Comment on 10 Toys That Are Replacing Cutting-Edge Technology by Nerds Do It Better./must visit

History March 29, 2014

Technology Karl Smallwood September 13, 2013

Technology is often built with a single purpose in mind and a device built for one specific purpose will invariably be better than a device with that feature included as an add-on. For example, you expect a digital camera to be better than the camera bundled with your smartphone because a digital camera doesn’t have a phone crammed in there too.

But sometimes, devices will surprise you by not only having an excellent secondary feature, but by having one that can trump or perform better than purpose-built, more expensive pieces of technology.

The US Army, instead of spending millions developing controls for their devices, use Xbox and Wii controllers to control their drones. Since they’re so well designed and intuitive, there’s virtually no point in using anything else.

In a British Army recruitment video, an eagle-eyed viewer noticed a split-second shot in which a soldier uses what appears to be an Xbox controller to control a drone. When he wrote to the Army asking why, they claimed that it wasn’t an Xbox controller. They just so happened to invent/use something that was exactly the same because it was better than whatever alternative they happened to have at hand.

Of course, this also means that war is becoming increasingly like a video game, but as long as our army is better at that video game, we’ll probably be okay. 

Unlike the other entries on this list, this is a game rather than a piece of hardware. The Gran Turismo series is unique in that it’s spent years perfecting itself as a driving simulator. It is now so realistic that it trounces actual real driving simulators, to the point where actual race car drivers use it to train for races. In fact, graduates from GT Academy, a school were the best players are honed in Gran Turismo simulators, have been banned from amateur racing events due to the fact their training in Gran Turismo gives them too big of an edge.

This ban came about after one such player entered a gentlemen racers’ tournament and almost won the entire thing, only losing to professional race car drivers with actual sponsors by seconds. But it’s not just amateur racers who can use the game, professional race car drivers have been known to boot up a copy of the game and use it to learn a particular track. The game is that realistic—the simulators they have spent years building for race car drivers can’t top a game they can buy for $60.

The Wii Balance Board, despite being a toy, is the easiest way to accurately check your center of pressure. You may be wondering what  your center of pressure is—it’s basically just how you stand when relaxed. It’s something that’s super important and it can affect everything from your gait to how prone you are to falling over. Putting too much pressure on one leg or foot can lead to several nasty problems. To detect and correct this you need either highly specialized equipment or just a Wii Balance Board.

According to a study conducted by the University Of Nevada, the Wii Balance board isn’t just a brilliant way of checking this, it’s virtually the only machine on the market that can do so that isn’t a professional, clinical grade machine costing thousands of dollars. In fact, the Wii is so good at measuring this that the study advises doctors to use the device as a cheaper alternative.

But here’s where the Balance Board trumps the other machine: Not only can it be used to discover a person’s center of pressure with a simple hack, it’s also super useful in helping people being rehabilitated after things like strokes, something the other machine obviously can’t do.

The PS3 had a built in Blu-ray player, the PS2 had a DVD player and the PS1 came with an inbuilt CD player. At the time of each console’s release, each of these devices on their own would set you back several hundred dollars. Amazingly, the CD player on the PS1 isn’t just good—audiophiles swear by the machine, claiming that it is simply the best CD player money can buy, even holding its own against thousand-dollar equipment designed for the express purpose of playing CDs—also built by Sony.

For example, in one review, an audiophile compared a Playstation console (a device you can buy for like $20) to his brand new, “Class A+ rated” Sony CD player, and the Playstation held its own. How does that even make sense? Why would anyone buy anything else?

Despite being years old and costing just a few hundred dollars, the tech behind the Microsoft Kinect is insane. The 3-D-mapping software in the device is able to accurately and cheaply map huge areas. Though the device can only map an area several meters in front of it, its light weight means it can easily be rigged to a portable handheld device to map an entire area for a fraction of the price of a comparable, LIDAR device. In fact, archaeologists have already started using the Kinect device in their work, for exactly that reason.

Though the Kinect lacks the raw grunt of a LIDAR machine, its portability more than makes up for it. Plus, being able to buy 30 of them for the price of renting a LIDAR machine is a pretty sweet bonus.

Not to be outdone by its grandfather, the PS3 also has an ace up its sleeve: It can be used as a makeshift supercomputer that rivals rigs thousands of dollars more expensive in terms of power—providing you have a few of them and the know-how to wire them together.

