15/10/2011 Click

year. Now on BBC News it is time Welcome to Click, I'm Spencer Kelly.

This week Willie at... -- we'll be looking at.... Will you please make

up your mind on what you want to This week on Click win in Japan

uncovering some of the weird and wonderful prototypes that may or

may not make it to our world -- we're in. Roads? Where we're going

we don't need roads. We are looking at how well a futuristic

transporter could change the way we travel. All that plus the latest

Tech News and a look at how to put virtually anything anywhere. We

have a app that let's your friends change how you see the world in

Webscape. Welcome to Click, I'm Spencer Kelly.

There's no doubt that Japan has had a tough year. First the earthquake

and tsunami and then the radiation leak and more recently the massive

typhoon that has hit its coastline. As well as the human cost these

disasters have also affected the manufacturing and technology

industries. On top of that, Sony's servers have been hacked and

Nintendo has been struggling to make anyone care at art its new 3D

hand-held gaming console. -- care about. But in the background

research into new technology has been ongoing. Dan Simmons reports

from Japan's massive are Andy technology Expo on some of the

stuff that is being planned for the coming years. The tech world's

autumn is spiced each year with a looking glass directed towards the

future course see attack. They come here not to see what's hot to hit

the shops as they do in Vegas or Berlin. Nor grandstand a new mobile

as they might in Barcelona or Hong Kong. As the year draws to a close,

Tokyo offers inspiration. They are the suits with the cash. To turn a

prototype into a product. Many of the ideas here may never see the

light of day. Which is why we've come to see what's been dreamt up,

before it's commonplace - or forgotten. Pretty interesting idea,

so something new, never felt a touch screen like that before.

concept should hit the button. Because the people pressing this

touch screen, are feeling something very different from anything we've

experienced. I felt as if I was touching a real

button. One reason some of us don't like

touch screens is that we can't feel the buttons. But here unlike

conventional phones where a metal rod delivers vibration though out

the handset - Kyocera has added a thin glass cover that sits above

the screen to deliver more precise feedback straight to your

fingertips. At each end lies a ceramic

piezoelectric strip that generates a charge from the pressure applied

to it creating different vibes across the screen.

And because the screen itself is flexible, the level of pressure can

be measured. So you can click a button once then

push harder for a second, third, fourth, or fifth deeper click

When it's switched to a second level click, I could feel it even

more, it's very impressive. Imagine selecting a lower case

letter and then pressing just a little harder, clicking to an upper

case option. Japanese firm, Alps has gone one step further with its

dual-touch system. So in this game, the purple circle can be moved from

side to side by pressing harder at Pulse where Murata were showing off

a system that doesn't require touch at all -- elsewhere. We already

have some pretty smart sensors in our smart phones. They detect

things like light or proximity to the face which is how the

Smartphone knows how to turn the screen off to save energy when you

are taking a call, but what Murata are working on is something that

will detect motion so that you could move between options without

actually touching your touch screen. These are the sensors no longer

reliant on cameras to detect movement. One of these could be put

behind a screen here for example or in a tablet for example in a mobile

phone. We can now move in or around and then zoom around a particular

photo. We then cooking hands wet and in the winter wear gloves

unfortunately doesn't detect on touch screen so that this interface

uses it is easy to work the sensors offers us a new way interact and

More motion sensing - this time using a camera. Israeli outfit

Primesense helped develop the Microsoft Kinect system that uses

gestures to control games. Here's their PC version - running Forum8's

software, that "sees" much smaller realistic movements - so here the

driver can use his feet as he might in a real car to accelerate or

brake. In the real world the future of

cars might well be electric IF we didn't need to spend so much time

charging them up. NEC showed off a superfast charger

cutting the time for an 80% charge from 4 hours to 30 minutes.

Advances for handsets too - NTT DOCOMO's prototype smartphone

'sleeve' juices up a mobile in just 10 minutes.

Time for lunch.. And a little help from the SOFTWARE side of things IF

you're trying to stay in shape. Increasingly we're turning to our

apps to help count the calories but what if you're in a restaurant - no

barcode or brand name will help you know what you're eating. This app

attempt to use photo recognition to tell you the nutritional info by

And if you're serious about losing weight you'll want one of these. It

measures the tiny amounts of acetone in your breath. In case

you're not sure it tells you whether you're hungry and perhaps

more usefully when you're body will burn the most fat should you chose

to exercise, so you can schedule your workouts and your TV dinners..

