Daily news

8 January 2007

Invention: Cellphone sunscreen

Cellphone sunscreen

Weather forecasters can only provide a rough estimate of the following day’s UV index while personal UV measuring devices can be equally inaccurate.

Philips is now patenting a way for cellphones to provide their owners with precise, real-time advice on safe exposure times tailored to their specific location.

Under the plan, a cellphone network will use its own UV sensors, dotted around the country, or those belonging to a government meteorological department. As the network always knows roughly where each phone is, from the network “cell” in which it is operating, it can then send each user an up-to-the minute UV index rating based on their current location.

This rating could be sent as a text or voice message, either on-demand or by subscription. And, if the user then enters the factor of the suntan lotion, their phone will display the recommended safe exposure time. A handset could even act as an alarm, beeping a warning when this exposure time is up. Roll on, summer!


Read the full cellphone sunscreen patent application.

Oil slick drum

A Californian inventor working for the US government’s Mineral Management Service has developed a drum that rolls over the surface of an oil slick, picking up pollution as it goes. The secret is in the way the surface of the drum is patterned with tiny grooves.

Concentric ring grooves are cut in the surface of the smooth aluminium surface and the drum rotated as it is towed across oil-covered water. Surface tension causes the oil to stick into the grooves with light, freshly-spilled oil collecting deep in each grooves and older, stickier oil gathering in the wider mouth of each furrow. A fixed scraper that matches the grooved shape of the surface exactly then removes virtually 100% of the trapped oil.

Tests carried out at the Ohmsett National Oil Spill Response Test Facility in New Jersey, US, show that using a grooved drum is at least twice as efficient compared to a flat surface. They also suggest that the ideal groove has walls set at an angle of 30° and is 2 to 3 centimetres deep. These tests furthermore show that the drum should travel at a speed of 40 revolutions per minute – any faster emulsifies the oil.

Read the full Oil slick drum patent application.

Light controller

Sony has been hit hard by PS3 delays and the runaway success of Nintendo’s Wii games system, which uses a Bluetooth radio link to connect a hand-held controller to the console. Now Sony is patenting designs that would make a PlayStation controller work just like a Wii, based on a much simpler principle.

The patent application boils down a simple, yet catchy, idea. In addition to all the usual buttons found on a hand controller are four LEDs on its front, arranged in a rectangle of bright spots. A webcam sitting on top of a TV screen then watches the way the rectangle changes shape as the player tilts and twists their “photonically detectable” controller up and down, and from side to side. Software in the console translates these shape changes into motion commands with a game.

The LED light is also modulated, like the infra red from a TV remote control, to send different button commands to the console. And the modulation is uniquely coded so that several people with different controllers can play in the same game together.

Read the full light controller patent application.

