.

                      As we've seen, California-based OriginOil has big hopes for algae. The company has developed a technique called Single Step Extraction, which is a way to separate algae from water without using expensive chemicals or heavy equipment, which makes it more energy-efficient. The process also breaks into algae cell walls to release oils and other components that can be separated out during other phases of processing. Algae are highly sensitive to electromagnetic waves. OriginOil has developed tuned wave patterns that cause the algae to “flocculate”, that is, to separate from water. It also causes the algae to “lyse”, or rupture. Algasol, headquartered on the Balearic Islands in Spain, is developing a photobioreactor with low cost material and design that can be scaled up industrially. The idea is to lower investments and operating costs, which are currently a major obstacle for the development of algae fuel. The weather-protected photobioreactor developed by Algasol floats on water and is divided into several compartments. To manufacture it, Algasol uses a thin and flexible polymer material, and the device can be installed in seawater, either in a pond land or in the sea. The company has patents pending in 70 countries.

                      Algae as biofuel feedstock offer several advantages compared with food crops. For one, it doesn’t compete with food production, a major point of contention among environmentalists. Further, biofuel crops release carbon emissions and in some cases can contribute to deforestation because of the land needed to raise biofuel crops sometimes replaces tropical rainforest. Algae avoid all these problems. They can be grown in open ponds and closed bioreactor systems. Potential yields are high, even 10 times higher than the most productive crops currently explored. Hopes are high for algae as a cleaner petroleum substitute, and aviation is spearheading algae biofuel application. Last November, a United Airlines flew between Houston and Chicago on Solazyme's mix of 60 percent petroleum and 40 percent algal fuel. Before that, Solazyme had tested its algae fuel technology on a military helicopter running a 50/50 mix of petroleum and algal oil.

Ferry converted into movable floating swimming pool to open in August

Floating swimming pools seem to be becoming a thing. Last year we looked at the +Pool concept to install just this sort of thing on one of New York's rivers - a concept that engineering consultancy Arup has since greenlit from a feasibility point of view, at least. And then there's realities:united's scheme for the world's longest swimming pool, called Flussbad, in the River Spree in Berlin. But now the 120-meter (394-feet) long Badboot Lido has seemingly leapfrogged the competition, opening for business this August in Antwerp, Belgium. Because the Badboot is adapted from a 1960s ferry, it can be moved around the city as needed.

Designed by SCULP(IT)'s Pieter Peerlings and Silvia Mertens, the Badboot professes to be "a full-fledged leisure platform." Though the main feature is clearly the 40-meter (131-foot) long pool itself (which, come winter, will be put to more seasonal use as an ice rink), the facility will include two events venues, a restaurant, cocktail bar (in the ferry's converted bridge), not to mention the various exterior decks and terraces. In total, the facility can accommodate 600 people and it's claimed this makes it one of the largest outdoor swimming centers in the world. SCULP(IT) has aimed to make the Badboot's design as environmentally friendly as possible. The facility will have an onboard reed bed water purification system. Beneath the pool is a buffering hold which fills with water from the pool during the evening, supposedly preventing evaporation of water as well as insulating it to keep it warm, reducing the facility's energy consumption. And the Badboot uses LED lighting throughout, further reducing energy consumption. The Badboot is being built by shipbuilders HSS. Construction commenced at the beginning of February and will end, it's hoped, by early August - an ambitious project for such a small window.

Baby mobile and monitor concept gives a bird’s eye view of cot

There's no shortage of baby monitors out there, even high-tech ones. Previously we've seen devices which let parents check on their little ones using an iPhone or iPad, and others which swivel to track them, wherever they are. But designer Denny Tsai thinks he's come up with something unique – a baby monitor which is fitted into a cot mobile.

Tsai, who came up with his concept while attending the Art Center College of Design in California, says his creation would give a bird’s eye view of a baby lying in a cot as well as performing all the usual functions normally associated with a baby monitor and crib mobile. It would act as a nightlight, play lullabies, and the speakers would act as a two-way radio so that parents could always hear their baby and talk to them remotely. What makes his Aegis different from current offerings is that a camera is fitted within the mobile – but out of reach of the baby – giving a unique view from above, which is better than most baby monitors on the market which have to be positioned off to the side. "A baby mobile is often the first toy that any baby gets," Tsai told Gizmag. "It's attached to the baby's crib and helps them develop their spatial reasoning skills."

After realizing this and researching the needs of parents, he decided that combining a baby monitor with the mobile would be logical and set about designing his product. "The most important aspect is that the baby mobile has a camera that is out of the baby's reach," Tsai added. "This is important because other monitors on the market can be kicked over by an over-energetic baby, it also provides a better view of the baby at all times." Unfortunately, as the baby monitor mobile is only a concept, there are no plans for production. The Philips logo is present, as designing it to fit in with a product range already on the market was part of the project. Tsai estimates it would retail for around US$150 if taken to market and that it would be made out of acrylic, polycarbonate, ABS and various other non-toxic polymers. In case you're thinking that sounds a bit steep, Tsai has an answer for you. "Ask any mother what the price of her child's safety is. Over the course of a year, this is less than 50 cents a day!"

