For some of us, jetpacks represent a dreamy way to fly over traffic en route to work. For those just looking for fun, look no further than the Flyboard, a contraption that lets you zip in and out of water — and soar above it — akin to Flipper after way too much caffeine.

The device was created by French water sports racer Franky Zapata. It's essentially a board hooked up to a personal watercraft such as a Jetski via a water-sucking hose. Water shoots out through jets below the feet and hand grips to provide propulsion. 

---

In the video above, Zapata shows off the Flyboard's ability to turn humans into flipping, twisting, jumping and diving dolphins. It looks like a blast, though some skill must be required not to get tangled up in the hose. 

It hooks up to any personal watercraft with more than 100 horsepower and costs about $6,400 (PWC not included). While there are certainly other jetpacks on the market, this one might fit a few more budgets and spike higher on the fun-o-meter.

[Via PopSci and The Australian]

More on jetpacks:

• Jetpack soars a mile high
• This jetpack can be yours for $100,000
• Dude, where’s my flying car and jetpack
• 7 flights of fancy that fizzled

---

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

A new imaging system that captures visual data at a rate of one-trillion-frames per second is fast enough to create virtual super-slow-motion videos of light particles traveling and scattering through space.

For reference, light particles — photons — travel about a million times faster than a speeding bullet.

---

While that's fast, researchers at MIT's Media Lab have developed a system for capturing data on the movement of photons through space and time and then stitching that data together in a computer to create virtual slow-motion videos.

 

In the video above, for example, a burst of laser light is seen traveling through a soda bottle and bouncing off the cap. Other videos show a ripple of laser light move across a table, over and into a tomato, and up a wall.

"What you see in the videos is an average of many pulses," Andreas Velten, a researcher in MIT's Media Lab who is leading the effort, explained to me Tuesday. "If we capture one pulse, we don't get enough information. First of all because it is too faint and second because we only see one line at a time." 

The technique to create the videos relies on what's called a streak camera. The aperture — opening — of this camera is a narrow slit that provides a reasonable field of view in the horizontal direction, but very limited view in the vertical — essentially a line, or row of pixels. 

"It can only see one line, but it gives you a very high frame rate — a trillion-frames-per second," Velten said. This allows the researchers to make a movie of one scan line. Several pulses of light are used to compose each scan line movie to improve image quality, he noted.

Then, a system of mirrors in front of the camera changes the field of view slightly so that a movie of the next line can be made. The process continues for each line of a scene, such as a pulse of light moving through a bottle. Then, the computer uses all this information to create the virtual slow-motion movies.

"So what you are seeing is actually an average of many pulses, but because our camera and laser are synchronized very well, all the pulses look exactly the same," Velten said. "That's basically the trick."

According to the researchers, it takes only a nanosecond — a billionth of a second — for light to scatter through a bottle, but it takes nearly an hour to collect enough data to stitch together a video.

While watching photons move through soda bottles and across tables is visually cool and educational, the technology could be used to study the properties of materials, as well in scientific and medical imaging, even "ultrasound with light," the researchers suggest.

For more on this technology, check out the video below featuring Velten and his adviser, Ramesh Raskar. 

More on high-tech camera technology:

• New camera always takes perfectly focused photos
• Foam ball snaps panoramic images in the air
• Smart fiber can act as a camera
• Insects, animals captured with high-speed photography

---

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

Every year, thousands of tourists stand in front of Paris' Eiffel Tower to have their picture taken, painted, or sketched. Though every image is different, each contains the sky piercing tower. Now, a computer can match up all those images based on that one identifying feature.

This could be useful, for example, to someone who is wondering how the Eiffel Tower and its surroundings have changed since their grandparents had their picture painted in front of it on their honeymoon. In this case, the computer could find a match to the painting by searching online for a modern match.

The technique differs from photo-matching methods that focus on similarities in shapes, colors, or composition, which work well when searching for exact or very close matches but fail when applied across domains, such as a picture taken in different seasons or a painting and a picture.

---

"The language of a painting is different than the language of a photograph," Alexei Efros, an associate professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Penn., said in a news release. "Most computers latch onto the language, not what's being said."

In the video below that explains how this all works, for example, a standard computer algorithm tasked to find images similar to a painting of a temple returns images of clouds and the ground that most closely match the image, not the temple that's of most interest to humans.

Efros and his colleagues programmed a computer to find the unique element that sets an image apart from others in a sample and then uses that uniqueness to match it with similar images. 

The uniqueness is computed based on a dataset of randomly selected images. So, to use the Eiffel Tower example, the person standing in front of the tower is likely similar to other people in other photos and thus given little weight, but the tower itself is unlike anything else in the other photos.

Efros said the approach is the "best approximation" yet achieved to how humans compare images.

The technique can be used for automated image searches, for example, or combined with a GPS-tagged photo collection to determine where a particular painting of a landmark such as the Eiffel Tower was painted.