For just $4,000, you can build a supercomputer of immense power by linking together several dozen consoles. Though that may seem a little steep, we should point out that you normally need to rent time on a supercomputer for a dollar an hour. Again, that seems cheap, but when you realize a single calculation or simulation can take thousands of hours, it quickly becomes apparent that the PS3 supercomputer is a viable, cheaper alternative. Not to mention that it can be used to play Blu-rays when you’re bored.

In fact, because the PS3 was originally able to be loaded with Linux, clever people realized that they could outsource massive calculations to the millions of Playstations across the globe, and use their computational clout while inactive to solve problems like curing cancer. The researchers who developed the app that could do this calculated that just 10,000 PS3s working in tandem would rival the world’s most powerful supercomputer. However, since Sony stopped people from being able to install Linux on their console, this is no longer the case.

When we don’t cure cancer, you know who to blame.

We mentioned that you’d expect a dedicated camera to be better than the camera bundled with your smartphone, but smartphones seemingly want to go down swinging. While their camera function may not always be up to snuff, their tethering function is.

If you happen to own a smartphone that can access the Internet, you may or may not know that you can use it as a portable modem for a laptop, PC, or games console. Of course, this isn’t the intended use of your smartphone—it’s just an added feature. However, this hasn’t stopped smartphone tethering from being more reliable than actual, dedicated USB modems.

Along with doubling as an actual phone, smartphone tethering can be cheaper than a USB dongle, since you get a phone along with Internet access. In fact, phones were so awesome at this that many companies in Europe stopped offering unlimited data plans almost purely because customers realized that they could simply pay a few dollars more for an unlimited plan and completely negate having to pay for a dedicated broadband connection at all. Since offering a great service for a decent price is an alien concept to phone companies, they instead capped data limits and made phone modems somewhat less useful.

However, they’re still noted as being superior to USB dongles in terms of price, portability, and the amount of data they can use (and we don’t think we need to point out that you can’t play Angry Birds with a USB dongle).

A pedometer is used to measure the amount of steps one takes, but due to the fact that they usually just measure slight knocks and bumps, they’re notoriously unreliable. How do we know you walked 10 miles? How do we know you didn’t just strap it to your ankle and put on your most toe-tapping dubstep playlist, eh?

In an experiment involving several adults and several children (for accuracy) conducted by Iowa State University, the humble Pokewalker, which is most definitely a toy for children, trounced the competition—which consisted of pedometers built for actual accuracy.

Though thousands of teachers across the globe, and even the site’s founder Jimmy Wales, have said that Wikipedia shouldn’t be used as a source, it still happens. But that’s okay: in tests, Wikipedia has shown that it is possibly a more accurate purveyor of facts than the Encyclopedia Britannica, the foremost fact dispensing book on Earth. We say “possibly” because Encyclopedia Britannica disputed these claims—however, the accuracy of Wikipedia was found to be rather high in the dozens of tests conducted measuring its accuracy.

Which is impressive, considering that Wikipedia is a dictionary, a quotes database, is published in like 40 different languages, and is available for free. When you consider all that, a few errors is understandable.

If you were take you phone out of your pocket right now and drop it onto the floor, chances are it would immediately crack or break. Unless, that is, you bought a product that specifically advertised itself as being more durable. But why should you have to pay more for a product that can survive everyday wear and tear? Nintendo also asked that question, which is why they intentionally design all of their products with longevity in mind and don’t charge you extra for it.

The Game Cube can be hit with a sledgehammer and work just fine. The Nintendo DS was specifically designed to be able to survive a 1.5 meter (five foot) drop onto solid concrete without breaking, and one of the company’s bigwigs wouldn’t let it go past the design phase until the design team could guarantee it could survive the drop at least 10 times. In fact, Nintendo products have such a reputation for being impossible to break through normal means that they spawned the term “Nintendium”—an all-purpose phrase given to pieces of technology that survive extreme punishment. For example, take the Gulf War Game Boy, an original Game Boy console that survived having a freaking bomb dropped on it.

But here’s the thing: Nintendo never advertises their products as being durable, they don’t brag about their Game Boys being bomb-proof or their consoles being tough enough to survive being hit by a car. They just expect their customers to be human and include features to prepare for that humanity. While other companies decide that they’re nice by including a cover to protect the screen of the $600 phone you just bought in case you drop it, Nintendo just builds a device that can survive being dropped in the first place and doesn’t make a big deal about it. Because that’s how a real company does business.

Karl Smallwood has a Twitter account where you can make fun of his name. He also wrote an article explaining why Abraham Lincoln was a total boss.

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Don’t give up on flying cars or hoverboards just yet! As technology marches relentlessly on, everything goes into development sooner or later—as demonstrated by the existence of these things, which we’ll almost certainly see within our lifetimes.

