Willow Glass: ultra-thin glass can ‘wrap’ around devices

A new type of flexible ultra-thin glass has been unveiled by the company that developed Gorilla Glass.

Dubbed Willow Glass, the product can be “wrapped” around a device, said the New York-based developer Corning.

The glass was showcased at the Society for Information Display’s Display Week, an industry trade show in Boston.

Besides smartphones, it could also be used for displays that are not flat, the company said.

But until such “conformable” screens appear on the market, the glass could be used for mobile devices that are constantly becoming slimmer.

“Displays become more pervasive each day and manufacturers strive to make both portable devices and larger displays thinner,” said Dipak Chowdhury, Willow Glass programme director at Corning.

The prototype demonstrated in Boston was as thin as a sheet of paper, and the company said that it can be made to be just 0.05mm thick – thinner than the current 0.2mm or 0.5mm displays.

The firm has already started supplying customers developing new display and touch technology with samples of the product.

Lots of potential outside technology products, of course: interior, textile and jewellery design could benefit (curved glass walls, wearable glass etc?)

(Read more at BBC News – Willow Glass: ultra-thin glass can ‘wrap’ around devices: .)

The Blind Shooting The Blind

We trekked out to the wilds north of Eglinton to the CNIB, dropping in on the iDevice User Group. This is a group where blind people teach each other how to get around in the world, using iOS applications as their helpers. We were the only sighted people present, there to talk to this particular subset of Pocket Rocket‘s users.

I simply gawped when one blind woman pulled out an iPhone then snapped a perfect shot, guided by the built-in Camera app.

Eventually a common theme became apparent: Apple’s applications — Calendar, Messages, Mail, iPhoto, even Maps and most surprisingly Camera — are completely usable by blind people.

If you’ve never seen a blind or partially sighted person using an iPhone or iPod Touch, it is quite intriguing – you can’t help but stare in the way your mother told you not to do. You can try it out for yourself, as Stephen van Egmond shows:

1. Go into Settings app, and go into Accessibility at the top level.
2. At the bottom of the screen is a setting that lets you make a home key triple-click turn on VoiceOver. Turn it on.
3. Go into the VoiceOver panel, and turn it on. Your phone will now say “VoiceOver on” and become extremely annoying to use if you’re not used to it. A “VoiceOver Practice” button will appear.
4. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to ‘tap’ on that VoiceOver Practice button and go practice some moves. Hints:
5. You can drag one finger around the screen to browse until you find the button that does what you want, then put down a second finger to activate it (some call this a tap-and-a-half; the proper term is a split tap).
6. Use two fingers flicking down to have the entire screen read to you. This is great for news or email: your device can read a piece to you while your hands are busy driving a car or feeding your baby.

(Disclaimer: never use your phone while driving a car)

The point of Stephen’s blog post is to encourage all app developers to build in accessibility like this – it’s part of the iPhone’s operating system and there’s really no excuse for developers not to do it. The effects can be quite amazing - read what Austin Serpahin wrote a couple of years ago about “hearing” colours:

The other night a very amazing thing happened. I downloaded an app called Color Identifier. It uses the iPhone’s camera, and speaks names of colors. It must use a table, because each color has an identifier made up of 6 hexadecimal digits. This puts the total at 16777216 colors, and I believe it. Some of them have very surreal names, such as Atomic Orange, Cosmic, Hippie Green, Opium, and Black-White. These names in combination with what feels like a rise in serotonin levels makes for a very psychedelic experience.

[…]

The next day, I went outside. I looked at the sky. I heard colors such as “Horizon,” “Outer Space,” and many shades of blue and gray. I used color cues to find my pumpkin plants, by looking for the green among the brown and stone. I spent ten minutes looking at my pumpkin plants, with their leaves of green and lemon-ginger. I then roamed my yard, and saw a blue flower. I then found the brown shed, and returned to the gray house. My mind felt blown. I watched the sun set, listening to the colors change as the sky darkened.

The title to Stephen’s post, “The Blind Shooting The Blind”, refers to that scene of a blind user taking a perfectly framed, perfectly focused photo using the iPhone. As Stephen says:

To get your mind blown, fire up Camera and point the camera at a nearby face, preferably a cute infant.

(Read more at The Blind Shooting The Blind ∵ Stephen van Egmond’s weblog: .)

Hi-tech car aid for older drivers

A team at Newcastle University is developing new technology aimed at helping older drivers stay on the road.

Many give up because their reaction times have slowed down – but this means they become more isolated and inactive.

One of the Intelligent Transport team’s developments is a “Granny-Nav” which identifies the safest route, such as avoiding right turns.

The Age UK charity said such developments could help the elderly maintain their independence.

[…]

Many avoid turning right because they do not feel confident about judging the speed of oncoming traffic.

It also uses pictures of local landmarks, such as a post box or public house, as turning cues for when people are driving in unfamiliar places.

(Read more and watch video at BBC News – Hi-tech car aid for older drivers)

Great British design: six favourites

Last week’s Observer had a feature on British Design to coincide with a new exhibition at the V&A. Here’s James Dyson’s pick of the best of British:

I remember the launch of the Mini in 1959. We were all aware that this was a complete break from the past. My mother bought one in 1960 when I was 14. I loved it. My brother and I were both 6ft 1in and my mother was 5ft 11in, so here were these great lanky people, getting into a Mini and thinking it was huge.

Italy had the Fiat 500 and France had the Citroën 2CV, both brilliant cars, but the Mini was a very British riposte to that. It was revolutionary in quite an interesting way. The Fiat and Citroën were both cars with big wheels that projected into the interior of the car, making the interior feel small – if you got into cars of that era, you were horribly aware of the big wheel arches. The clever idea of Sir Alec Issigonis, the Mini’s designer, was to make small wheels but to pump them up harder to get over difficulties with the suspension. The brief was to have a car that was only 10ft long – he thought cars were too big – and the Mini also answered a sociological need: it was a small family car that was extremely economical.

If you get into an original Mini now, you’ll find the interior is still large in comparison to cars of today. Issigonis dispensed with the wind-down window which meant that when you touched the inside panel of the door you were also touching the outside panel, so you got the full width of the car. It was very simple, but a great breakthrough. There is a reason why it became Britain’s best-selling car.

 

(Read the rest of the picks at Great British design: six favourites | Art and design | The Observer)

Drying clothes in Japan

Nifty.

Exciting!

Clothes dryers aren’t common in Japan so drying is done the “old fashioned” (and natural, energy-efficient, not-clothes-destroying) way. As a result, innovation in clothes hanging has taken the country way beyond our biggest achievement, the radiator hanger.

(You’ll learn the Japanese for “high performance”, “good job” and “it’s perfect” by watching these adverts. We’ll test you on those soon)

Jonathan Ive on the importance of prototyping

 

Sir Jonathan Ive, Apple’s lead designer, has been interviewed by The Evening Standard. This part is particularly interesting:

“Where you see the most dramatic shift is when you transition from an abstract idea to a slightly more material conversation. But when you make a 3D model, however crude, you bring form to a nebulous idea and everything changes — the entire process shifts. It galvanises and brings focus from a broad group of people. It’s a remarkable process.”

Read the full interview at This Is London