Would you "iRobot" with Jules?

The iRobot (Bedford, MA) floor cleaners (promoted on the "iRobot, do you?" television commercials) and even the service robots such as display-bearing office-assistant robots like EMIEW2 from Hitachi (Tokyo, Japan) that bring a video computer into your cubicle for a chat with a long-distance colleague aren't very scary. But have you seen the humanoid robot named "Jules"? If not, take a look at this video on the Vision Systems Design video player (http://www.vision-systems.com/video.html) as creator David Hanson from Hanson Robotics says goodbye to Jules:



Jules was designed by the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, and you can watch a more educational video here at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odMgOBfVwrc for the details.

The videos were brought to my attention by a colleague who sent them around with the email title "Technology gets really, really creepy". After feeling creeped out myself, I sent it around to a few friends to get their impressions, and found a surprising array of responses from both technology-focused and not-so-technology-focused folks (the responses are "anonymous" to protect the at-times-disturbing viewpoints--depending on who you ask). Here are those unvarnished, anonymous responses after watching Jules in action:

1. Not someone to have a beer with after work.

2. Wow! I know where Mitt Romney really comes from.

3. As long as they are friendly it's rather funny.

4. Can you imagine waking up and seeing him in the corner staring at you with that impish grin?

5. One step closer to Blade Runner.

6. You know, that's not a bad looking robot. And so well mannered. Do you think I could get the girl version? Not Jules- Julia? With a full head? I'm particularly interested in one with an off switch like this one had. Are they available on Amazon?

7. (Reply to item 6) Tell your buddy to watch this. And never, ever tell me if he orders one. :) http://bit.ly/dfXY3j

Item 8 (which was a reply to item 7) is really not appropriate for general audiences. And if you're still curious about these humanoid robots and want to see some of the creepiest, go to http://www.cracked.com/article_16462_the-7-creepiest-real-life-robots.html. Here are a few:

The photo below shows professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University in Japan, with the Geminoid robot he created in his likeness; which is which (or should I say who is who)?

There is also Geminoid-DK, a tele-operated Android in the geminoid series made to appear as an exact copy of its master, asc. professor Henrik Scharfe of Aalborg University in Denmark. Again, who is who?

According to some of the news reports, Jules has high-resolution cameras in his eyes so he can track a person and lock onto them to have a serious conversation. No doubt machine vision and gesture recognition advances will help the robots of the future be even more "animated" than once thought possible. Throw some neural networks in the mix and you've got a scary combination! Technology is great in my opinion, but I agree wholeheartedly that it can be entirely creepy as well. As science fiction truly comes to life, who knows how many of these humanoids are out on the streets walking around with us? And creepier still, just what are their intentions?

Top photonics articles in 2012 point to 2013

The top 10 most-read photonics articles in 2012 help predict the hottest topics in 2013: for example, bio-optics, fiber lasers, laser market analysis, military lasers, terahertz technology, and mobile apps. I can think of a few more topics that would be on anyone's list, but these articles from 2012--in order of popularity--should help you ring in the New Year:

1. MEDICAL APPLICATIONS OF FIBER-OPTICS: Optical fiber sees growth as medical sensors

2. 2012 ANNUAL REVIEW AND FORECAST: Economic aftershocks keep laser markets unsettled

3. DIODE-PUMPED SOLID-STATE LASERS: Laser dazzlers are deployed

4. FIBER LASERS: The state of the art

5. OPTICAL DATA STORAGE: Holographic data storage uses volumetric crystal media

6. Sandia laser-guided bullet prototype can hit small targets a mile away

7. Terahertz microchip could let cell phones see through walls

8. How to measure relative intensity noise in lasers

9. FLIR intros thermal imaging camera app for iPad and iPhone

10. 2011 ANNUAL REVIEW AND FORECAST: Skies may be clearing, but fog still lingers

If you're looking for the very latest laser market numbers and more insights into these technologies and products from industry leaders, please join us at the 25th Annual Lasers & Photonics Marketplace Seminar, February 4, in San Francisco during SPIE Photonics West.

Holmium for the holidays

Chemical elements are the gifts that keep on giving. This holiday season, it's important to acknowledge how much the chemical elements--and especially the rare-earth elements--keep our photonics industry humming. As I prepare to write my February Photonics Applied feature article on "Photonics Materials", I am reminded of how precious these chemical elements are to the livelihood of our industry and unfortunately, how precarious their supply really is.

For example, take the lanthanide and rare-earth element holmium (Ho), atomic number 67. According to Wikipedia and the Royal Society of chemistry's online periodic table (www.rsc.org/periodic-table), holmium and all the other rare-earth elements including cerium (Ce), neodymium (Nd), erbium (Er), thulium (Tm), and ytterbium (Yb) share something in common: they are at "high risk" in terms of supply. Like many of the rare-earths, holmium rarely occurs in pure form in nature. A soft and malleable silver-white metal (see image), it is extracted from other metallic minerals using caustic and acidic processes. Holmium oxidizes rapidly into several forms of holmium oxide. While benign in its elemental form, many of the isotopes of holmium are radioactive.