Neva poles would give skiers a grip on connectivity

It seems that more and more often, we’re hearing about people adding computer functionality to existing products – turning so-called “dumb” devices into “smart” ones. While that’s understandable with electronic appliances such as fridges and washing machines, a lot of people might scoff at the idea of a smart ski pole ... wouldn’t that be sort of like a smart pencil sharpener or doorstop? It turns out, however, that software engineer Anthony Griesel’s Neva microprocessor-equipped ski poles could actually be kind of useful.

Although the product isn’t commercially available yet, Griesel did spend last winter skiing with a functioning prototype, in his home state of Utah. In each set, the grip of one of the poles will be the proprietary smart part, with everything else being being ... well, dumb. A partnering local ski company will be supplying the standard aluminum poles, which he describes as being of the “highest quality and lowest weight while staying affordable.” The waterproof smart grip will be linked via Bluetooth to an app on the user’s iPhone or Android smartphone. Using that app, they will be able to select which functions are enabled on the grip. Probably the most useful of these functions would be the ability to take phone calls. When a call comes in to the linked smartphone, the identity of the caller flashes on the grip’s top-mounted OLED screen, while the ring tone sounds in the user’s own Bluetooth headset (not provided). To take or ignore the call, they just swipe a gloved finger or thumb across an optical sensor embedded in the screen. According to Anthony, this should be considerably easier than stopping to take off your gloves and fumble the phone itself out of a pocket, then possibly dropping it in the snow.

Other features include the ability to receive and display short text messages, along with information such as the current time, temperature and elevation. Additionally, the poles can access Griesel’s SlopeScience website, to warn users if they're entering an area where an avalanche could occur (based on their GPS location). That locational data can also be used to generate a visual record of the day’s runs, on Google Earth. Future possibilities may include control of the phone’s music library, or text-to-speech messaging. Power is provided by a rechargeable battery, which will reportedly allow for three days of use before it needs recharging. It’s good for approximately 500 charging cycles. Despite the fact that most North Americans aren’t thinking much about skiing right now, Anthony is currently attempt to raise development funds on Kickstarter. A pledge of US$120 will get you a pair of his poles, when and if they reach production. They may, however, have some competition. Germany's Fraunhofer research group is currently developing a smart ski helmet, that incorporates a control panel mounted on the back of a Bluetooth-enabled glove. More information on the Neva poles is available in the pitch video, seen below.

iPad protective cases use light to extend functionality and battery life

Last April, Logitech partnered with ZAGG to release a rather smart iPad case with built-in physical keyboard. The company has now announced a new book-style case for Apple's tablet where the power for the included Bluetooth keyboard comes from batteries juiced up by built-in photovoltaic panels. The Solar Keyboard Folio won't help an iPad last any longer, though. Fortunately, Wireless NRG has developed a tough extended battery case for the iPad that also packs light-soaking cells on its flap that can keep the protected tablet going for up to ten days. The panels on both cases don't just rely on direct sunlight for power, as they can also take advantage of indoor light too.

Logitech says that when the NiMh batteries of its new Logitech Solar Keyboard Folio are fully charged, the Bluetooth 3.0 keyboard will be operational for two years (based on an average use of two hours per day) even if its dye-sensitized solar cells never get access to any light during that time. The 64 (U.S.) / 65 (EU) keys have 1.5 mm of key travel and the case provides two viewing angles for either typing or viewing comfort.

Compatible with the second and third generation of iPad, the 16.8 x 0.7 x 9.96-inch (428 x 17.8 x 253-mm) book-style case offers front and back protection for the enclosed iPad, auto wakes the tablet when it's opened, and places it in sleep mode when closed. It's available this month for US$129.99. The Kudocase from Wireless NRG trickle charges the built-in 4mm thin 10,000mAh batteries when the photovoltaic ink panels are exposed to either indoor or outdoor light sources, which in turn tops up the iPad's battery at the required voltage. The company says that the case essentially extends the iPad's ten-hour battery life to an impressive 24 hours of continued use. Based on the same two hours per day average as above, it's claimed that the case can give up to ten days of tablet use before needing some charging attention. The Kudocase can also be used to juice up other devices in addition to the iPad courtesy of a USB charging port. An included HDMI 1.3 adapter caters for watching content from the tablet on a connected big screen TV, monitor or projector.

As well as extending the iPad's battery, the Kudocase also affords the tablet some protection thanks to a hard shell outer housing made from biodegradable corn grain. It benefits from a number of different viewing angle possibilities and features a useful whistle locator which will beep when the user, well, whistles (although the feature can be turned off to avoid accidental activation). Users who simply can't wait around for sufficient light to fully charge the high capacity battery pack will be pleased to find a mains power lead supplied with each case. There's a Kudocase version for each of generation of iPad and a number of colors to choose from. It's available now for US$189.95.