That’s the idea behind one designer’s concept for a Fujitsu Lifebook, which would come with slots for a smartphone, digital camera, and tablet, for them all to all work together as one super device. The unique concept, dubbed "Lifebook 2013," comes from designer Prashant Chandra, who submitted the design to a competition held by Fujitsu. The laptop would feature fitted slots for various smart devices, but those aren’t for your standard connectivity. Attaching a gadget to the Lifebook would bring all it’s functions to the computer, including using its own processor to run some of the laptop’s functions.

Fitting the digital camera to the front would mean pictures could be downloaded to the computer or other devices. Sliding in the smartphone/mp3 player would allow music to be played and other data to be shared across devices. The Lifebook 2013 concept doesn’t have a keyboard itself, since an tablet becomes the keyboard once slotted into place. The tablet can also be used as a second display (like a larger Nintendo DS) or as a digital sketchpad with a stylus. Aside from potentially reducing the overall cost, another advantage to this setup would be that all the devices can be synced and updated simultaneously from the same hub.

"The proposed Lifebook is a laptop computer concept based on the principle of ‘shared hardware,’" explains Chandra. "Currently a lot of hardware is wasted when we use separate devices, as there is often a lot of ‘repeat’ of data stored and features. For example if I have my songs on my music player, why do I have to block the same amount of storage on my laptop? Similarly, if I have a processor sitting in my tablet, why can it not also run/assist my laptop? If I have a fully functional camera with its own memory and image processing power, why do I need to have it repeated in my laptop?"

Put this way it sounds like a logical step forward for the next generation of laptops, though there is the obvious question of being limited to the concept’s constituent devices, which would clearly be a bit limiting for the consumer.

A new, truly 360-degree 3-D display has been developed by researchers at Osaka University. The fog display is created by three projectors each beaming a different image into a column of thin fog, making the resulting image appear 3-dimensional from all angles. This technique means that viewers can physically walk around the display to see it from different vantage points without losing the 3-D effect.

As we see in the video, the image quality is still a little shaky, but researchers say their next step is to make the technology “more stable.” Applications for the 360-Degree Observable Fog Display are not exactly clear, but researcher Asuka Yagi says in the video that they hope to apply it in “healthcare and entertainment.” The project was inspired by amusement park fog displays, so we can only hope that means one day your children will be taking pictures with 3-D fog princesses at theme parks.

Blinput would allow the visually impaired to navigate its menu system using hand gestures

Smartphones have already proven their worth as navigation devices for sighted people but a new concept aims to go even further for the vision impaired. Dubbed blinput, the system would allow visually impaired people to not only find their way around, but also interact with the connected world using the smartphone’s camera to gather context relevant information that would then be relayed to the user through a pair of headphones.

The blinput system would see a visually impaired person wearing a smartphone around their neck with the camera facing out and a pair of headphones that would produce audio in 3D. With sound being an even more important sense for the visually impaired, these would be open headphones to allow ambient noise to be heard.

To navigate the system’s controls the user would hold their hand in front of the phone’s camera and scroll through options, which are read out to them, by moving their hand up or down and select options with a pinch of their fingers. This simple user interface would not only allow them to get directions, but would also allow them to interact with devices such as vending or ticket machines that are embedded with RFID or Bluetooth.

Additionally, the concept envisages stores installing beacons to allow visually impaired shoppers to easily find items. Once the user has found their way to the desired product range they can then identify specific products by holding up the item’s barcode to the smartphone camera.

Because all the context specific information is stored on the blinput servers and not the phone itself, users are also able to make their own posts for others or listen to other’s location-specific posts pointing out things such as potential obstacles or points of interest.

The system can also alert the users to when friends are nearby and direct them in that direction using 3D audio. The system would then use facial recognition to analyze the person’s emotions and translate this into a particular pattern of vibration – one pattern for happy and another for sad, for example.

