Tech Tuesday: Crowd Cam & Wireless communication without batteries

This week on News 1130 radio in Vancouver, I talked about these items:

• CrowdCam: With nearly everyone capturing events in real time with their smartphones, a new conceptual app could change the way we view these events. CrowdCam is an idea from Aydin Arpa (MIT) that figures out the location of each camera relative to the action it’s recording “giving users the ability to swipe between different points of view, while stabilizing the image and transition and keeping the image centered on the main object of interest.”
• Ambient Backscatter: A team at the University of Washington has come up with a way to power certain types of wireless communications by “using existing TV and cellular transmissions — ambient RF energy that’s in the air around already — both as a communication medium, and as a source of power.”. This technology can give power to things that you wouldn’t want or need to have to charge, like your keys, which when dropped onto the couch, could tell you their location because the couch could sense them. This won’t work to power your laptop quite yet but it’s an exciting development that could have many applications giving power and communication to everyday objects.

This will be my final Tech Tuesday as Rob Freeman (who produces the segment) is moving on from News 1130 at the end of the month. It may return in the near future. Thanks for having me, Rob! It’s been a fun segment to work on these past couple of years!