Here's a different way to control your TV set through what appears to

be just a piece of plastic, when we twist it we can go up a channel and

when we twist it the other way back down a channel. Not just twisting

but bending as well you can bring the volume up or down accordingly

now what inside here is two pieces of thin polyester coated with

electrons which give a different signal depending on whether you're

twisting or bending this device and that signal is then sent to the

control centre on the side of the panel which is powered by a battery

now you don't need to plug it in or change the battery because that's

powered by these die sensitised solar panels; the device then sends

a radio signal to the TV set which tells it to go up down or if you

fancy off. Again, it's easy to see how this

might add an extra twist to gaming - although I couldn't help

wondering how long it would last in the hands of a 5-year old.

We couldn't leave Japan without a nod to the tech it's most famous

for - the robots. Often very impressive but, beyond amusement,

difficult to imagine their One idea at the show was this self

correcting walking assistant using similar balancing technology mixing

gyroscopes and motor feedback as these cycling robots.

Where these mainly Japanese technologies go from here will

depend largely on whether they're picked up by big manufacturers. But

if, in the future, a gadget seems just a bit bizarre. It may well

have first appeared here, as a prototype one autumn at Tokyo's

tech show. Dan Simmons on the weird, wacky and

sometimes actually quite useful research on show in Tokyo this

month. Next up, a look at this week's Tech News.

A disastrous week for RIM with BlackBerry outages spreading across

the world affecting millions of computers. The failure of back-up

systems to kick in after databases were corrupted could cause

irreparable damage to Rennes that has built its erect quotation on

solid. It has shed half a million users in America and analysts say

more could switch to an iPhone and Android smart phones that do not

rely on a centralised system. Apple has launched its new operating

system that offers messaging, its answer to BlackBerry Messam does.

Germany's justice minister has called for an investigation after

hackers expose a programme that has been spying on citizens. Berlin's

Chaos Computer Club said Federal trojan can activate wed cans or

computer market aims to track activities in a person's home or

monitor Skype calls. The area has admitted using the software since

2009 but says it was not illegal. You might not have the money to go

into space but your science experiment might make it to the ISS,

if you're aged 14-18. The YouTube Spacelab competition encourages

people to send in a short video detailing their idea.

Finally you don't usually see dot- matrix printers any more, much less

plucked into a computer on a tricycle but Nicholas Hanna put

these together as he rode his modified trike through Beijing as

part of its design week. It is a modern twist on an old Chinese

tradition of writing calligraphy in water.

I lived on a crowded island. My morning commute to work is a

crowded one. My personal space is 0. But at Heathrow they are offering a

new system, automated driver Les iPods that offer public-transport

with a personal touch. We could only send Peter Price along for the

There's something strange taking to the sky over Heathrow. Four seater

pods are moving overhead, whisking travellers from car park to check-

in in record time. Travelling at 40 kilometres an hour, these battery

powered vehicles use lasers to stay on track. We're used to seeing

monorails at airports, but this system's different. The pods are

automated, driverless and operate on-demand - waiting at the station

until they're needed rather than running around empty. This system's

a hybrid of public and private transport. It's like public

transport because like a bus or a monorail, you just hop on the next

one. It's also a bit like private taxi because you tell it exactly

where you'd like to go and the pod, which is individual to you, takes

you there, from A to B without stopping anywhere in between. So,

business parking station A please. Here we go. Here at Heathrow, the

pods are replacing buses shaving about 10 minutes from the average

journey time. That's time saved thanks to each pod being controlled

by a central computer. Its software is on a mission get the pod to its

destination in the fastest time. Two operators monitor the comings

and goings via CCTV, but don't be fooled, it's computer rather than

human that's doing the thinking. Computer-controlled transport like

this is known as personal rapid transit or PRT and it's ambition

goes beyond airports. Well, this was designed to work in cities. Not

the very big cities like London, which is a very unique place, but

also designed for somewhere like Bristol. I just thought that

transport's not very well done. I thought if it was thought through

properly you could find a better way to do it. The idea's been

around for some time but in the past people have been carried away

with trying to do automation, you know the technical things. We've

always tried to provide a service to people which would actually do

what the passenger wanted. It all looks very futuristic, but the idea

of PRT has been around for decades, and it's development has been

anything but fast. It was conceived in the 50s and one of the first

trials took place in Paris. Leaving gaps between trains is inefficient

says the science, so this project aims to run pods as close together

as possible, maximising capacity of the track. The carriages of this

little train are connected by light waves. Each carriage carries a

laser which bounces its beam off the carriage in front. It measures

how long it takes the light to travel and calculates how far away

the next carriage is. Slightly too close for comfort perhaps. While

the Parisian system was abandoned, PRT has once again caught the

imagination with several systems currently in development around the

world. This is the UK's most high profile transport project: High

Speed 2. Brand new tracks across these fields will link London and

Birmingham. It's still many years away, but the trains look strangely

conventional. One man who specialises in transport design,

thinks future high speed travel could benefit from some blue-sky

thinking. I think they're being built on an old system. By their

very nature they have to be built going past the outside cities

because it's so expensive to go through them. So that's one problem,

because you then have to get from the city to the high speed train. I

also think that stations haven't changed at all for about 100 years,

they're still a piece of concrete and you get wet when it rains.

is Paul's vision of the future, doing away with platforms and

stations all together. Slow moving trams pick up passengers in the

city centre before speeding up to pull alongside passing express

trains. Then it's a gentle stroll across to continue your journey.