Inventors have long sought an underwater breathing apparatus that doesn’t store oxygen, but extracts it from the water the way gills do. Israeli inventor Alon Bodner has come close.

The device, aptly named LikeAFish, works by using a centrifuge to lower the pressure of water within an airtight chamber. Since only a little oxygen is contained in water, the device must move about 190 liters (50 gallons) per minute in order for the average person to breathe comfortably. Despite this, the only real barrier to implementation is size and weight, but it’s close enough that the device has been under consideration for military use for several years now.

Such a system would obviously allow for longer “bottom time” without the need for refilling oxygen and would decrease the amount of nitrogen the diver is exposed to. According to Bodner’s website, the company spent 2012 “quietly designing a prototype to be installed on board a naval submarine,” so they may be very close to solving the size and weight issues of previous prototypes.

Agricultural robotics are, somewhat surprisingly, still in their infancy. While unemployment seems to be leveling off, there is still talk of a possible general labor shortage in the near future—particularly in agriculture. Many companies worldwide are attempting to bring various types of robot farmhands to market, but in robotics (where government and academic projects still lead the way) it tends to take longer than in some other, more commercial industries for such projects to obtain funding, produce a product, and prove its viability.

But the technology is coming along, and it’s easy to imagine it implemented on a wide-scale basis before too long. One Boston company that was able to raise nearly $8 billion in private funds in 2011 has developed a robot that it claims could perform 40 percent of the manual labor currently performed on farms. A Japanese research company has developed a robot that performs stereo imaging of strawberries to determine their ripeness before picking them, and MIT has a cherry tomato garden that is managed by a small crew of robots equipped with vision sensors. Of course, the main advantage to robot farm workers is the fact that they can work around the clock and never get tired.

An effective sunscreen that can be administered orally has been sought after for some time now. One doctor claims that a fern extract, containing the compound polypodium leucotomos, can act as such. He cites a human study showing less sun damage to the skin of those who were administered the active ingredient (though he did have to admit that there were only 12 people involved).

Also promising is a study at King’s College in London, which has determined a method by which coral protects itself from UV rays through its relationship with a symbiotic algae that lives within it. The algae produces a chemical compound which is converted by the coral into its own UV-blocking sunscreen, benefiting not only the coral and the algae but also the fish that feed on the coral. This transference has led scientists to believe that if the compound can be isolated, it could potentially be modified into a human oral sunscreen that would protect both the skin and the eyes. Said Dr. Paul Long, head of the three-year project, “There would have to be a lot of toxicology tests done first but I imagine a sunscreen tablet might be developed in five years or so. Nothing like it exists at the moment.”

In early 2013, consumer electronics shows debuted a prototype by European firm Plastic Logic of a product called the Papertab. That would be a portmanteau of “paper” and “tablet” and it is pretty much what it sounds like: a fully functional, touch screen tablet computer that is not only as thin as a sheet of paper, but as flexible as one too, and possesses the same reflective qualities. The company envisions such machines being ubiquitous within five to 10 years, as they could be inexpensive and interactive. A consumer could have several lying around, multi-tasking with different media all in service of one project.

A joint project between two American and Canadian universities has been creatively dubbed the Paperphone. Queens University director Dr. Roel Vertegaal has largely the same vision of the project. “This is the future,” he says. “Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years.” The machine is the size of a regular smartphone, with a 9.4-centimeter (3.7 in) display, but again, paper-thin and flexible. Users can give the phone commands by using “bend gestures.” It consumes no power when not in use and is considerably harder to damage than an ordinary phone.

Regeneration of body parts in humans seems permanently consigned to the realm of science fiction, even though many species of animals are able to completely regrow lost parts. It’s long been known that alligators are able to regrow lost teeth, for example, but it was assumed to be a cyclical process, like snakes shedding their skin periodically. Scientists have recently discovered that this is not the case: An alligator’s tooth will grow back automatically to replace a lost one. This is quite significant because the structure of alligators’ teeth is pretty similar to ours.

The problem has been that the inner areas of teeth contain living tissue known as “pulp” that doesn’t grow back. But the solution may have been found in stem cells: Scientists in multiple countries are trying to figure out how to get them to produce the correct tissues and structure for the given situation on demand. A University of Utah study in November 2012 confirmed that this could be done in a lab. Perfection of this technology could result in the potential end of tooth decay, gum disease, fillings, and root canals.

While Ultra High Definition TV is on the way, there are really only so many pixels you can cram into a flat display—most existing models are 214-centimeter (84 in) monsters for that very reason. But the next generation of TVs, if you can call them that, won’t have screens so much as they’ll have a viewing area. As seen above, it could be a desktop display, or it could be an entire room—but holographic displays are definitely in the works.

Researchers at MIT, who are apparently good at the cutting-edge technology thing (hence the “T”), have created a chip that can support a holographic display of 50 gigapixels per second—enough to simulate real world objects, as reported in the journal Nature. Such amazing technology will have to wait to come to marketplace, though, until costs can be driven down—right? Well, says Michael Bove, head of MIT’s Object-Based Media group: “The technology itself is one that’s easy and inexpensive and, as far as we are aware and Nature is aware, has never been applied to displays before.” He foresees holographic displays on the market within 10 years—at the same cost as today’s regular, flat TVs. Another company, Provision, has built an inexpensive projector that displays a 45-centimeter (18 in) image. As of this writing, they’re working on ramping that up to a two-meter (six-foot) image, displayed by a unit the size of a toaster.

At RAL Space in Oxford, scientists are building two video cameras quite unlike any other. Meter-long tubes packed with electronics and mirrors, these cameras are to be mounted to the outside of the International Space Station. But their purpose isn’t to capture images of space—they’ll be pointed toward the Earth. And while the resolution won’t be great (roughly a meter per pixel) it will be a real-time, streaming, live video of the entire planet.

Meanwhile, some Georgia Tech researchers are taking a slightly different approach toward the same ends. They take footage from the many live video feeds around the world and use it to layer complex animations on top of Google Earth, sometimes piecing together multiple camera angles to extrapolate the desired information. While currently focusing on people and cars, they’d like to add animals and weather conditions soon.

The notion of wireless electric power has been around far longer than one might think: Nikola Tesla might have perfected the technology a century ago if he had not been poor, unlucky, and kind of crazy. Many today are unaware that, even though it has obviously yet to be deployed en masse, wireless power transfer actually exists.

Wireless device charging has been around for some time, and continues to improve. Companies like Witricity are at work developing electric “hubs” that can power your entire house. Their prototype is called “Prodigy” and is based on research done by physicist Marin Soljacic of MIT. It works by exploiting the fact that certain frequencies of electromagnetic waves facilitate ease of energy transfer, and two objects resonating with such a frequency can easily transfer electricity between them, even at some distance and even if the objects are metal. When perfected (which many see coming within the next decade), it could bring about an end to batteries as we know them.

Magnetic levitation, or Maglev, trains have been in development for quite some time. In Japan, a recent successful test run means that plans are underway to connect the whole country by 2045 with trains capable of reaching over 480 kph (300 mph). They accomplish this by removing the wheels—and thereby, contact and friction—from the equation. Maglev trains levitate above the track, suspended by an electromagnetic field. And while the Japanese model is impressive, one company in the small Colorado town of Longmont is upping the ante by eliminating another barrier to shattering speeds: namely, wind resistance.

To be fair, eliminating this factor doesn’t so much up the ante as it blows up the entire house containing the card table. Daryl Oster of ET3 says that his company’s concept, called the Evacuated Tube Transport, is the future of transportation, and it very well may be. Its track is contained within a sealed, pressurized vacuum tube, making the capsules conceivably capable of speeds up 6,500 kph (4,000 mph), all while subjecting the passenger to G-forces comparable to that of a leisurely ride on the highway and transporting them across the entire US in less than an hour. ET3 has built prototype capsules and, as of this writing, are searching for an appropriate stretch to build the first tube.

Nuclear fission (the process by which nuclear power plants produce energy) is much easier to control than nuclear fusion (the process by which the sun burns, and nuclear weapons work). Small nuclear fusion reactors have been built, but a large-scale, sustainable fusion reactor has yet to be attempted—until now. A consortium of seven member bodies (the US, EU, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, and India) has chosen a location in France to build the world’s first. And while even its champions concede it could be decades before it’s dispensing energy, nuclear fusion is cleaner and yields three to four times more power than fission.

The project is called ITER, for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, and it is the second-largest cooperative international scientific endeavor (ranking behind only the Space Station). It will use a donut-shaped magnetic field to contain gases that will reach temperatures comparable to those at the core of the sun, in excess of 150 million degrees C (270 million F), and will produce 10 times more power than it consumes.

Mike Floorwalker

Mike Floorwalker's actual name is Jason, and he lives in the Boulder, Colorado area with his wife Stacey. He enjoys loud rock music, cooking and making lists.

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