LCDs are so expensive and limit our ability to visualize and interact with technology at various physical scales. 6th Sense technology from MIT Media lab is all set to revolutionize the way we interact with the world around us. I can't wait for the day when accessing information this way would be the common place. It makes current touch based gestures on devices like the iphone obsolete.

Enjoy this amazing TED Video demonstrating the technology created by Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry.

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I have been a skeptic of being able to achieve true AI as we know human intelligence. We are talking about humans designing artificially what evolution has taken billions of years to develop.

However, I am beginning to think that I might be wrong. Jeff Hawkins - enterpreneur and scientist has been working on what is called Hierarchical Temporal Memory that tries to model the brain and this just might be the best approximation of the brain behavior we have. This video lecture has him explain its functioning and at the end of the video I come out convinced that Jeff is onto something big here. I can't help but feel that there is an opportunity to build something much more capable than the human brain overcoming biological limitations of the human body and solve very complex problems by scaling the model across powerful computers.

Jeff Hawkins company Numenta is working on commercializing this technology and has released the Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing (NuPIC) which can be downloaded from the Numenta website.

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Image Source: Wikipedia

3D Printers are machines that build mechanical parts given a design as input. You can now build physical objects by printing them in a 3D printer. Sounds too good to be true, doesn't? It is all real and quite impressive. Not only is it real, it is slowly becoming affordable. A day will come when we build common household items by clicking on the file menu and choosing Print 3D.

RepRap is one such 3D Printer. Founded by Dr Adrian Bowyer, a Senior Lecturer in mechanical engineering at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom, Reprap is an universal constructor that can build itself besides other things. The RepRap project is published under the GNU General Public License, a free software license, at no cost, allowing other investigators to work on the same idea and improve it. The device itself costs around 400$ to build.

RepRap has been used to build items like hanging hooks, fly swat, shoes, water filter, door handle and many more items. See images below:

Visit RepRap website for more interesting details and how you can build your own RepRap.

If you think the RepRap looks like an unprofessional project (Wait for it to grow!!), you might want to consider the 3D Printer from Desktop Factory. Coming in at $5000, the Desktopfactory 125 Ci 3D Printer is not as cheap as the RepRap but the finished products are of higher quality. You can check out the amazing finish 3D produts at their homepage.



If you liked this article, you should check out the article from Replicator about 10 things 3D Printers can build now including action figures, jewellery and functional objects like hearing aids.

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