Although the blinput system, which is the brainchild of Norwegian designer Erik Hals, is still in its early stages and would require some cash investment to be developed further, most of the technology required already exists. In fact, one of the biggest current obstacles would be finding batteries capable of keeping the smartphone camera on for extended periods. Still, it might not be long before such a system becomes a valuable tool for the visually impaired.

Someday, This Tree Could Be Producing Its Own Light nauright on Flickr

Taiwanese researchers have come up with the elegant idea of replacing streetlights with trees, by implanting their leaves with gold nanoparticles. This causes the leaves to give off a red glow, lighting the road for passersby without the need for electric power. This ingenious triple threat of an idea could simultaneously reduce carbon emissions, cut electricity costs and reduce light pollution, without sacrificing the safety that streetlights bring.

As many good things do, this discovery came about by accident when the researchers were trying to create lighting as efficient as LEDs without using the toxic, expensive phosphor powder that LEDs rely on. The gold nanoparticles, shaped like sea urchins, put into the leaves of Bacopa caroliniana plants cause chlorophyll to produce the reddish luminescence.

In an added bonus, the luminescence will cause the leaves’ chloroplasts to photosynthesize, which will result in more carbon being captured from the air while the streets are lit. The next steps are to improve the efficiency of the bioluminescence and apply the technology to other biomolecules.

The Sea Kettle concept life raft not only aims to provide shelter from the elements but also drinking water from the sea

The thought of folks suffering from extreme dehydration whilst stranded in a life raft at sea got industrial designer Kim Hoffman thinking of a way to turn all that sea water into safe, drinkable, life-saving refreshment. She took inspiration from portable desalination tools and created the Sea Kettle concept, a colorful life raft that uses heat from the sun to evaporate salty water and collect condensed run off in containers within the raft’s structure.

According to Hoffman, a product design graduate of San Francisco’s Academy of Art University, the Sea Kettle "is a life raft that combines safety, accessibility, and a desalination process. In an emergency at sea, you may not be able to obtain fresh drinking water before being forced to abandon ship. Passengers could easily die of thirst or from extreme temperatures before they are rescued or reach land."

As well as providing both insulation and shelter from the elements, the Sea Kettle would feature a number of hand pumps within the cabin. With these, the lucky survivors would draw up sea water into a Gortex covered plastic reservoir. Both the reservoir and the cover would be black to help concentrate the sun’s heat onto the water contained therein.

As the evaporated water hits the top of the cover, vapor escapes through the Gortex but the larger water molecules are condensed and the droplets run into four pockets around the raft, filling them up with drinkable water. Hoffman states that the process should provide enough drinking water for up to five people.

The designer says that the desalination process used in the Sea Kettle design was inspired by the Watercone, a portable solar still where salty/brackish water is poured into the base and the cone floated on top. The black pan base helps cater for the evaporation of the water, which condenses to form droplets on the inside of the cone. The droplets trickle down into a trough. A cap at the tip of the cone is unscrewed and the cone turned upside down to pour the drinking water into a suitable container.

Hoffman has entered her design in this year’s James Dyson Award competition and will know shortly whether it’s made it through to the next round, the first shortlist being announced on August 3. The overall winner will be crowned in October and will walk away with GBP10,000 (approx. US$15,682), a visit to one of the Dyson R&D centers and the Award trophy. If appropriate, the University Department to which the winning designer or team belongs will also receive GBP10,000.

Of course the whole life-saving process sort of depends on a Sea Kettle ending up in a location where there’s sufficient heat to evaporate the collected sea water. Rafters may still find themselves a bit parched if their Sea Kettle bobs around in stormy, bitter cold Titanic-type situations. That said, marine accidents are not just restricted to icy northern waters and I would rather take my chances in a Sea Kettle than one without built-in solar desalination.

The Electric Bike Version 2 also features a compartment for storing and charging mobile phones, notebooks or MP3 players

Yuji Fujimura has taken the bicycle design manual and thrown it to the wind with his concept Electric Bike Version 2. Ditching the popular and familiar diamond frame design, Fujimura has opted for a flat solid box on wheels where the handlebars, seat and pedals fold away flat to help squeeze the bike into tiny parking spaces.

