In the Beginning: Etching Tin Thomas Edison is credited with creating the first device for recording and playing back sounds in 1877. His approach used a very simple mechanism to store an analog wave mechanically. In Edison’s original phonograph, a diaphragm directly controlled a needle, and the needle scratched an analog signal onto a tinfoil […]
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Virtual Reality Immersion In a virtual reality environment, a user experiences immersion, or the feeling of being inside and a part of that world. He is also able to interact with his environment in meaningful ways. The combination of a sense of immersion and interactivity is called telepresence. Computer scientist Jonathan Steuer defined it as
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What is Autofocus? Autofocus (AF) really could be called power-focus, as it often uses a computer to run a miniature motor that focuses the lens for you. Focusing is the moving of the lens in and out until the sharpest possible image of the subject is projected onto the film. Depending on the distance of
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Facial Recognition Technology Identix®, a company based in Minnesota, is one of many developers of facial recognition technology. Its software, FaceIt®, can pick someone’s face out of a crowd, extract the face from the rest of the scene and compare it to a database of stored images. In order for this software to work, it
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Edison’s Discovery In 1877, Thomas Edison and his assistants attached a needle to the diaphragm of a telephone receiver with the idea that the needle could be used to etch an impression of sound onto quickly moving paper, thus creating a recording or sound writing. Edison understood that sound is the vibration of particles across
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Wireless’ Unending Evolution Wireless networks are hodgepodge of various and overlapping technologies. No matter how convoluted the acronyms, what it always boils down to is this — wireless networks are radio systems. You can read about the basics of cell phone technology in How Cell Phones Work and How Smartphones Work. No matter which wireless
Seeing in Three Dimensions Why can you look at an object in the real world and see it as a three-dimensional object, but if you see that same object on a television screen it looks flat? What’s going on, and how does 3-D technology get around the problem? It all has to do with the
How Instant Film Develops The component that gets the developing process going is the reagent (as in re-agent), a mix of opacifiers, alkali, white pigment and other elements. The reagent sits in a layer just above the light-sensitive layers and just below the image layer. Before you take the picture, the reagent material is all
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Inside the iPod Shuffle Although an iPod with 240 or 500 songs might not sound so impressive from the start, you have to consider the size of the iPod Shuffle — it’s about as big as a quarter. The iPod Shuffle stores music using a USB flash drive, the same kind of technology you find
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Analog, Digital and HDTV For years, watching TV has involved analog signals and cathode ray tube (CRT) sets. The signal is made of continually varying radio waves that the TV translates into a picture and sound. An analog signal can reach a person’s TV over the air, through a cable or via satellite. Digital signals,
