Remember when that computer asked Matthew Broderick “Do you want to play a game?” in it’s cold electronic tones? Yeah, this is like that, minus Broderick. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers holds a symposium every year on Computational Intelligence and Games. Sounds innocent enough. But part of the symposium is a kind of “Turing Test” challenge, in which contestants program an AI to play a videogame. The objective is to trick a panel of human judges into thinking the AI is a human player.

This year’s videogame is DEFCON, the nuclear war strategy game from Introversion. