Category: Engineering

ENG: During the COVID-19 pandemic, online video conferencing has been a useful tool for industry, education, and social interactions. However, it has also been associated with poor mental well-being, poor communication, and fatigue. To help overcome the challenges of online video meetings, Hills developed VMS (Video Meeting Signals), a set of simple physical gestures that can be used alongside verbal communication during a video meeting. The gestures, including two thumbs up to signal agreement or a hand over the heart to show sympathy, are meant to improve experiences by serving a similar function as subtle face-to-face signals, such as raised eyebrows, while being more visible in a small video setting.

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ENG: Image sensors measure light intensity, but angle, spectrum, and other aspects of light must also be extracted to significantly advance machine vision. In Applied Physics Letters, published by AIP Publishing, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Washington University in St. Louis, and OmniVision Technologies highlight the latest nanostructured components integrated on image sensor chips that are most likely to make the biggest impact in multimodal imaging. The developments could enable autonomous vehicles to see around corners instead of just a straight line, biomedical imaging to detect abnormalities at different tissue depths, and telescopes to see through interstellar dust.

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ENG: Coordination nanosheets are one particularly interesting type of 2D material. The “coordination” refers to the effect of metallic ions in these molecules, which act as coordination centers. These centers can spontaneously create organized molecular dispositions that span multiple layers in 2D materials.

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ENG: The National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) research team recently developed an ionic artificial vision device composed of an array of mixed conductor channels placed on a solid electrolyte at regular intervals. This device simulates the way in which human retinal neurons (i.e., photoreceptors, horizontal cells and bipolar cells) process visual signals by responding to input voltage pulses (equivalent to electrical signals from photoreceptors). This causes ions within the solid electrolyte (equivalent to a horizontal cell) to migrate across the mixed conductor channels, which then changes the output channel current (equivalent to a bipolar cell response). By employing such steps, the device, independent of software, was able to process input image signals and produce an output image with increased edge contrast between darker and lighter areas in a manner similar to the way in which the human visual system can increase edge contrast between different colors and shapes by means of visual lateral inhibition.

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