Gadgets ! What's Next

Check out this new key fob from Delphi, using E Ink and destined for a futuristic auto near you. Using the same E Ink tech in the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader but on a smaller scale, it sips power, digitally painting images on a screen without continuously using energy. This key fob is an example of what can be done with E Ink’s next-generation segmented display cells (SDC), thinner and flexible enough to bend around curved devices.

This groundbreaking gadget will wirelessly communicate with your car, telling you from a distance if you need gas, giving you remote starting capabilities, letting you adjust your car's climate control, and even helping you find that vehicle in a vast, crowded parking lot. Its E Ink allows this handy little bauble to go a long time without a battery charge. Best of all, the company says mass production will keep the price low. Whoa.

This isn't a sandbox with a marble in it. Sysyphus V, a kinetic sculpture by Bruce Shapiro looks like a Zen Garden. But instead of a buddhist monk carefully raking gravel, it's an autonomous steel sphere carefully crawling over and over, making polar geometric shapes that can best be described as iterative lilies or stars. A magnet on an arm on a two axis plotter sites underneath the half-ton set up, and Sisyphus is making its first appearance here, at Maker Faire 2008.

Super thin display panels are rapidly approaching the point at which they will cease to exist if you look at them sideways, as this minuscule 0.02mm (that’s 0.0079 inch) 320 x 220 OLED panel developed by Sony demonstrates.