Although abundant in nature at 1.3 mg/kg of earth (more than 20 times more abundant than silver according to www.lenntech.com/periodic/elements/ho.htm), the environmentally unhealthy separation process means that nearly 97% of the supply comes from China. A recent Forbes article (www.forbes.com/sites/jackperkowski/2012/06/21/behind-chinas-rare-earth-controversy/) highlighted the

controversy, in which China published its first white paper and indicated that it had a smaller percentage (23% of the world's supply) compared to the 36% it was estimated to have. The report raised stock prices for non-Chinese mining companies and recent quotas on exports from China are alarming rare-earth purchasers. Indeed, other nations have simply stopped mining the stuff (see chart).

Because holmium has the highest magnetic moment of any of the rare-earths, it possesses unique properties that make it useful in building ultrastrong magnets, in absorbing nuclear-fission-created neutrons, and as a dopant material in solid-state and fiber lasers. In fact, holmium YAG lasers are used with much efficacy in laser-based surgical applications. For example, a video at http://youtu.be/3TDI8kmU9C0 shows how holmium lasers can remove kidney stones, and another video here shows how a holmium laser is used to treat urethral stricture--an abnormal narrowing of the tube that carries urine out of the body:

So what would the holidays be without our rare-earths? Ask any photonics company and they will tell you, not at all joyful. I'm not a fan of mining and its harmful effects on the environment, but it's clear that the geographic availability of these rare-earth elements needs to be expanded. Stay tuned for my February feature article on photonic materials and the many surprising uses for common and not-so-common chemical elements in our photonics industry. And until then, here's hoping you'll get a big Ho-Ho-Ho from Santa this holiday season!

Image projection via caustics -- wow!

I just came across a method for projecting a monochrome still image that is stunning in both its simplicity and efficiency. Developed at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL; Lausanne, Switzerland), the method relies on an acrylic projection "slide" that has nothing embedded within it and nothing printed on it, but instead has a surface shaped to be slightly uneven.

Place it at the right point between a reasonably small, bright light source and a wall, and an image appears. The image is formed from the "caustics" that arise when an optically smooth but rippled surface slightly and unevenly deflects light, producing lighter and darker areas (such as what you see at the bottom of a swimming pool on a sunny day).

Form the ripples in the right way, and you can project whatever image you want -- such as this image of Alan Turing, the British mathematician and father of modern computer science, shown in the light of an ordinary white LED.

Credit: (c) Alain Herzog

The surface shape to provide a specific image is calculated via an algorithm. Because this type of projection doesn't rely on absorption, the process is virtually lossless. Almost any transparent item could be made into a projector -- windows, display cases, architectural ornamentation, vases, glasses, jewelry, and so on.  See this EPFL Youtube video for more.

Researchers in EPFL's Computer Graphics and Geometry Laboratory showed working image-projecting caustic plates recently at the Advances in Architectural Geometry Conference in Paris. Contributors to the project include Mark Pauly (EPFL), Thomas Kiser (EPFL), Michael Eigensatz (Evolute; Perchtoldsdorf, Austria ), Minh Man Nguyen (WAO Architecture; Paris, France) and architect Philippe Bompas.

Telepresence to go microscopic?

A couple of weeks ago (on Halloween, in fact), I posted a news story to Laser Focus World about "telepresence" robots crafted especially to allow people to attend corporate meetings; the remote attendees wear head-mounted displays and other devices, while at the other end their physical robot avatars sit at the meeting, displaying facial expressions and waving their hands impatiently.

However, this is only the beginning. A group of European and American scientists recently created a somewhat similar telepresence system, except that the meeting consisted of one human and one rat.¹ The human, who wore an eye-tracking head-mounted display, was represented by a rodent-sized robot that allowed the person to communicate with the rat on its own scale; the rat, tracked by two stereoscopic cameras, was represented to the human as a humanoid avatar on a computer screen. The human got to play carefully scripted games with the rat; the rat got to play along and occasionally receive a dab of jam for a reward.

So what's next? Well, back in the 1960s, a science-fiction movie, Fantastic Voyage, was based on the implausible idea of shrinking a submarine and a few people to microscopic size and injecting the sub into someone's body so that the crew could find and eliminate a blood clot. It made little sense then, but telepresence could make this sort of thing a reality (minus the teeny humans).

For example, the "Pillcam," invented by Given Imaging (Yoqneam, Israel) more than ten years ago and now moving toward FDA approval, is swallowed by a patient and moves naturally through the patient's gastrointestinal tract looking for polyps, conceivably eliminating the need for a colonoscopy. Such devices could be made smaller -- perhaps much smaller -- and could possibly be steered or even self-propelled, delivering drugs or doing microsurgery. As for photonics hardware, an extreme version of a camera-on-a-chip would be needed for vision, and other (perhaps plasmonic) sensors would be a must. Or the devices could be tracked using optical coherence tomography (OCT). Or . . .

Rats, I have to get back to work.

REFERENCE:

1. Jean-Marie Normand et al., PLOS ONE (2012) doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0048331.

Industry leaders to speak at Laser Marketplace Seminar

A host of industry leaders will help us celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Lasers & Photonics Marketplace Seminar on Monday, February 4, during SPIE Photonics West in San Francisco. The keynote speaker is Valentin Gapontsev, chairman and CEO of IPG Photonics, who will discuss developments in and opportunities for the fastest growing laser segment--fiber lasers.