In the following video, the team shows off how the program can also be used to assemble what they call a "visual memex" — a dataset that explores the visual similarities and contexts of a set of photos. It shows a graph of 200 images of Medici Fountain, another Paris landmark, from various distances. 

More on photo matching technology:

• Police use facial recognition technology to match rioters
• How to turn off Facebook's creepy face recognition
• Google image search can't tell Obama from Bush
• U.S. spies seek geotagging software

---

Efros and colleagues will present their findings Dec. 14 at SIGGRAPH Asia, a computer graphics and interactive techniques conference in Hong Kong.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

Robotic quadrocopters — that is flying machines with four rotors — have built a 20-foot-tall tower of polystyrene blocks at a museum in France.

This may come as bad news for unemployed construction workers hoping for a bright future building next-generation skyscrapers, but it's yet another way robots are aiming to re-shape the global workforce.

---

In this case, an architect still draws up a blueprint for the building, but computers and robots do the rest — interpreting the blueprint and controlling the crew of robotic copters, for example. 

The first public job for this system was the "Flight Assembled Architecture" exhibit at the FRAC Center Orleans, billed as the "first installation to be built by flying machines."

The exhibit is the work of ETH Zurich roboticist Rafaello D'Andrea and architects Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler.

Like any construction site, a safe operating environment is essential. To avoid collisions, the robots reserve air space on one of two "freeways" before they fly. 

"The system ensures that while a space is reserved, only the reserved flying vehicle has access — all other vehicles must wait before flying through the space," the team explains in a media release.

This system also prevents collisions with the tower, since the tower itself is considered reserved airspace.

Each robot has a specially designed gripper to hold and place the bricks. The researchers also figured that quick flights are essential to prevent factors such as air turbulence resulting in a misplaced brick.

Perhaps the speed will also cut down on construction delays, giving the robotic workforce another edge over their human counterparts.

The tower on exhibit is 20 feet tall and made of 1,500 blocks. It's a model of a futuristic 2,000-foot tall "vertical village" that could house 30,000 people — assuming 30,000 people want to live in a building assembled by robots.

[Via CNET]

More on the robotic workforce of the future:

• More work for robots in China
• Nine jobs that humans may lose to robots
• In the near future, robots will work on farms
• Your new co-worker may be a robot
• Meet FRIDA, your robot co-worker

---

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

 

3-D printers are moving from the whimsical fringe of printing out chocolates, cheeseburgers and bikinis to serious life-saving stuff such as rescue robots and, now, a bone-like material scaffold that can help heal real broken bones.

This latest use comes from researchers at Washington State University. They used a commercially available 3-D printer designed to make metal objects and optimized it so it can spray a bone-like ceramic powder into whatever 3-D shape designers draw on a computer. 

---

New findings on the technology are reported in the journal Dental Materials where the team describes how the addition of zinc and silicon to the mixture more than doubled the strength of the main material, calcium phosphate.

"It can make bone scaffold using the material that you want very similar to human bone and it can fix the defect that the physician wants," Susmita Bose, a professor of mechanical and materials engineering at the university, explains in the video above.

In lab tests, after just a week in a medium with immature human bone cells, the scaffold supported a network of new bone cells.

And, the researchers are seeing promising results with in vitro tests on rats and rabbits, they report.

Susmita and colleagues aim to insert these scaffolds into human bodies to repair broken bones. As the bone-like material dissolves, real bone tissue in the body will grow over it.

Within 10 to 20 years, Susmita notes in the video, physicians and surgeons could be able to use these bone scaffolds, together with chemicals that help bones grow, to fix jawbones and fuse spines.

More on 3-D printing technology:

• The bikini of the future is made by lasers
• The wild possibilities of printing food
• Jumping robot spider jumps out of 3-D printer
• Chocolate printer crafts sculptures from cocoa
• Analysis: 3-D printing making inroads in heavy manufacturing

---

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

A robot that looks like a little green Martian in a snowsuit has learned to recognize itself in the mirror — and is pleased with what it sees.

Mirror-self recognition is a hallmark of intelligence in animals, something found in primates, dolphins and elephants, for example, but not dogs.

---

On the robot's blog, the Thecorpora engineers said they wondered what would happen if Qbo sees itself in the mirror, noting that the robot is programmed with face and object recognition capabilities.

As seen in the video, Qbo is trained to recognize itself and, when it does, give the programmed response: "Oh, this is me. Nice." 

"This quite simple experiment touches interesting psychological aspects of self-consciousness," the blog reads. 

The researchers are working on programming the robot so it can recognize itself autonomously when found in front of the mirror, one step closer to true self awareness.

While robots don't yet rule the world, they are getting smarter.

More on robots and intelligence:

• The 10 smartest animals
• Dog vs. robot: Which is the better soldier?
• Robot learns from experience
• Can robots look all too human?

---

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.