The doors close, the tram slows and returns to plying the city streets.

The idea is that you can seamlessly move from one destination to

another rather than stopping and starting. Because I think the

railway system at the moment is a bit like pre-internet, the

telephone, where you had to press a button and then someone connected

it through wires. Rather than being able to choose where you want to go

and do it right then. So the idea that you can just jump on a tram

and go anywhere in the continent is just a better way of looking at it.

It's a glossy vision, but some experts are cautious. All transport

infrastructure, but particularly railways, is very expensive to

construct. To make it viable you need high densities of traffic, big

capacity. Railways are also very demanding technically. If anything

goes wrong, the railway stops. So have to be absolutely sure that you

can make the equipment work reliably and you get a lot of

people down the line of route. It is difficult to do and if you use

untried, untested technology, the risk is that it you will end up

with something that simply doesn't work. I don't believe the railway

in the form of a tram or the steel rail will ever become anywhere near

replacing the road. The road is just so much more flexible, it's

cheaper for most people most of the time. In the UK only 8% of

passenger miles are by rail. Almost all the movement, and this is true

of all developed countries, almost all the movement is by road.

Heathrow's at least, these pods are a futuristic way of easing

congestion on the roads, by replacing buses they're smoothing

the businessman's trip to the airport. But although the airport's

expansion plans are ambitious, rapid transit as a mainstream

method of transport could still be decades down the line. Now, you may

have noticed that Kate Russell does not get out of the Webscape studio

that often. That may have led you to wonder if she gets a bit lonely.

Apparently she does not, she has lots of friends around to her place.

Apparently that includes me. The thing is, I have never been around

to her place. This is Webscape. How could I get lonely when I have a

life-sized Spencer standing in my living room? Aurasma Lite lets you

place images in the world around you without the need for a marker.

Snap a picture as the location, and a graphic element from your camera,

the next time anyone use the same location through the application,

up pops your contribution to the world around you. This would be a

great way to create a high technology treasure tried, laying

clues around your garden or over you are holding a... You can play

on your iPhone. Make sure you do not play with anyone with a

different smart phone. It could end up with a fight. The application is

incredibly easy to use. Although the website says it only works with

an iPhone 4, I had no issues on my 3G. If that is too high technology

for you, why not pass some time reading ancient papyrus.

Ancientlives.org is a scientific project where participants are

asked to help translate fragments from ancient text that belonged to

the Egyptian exploration Society. This is another Zooniverse project.

They have added quite a few new projects to their list since I last

visited the website. If you want a really good excuse to waste time on

the internet, this is probably the right website to bookmark. I am

doing some very important scientific research. If you must

know. Like all Zooniverse projects, it is well designed. It's still

feels like you are contributing to a series scientific project. Of

course, you are. If you have a story you want to tell, why not try

self-publishing? Movellas .com is the easy to use electronic book

writer. You cannot charge for books written through Movellas .com, but

it is about distributing your words to anyone who is interested in

reading them. Lot in with Facebook to harness your personal crowd and

then tap away. You can invite a couple of collaborators if you need

someone to proof-read your work. When you're finished, click publish

instantly. Then wait with trepidation to see what the world

makes of your work. London is famous for its underground trains.

What many visitors to the city do not realise is that the bus service

could be your best option for many journeys. The largest problem is

that the timetables can be confusing. You never quite know

when a bus is due. Not any more with Bus Checker for iPhone, iPad

and iPod. You can check when it is due and where it is going based on

actual information from Transport for London, not the timetable. You

complain your journey and I am not surprised this application has led

to the top of the charts since it was launched. It cost �1.99 to up

load. A great investment for anyone planning to visit the city for the

Olympics next year. Apple has opened the doors of the iCloud

website, customers can sign up for the service that backs your data up

to the cloud. You cannot actually use it until you have are graded to

the latest operating system, when that update became available, the

service groaned under the weight of demand, seem incapable of coping

with the extra traffic. Let's hope the iCloud service is a little more

robust. Zynga has announced Project Z, a platform for playing social

games and chatting with friends, powered by Facebook connect. It is

not quite live yet but you can go to ztag.zynga.com and snag your

favourite user name ahead of the masses. See you online.

Kate Russell. If he missed any of Kate's things they are up at our

website. There is a link to the entire programme on BBC iPlayer.