There will also be great talks on market and technology trends by leaders such as Eric Swanson from OCT News on developments in optical coherence tomography, consultant Bo Gu on laser markets in China, Rüdiger Paschotta from RP Photonics on optical components for ultrafast lasers, and Parviz Tayebati from TeraDiode on high-brightness, direct diode lasers. In addition, Petros Kotidis from Block Engineering will talk about opportunities for quantum cascade lasers and Wilhelm Kaenders from Toptica will describe emerging applications for supercontinuum lasers.

To provide data and forecasts about sales of lasers, Allen Nogee, senior analyst at Strategies Unlimited, and David Belforte, editor in chief of Industrial Laser Solutions, will provide in-depth analyses of global laser markets.

The audience will also learn about recent trends in mergers and acquisitions from Robert Mandra at RSM Advisors, and hear about a rapidly developing model for taking advantage of IP and techology innovations from Jason Eichenholz at Open Photonics.

The continuous turmoil and uncertainty in the world economy has made many photonics companies cautious, even as some have done very well in specific product areas. As a result, the insights and networking you'll find at the Seminar should be of great interest--I hope to see you there.

For the Full Agenda and to register, please click HERE.

InterOpto takes fireflies very seriously

The September 25-27 InterOpto 2012 conference in Yokohama, Japan, was far removed from its roots as a telecom show in the years leading up to the bubble. While communications and optical components continue to be a focus for the InterOpto conference and its exhibitors, the conference has expanded to include not only InterOpto 2012 (optics and photonics), but also BioOpto Japan 2012 (biomedical optics), LaserTech 2012 (industrial lasers), and the LED JAPAN Strategies in Light (LED technology) conference. In fact, the LED JAPAN Strategies in Light conference complements the US-based Strategies in Light conference held each February in Santa Clara, CA (with 4600 attendees and 200 exhibitors) as well as the Strategies in Light Europe conference (September) and the Strategies in Light China conference (May). Strategies in light deals exclusively with LEDs and solid-state LED lighting technology. In addition to the conference programming, nearly 185 exhibit booths across the InterOpto, BioOpto, LED JAPAN, and LaserTech conferences were assembled in one area.

The LED exhibit (60 booths) included a wide range of LED and illuminance testing products from Konica Minolta (booth L-146) including their new CL-500A Illuminance Spectrophotometer--a very compact spectrophotometer for evaluation of LED lamps and electroluminescent materials. Its advanced sensor measures CRI (color rendering index), illuminance, chromaticity, and color temperature for any light source in a laboratory environment or out in the field. Who knew Konica Minolta had so many illuminance measurement products? Their portfolio includes Chroma Meters to measure color temperature,
and whole family of other illuminance meters (including integrating spheres) for any application.

Within InterOpto's new JIAL (Japan Importers Association of Lasers and Electro-Optics) Global Technology Seminar at which I presented the keynote entitled "Mid-Year 2012 Laser Market Review & Forecast", companies such as Coherent, Spectra-Physics, nLight, Oclaro, Amplitude Systemes, NKT Photonics, and Jenoptik presented overviews of their latest technology breakthroughs primarily in the laser industry. Of particular note in the spirit of the 2012 50th anniversary of the laser diode, DirectPhotonics Industries GmbH presented "Ultra-High Brightness Direct Diode Lasers for Material Processing." Fiber lasers may be seeing direct-diode competition sooner than anticipated if DirectPhotonics can leverage Fraunhofer technology to hone its single-emitter-based, wavelength-stabilized, spectrally combined system into a 2 kW, 7.5 mm mrad beam profile at 9xx nm into a production-ready machine. Its current DirectPump 900 source offers 90 to 600W for pumping applications, with more products being added to their portfolio.

The InterOpto exhibit was 84 booths strong, with many US-based as well as Japanese companies represented. With smaller exhibitions, LaserTech 2012 (16 booths) and more specifically, BioOpto Japan 2012 (21 booths) featured some excellent seminars. BioOpto Japan included Shinoda Plasma's presentation on a Luminous Array Film technology for a deep-ultraviolet light source, Furukawa Electric's description of its live-cell, damage-free cell flow cytometer, Nippon Dental University's presentation on dental caries prevention with a low-power laser, and Tokyo General Hospital discussed the role of low-level light therapy (LLLT) for the treatment of pain. And on the environmental front, Shojiro A. Maki from
the University of Electro-Communications presented his work on NIR probes based on firefly luminescence--the ultimate biomimetics success story in harnessing nature's best for the photonics industry.

As I took some time to vacation in Tokyo and Yokohama and visit some of the fine-art galleries, I was reminded of Japan's close tie with the natural world. And back at the conference center, I was extremely pleased to see that Japan is making strong efforts to improve the environment with the longest line of recycling containers I've ever seen! The United States should take note in its future photonics conference
venues--just because we have more land for garbage dumps doesn't mean we need to use it for that; how about creating a firefly habitat instead?