Where’s my Personal Air Vehicle?

Flying car implies it will replace anybodys car, said Carl Dietrich, chief executive officer of Terrafugia, which is developing the Transition, a personal aircraft designed to travel on skyways and highways. Flying car brings out a lot of connotations and The Jetsons.

A quick look at what it takes to control normal automobile traffic in our cities and states gives it away. We won’t be getting flying cars anytime soon, but I still just enjoy the fact that Paul Moller does what he does. I was a bit surprised to hear he’s 70 years old and I assume that means at some time in the next few decades we’ll lose updates on this story.

Fortunately for all of us, the X-prize and Google’s recent move to back the endeavor promise to bring us loads of fun for years.

  • Google offers $30 million for the first commercial lunar rover
  • Rover must safely land on the moon and beam back images and video to Earth
  • Google partnered with the X Prize Foundation for the moon challenge
  • Ansari X Prize contest led to the first manned private spaceflight in 2004

Star Trek Consoles and the Multi-Touch Display

This is an amazing piece of work and reminds me of the mult-function terminals in Star Trek NG and a bit like the Minority Report user interface (except no gloves). Information week describes the device.

At the O’Reilly Emerging Technology (ETech) conference in San Diego Tuesday, Jeff Han, a consulting research scientist at New York University’s Department of Computer Science, demonstrated a multi-touch system that he insists “will change the way people interact with computers.”

(update 2015 – replace video)