Parking bicycles can be a troublesome affair if you’re in an area where an awful lot of people use two wheels to get around. As electric bikes grow in popularity the issue is unlikely to improve. The Electric Bike Version 2 concept from Yuji Fujimura takes a slightly different approach to bike design which also offers a possible solution to overcrowded parking woes.

The concept bike would have pedals for human propulsion, which could both be set at the lowest position when traveling under electric assist. The upright seating position appears similar to that of more familiar diamond frame bicycles but that’s where the similarity ends. As you can see from the gallery examples, Fujimura has gone for a flat, solid body box design with all the electronics and lighting enclosed within the housing and solid wheels.

Being a concept design, details on the electrics are limited to revealing that the designer proposes using a Li-ion battery, an electric rear wheel hub motor and that the bike would include a charging compartment for mobile phones, laptops, MP3 players and so on. The handlebars, seat and footrests/pedals fold away flat so that the flat, wheeled box can slide into the slimmest of parking spaces.

Whilst the Electric Bike Version 2 concept is imaginative and aspects of it make a lot of sense, just how stable the bike would prove in strong winds with nowhere for gusts to go except to slam against the solid body is cause for great concern, especially when cornering. Fold-away handlebars, seat and pedals to help squeeze the two-wheeler into tight parking spaces though – now there’s a good idea.

3R-C Trike Parked and ready for use Honda

Honda’s EV-N concept may have the visage of a throwback car from the 1960s, but the car company’s new 3R-C looks like nothing less than a futuristic trike. The sleek three-wheeled, single-person vehicle is set to debut at the Geneva Motor Show next week as a zero-emission concept with a lithium-ion battery, Autoblog Green reports.

The 3R-C seems designed to address the single urban commuter, and unsurprisingly comes from Honda’s Research and Design facility in Milan, Italy. Its clear canopy lowers over the driver’s seat while parked, and is raised during operation to become a wind-shield for the rider. That’s a bit of a shame, given how perfectly streamlined the vehicle looks with the canopy down.

Future Trike: Riding the Honda 3R-C  Honda

Stability for the vehicle would come from the electric drivetrain sitting low in the chassis, and there’s even a lockable "boot area" in front of the driver to provide storage for luggage.

These concept vehicles won’t enter production, but they provide some food for thought concerning the needs of future commuters winding through narrow streets or alleyways. And given global trends, it’s safe to say that the cities of the world will only become more crowded in the near future. If you’re not down with a regular bike or a full-blown car, perhaps an affordable single-seat vehicle might not be a bad alternative, unless GM’s two-wheeled P.U.M.A. somehow takes off in a way that the Segway didn’t.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a digital food machine sitting in your kitchen that could create any dish, real or imagined, from scratch at the touch of a button? Cornucopia: Digital Gastronomy is a concept design that uses the well-established principles of 3D printing – plus precisely timed and temperature-controlled mixing and cooking – to open the door to a virtually limitless realm of replicable, creative cuisine in shapes and combinations that are simply impossible using our current, centuries-old cooking techniques. It’s a wonderful look into the future of cooking, from the creative food lover’s perspective.

We see all sorts of home gadgetry here at, but I think it’s fair to say that there hasn’t been a truly revolutionary invention in the world of cooking since the microwave oven – and those started popping up in homes more than 40 years ago. Otherwise, we’re still frying, casseroling, baking, pressure cooking, roasting, barbecuing, steaming and grilling our dinners in much the same way as we have done for hundreds of years.

For many, the simple and precise application of heat, fire, metal and various different ingredients has become a fine art – but surely we’re overdue for a technological overhaul in the kitchen that might open up some new possibilities.

The Digital Gastronomy concept design is an ingenious attempt to turn the cooking process upside down, open up a whole range of new creative possibilities and bring creative cooking into a new and replicable phase for the information age.

Cornucopia builds up edible creations using a layering process similar to some of the 3D printing machines we’ve been writing about recently, except that it uses a variety of different foodstuffs instead of plastics to build up its final product.

