Will it appeal to teenage boys or forty-something-year-old men? Sharper Image of San Francisco is patenting a games controller that allows you to produce real music while playing air guitar. The system beams out infrared light pulses and measures the time taken for them to be reflected back from, say, the hand of someone strumming Paradise City by Guns N鈥� Roses. The makers say the system is accurate enough to track each hand and convert that action into music (US patent application 2005/0057495). It can also be used to create a virtual keyboard, 脿 la Jean Michel Jarre, or allow gamers to pretend they are Marvelous Marvin Hagler and shadow-box a virtual opponent.
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Forget light bulbs 鈥� light-emitting diodes will illuminate the rooms of the future. LEDs are extremely efficient because they do not get hot, and red, green and blue LEDs can be combined to create white light, or vary its hue. The problem is that ambient temperature affects each colour diode differently, so the hue of the light emitted changes if the room warms or cools. The way to fix that, says Luminator of Plano, Texas, in WO 2005/021323 is to chop the electricity supply into short bursts. A thermometer monitors ambient temperature and varies the length of the bursts of electricity fed to each diode to keep the overall colour constant.
We鈥檝e all been there. You鈥檙e chatting on your cellphone when the call fails. You hang up and try to call again, but the reception is still too poor and you face a frustrating wait for it to come back. Now IBM says it has a solution (US 2005/0059381). When the call is lost, a synthesised voice asks you to record a short message, along the lines of: 鈥淪orry we were cut off, the important thing I was just saying was鈥︹��. Then, as soon as your phone detects that reception has returned, it automatically redials the number that was cut off and plays your recorded message when the person answers.