The printing head moves on a 3D axis, and extrudes precisely mixed and measured quantities of different ingredients from the canisters on top of the machine. Ingredients can be mixed as they come through the printing head, which is also able to precisely temperature-control the mix as it prints using a laser heating and piped cooling system.

The printed food output sits inside a temperature-controlled chamber that finishes the rest of whatever cooking or cooling needs to happen before the dish is done, and the device lets you know when it’s time to eat.

The ingredient canisters are refillable or automatically re-orderable, and provide constant feedback on stock levels or ingredients that are going out of date as well as offering smart alternatives if you’re low on something.

The Cornucopia system is one of the first genuine attempts we’ve seen to produce a machine that can make virtually any dish given the right set of instructions. Sure, it’s not going to print you a medium rare steak, but it can reliably and replicably build all sorts of elaborate and complex combinations, precisely mixed and temperature-controlled, that would be near impossible to create using any other cooking process.

Every dinner can be calorie controlled and nutritionally balanced, there’s minimal wastage, and a dietician or doctor’s orders can be turned into a number of simple recipe files that can be saved, downloaded and used to create food through the whole week.

It might all sound a bit mechanical and soulless – but then, part of what the Cornucopia is about is a love of new and different food combinations that can’t be made using any other technique, and an encouragement to experiment with 3D recipe design, refining, sharing and selling recipes to other 3D food printer users around the world. Digital chefs are bound to get very creative with how they use this sort of machine – and once they do, you just need to screw the right canisters into your machine and run their recipe file to sample the results.

I’d love to see this sort of machine get off the ground and into the hands of some gastronomical wizards – the potential for new flavours, textures and presentations is enormous – and the digital kitchen concept would mark a truly revolutionary step forward. Well done to designers Marcelo Coelho and Amit Zoran, and we hope to see Cornucopia make it through to prototype and production in the near future.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – December 14, 2009 — Synaptics Incorporated (NASDAQ: SYNA), a leading developer of human interface solutions for mobile computing, communications, and entertainment devices, today introduced Fuse™, a collaborative mobile phone concept, demonstrating the future of user interaction for handsets. Integrating for the first time multiple interface technologies—including multi-touch capacitive sensing, haptic feedback, 3-D graphics, and force, grip, and proximity sensing—the Fuse concept phone showcases exciting new mobile device usage models. In addition, Fuse demonstrates to device manufacturers the value of ecosystem collaborations providing a model for designing multi-modal interfaces that will optimize the user experience on next-generation handheld device. Every step in the value chain affects and is affected by the end product. A truly collaborative approach takes advantage of each partner’s unique contributions in benefiting the user.

Beyond Today’s Touchscreen
Fuse extends the now-prevalent touchscreen-based user experience first unveiled in August 2006 with Synaptics’ award-winning Onyx mobile concept. With Fuse’s bold lineup of innovative interface technologies, Synaptics and partners tackle the difficulty of single-handed usage and the need to look at the screen—two key challenges faced by on-the-go users in current-generation touchscreen phones.

Fuse’s innovative sensing technologies surrounding the entire device enable quick, intuitive, single-handed navigation. For example, grip sensing achieved via force and capacitive touch sensors on the sides of the phone allows the user to execute common controls such as pan and scroll. In addition to the novel side sensors, Fuse introduces for the first time, 2D navigation from the back of the phone. This feature offers yet another mode of effective and fun single-handed control without obstructing the display or enhanced usability, Fuse combines multiple sensory input and feedback technologies including active 3-D graphics and next-generation haptic effects.

“Consumers have many options when it comes to choosing a smartphone, and though many phones are loaded with applications to simplify one’s life, they often accomplish just the opposite,” said William Stofega, research manager for mobile device technology and trends at IDC. “Synaptics partnering with innovative industry leaders to deliver an intelligent concept device that has the consumers’ lifestyles in mind will help showcase the true potential of the smartphone.”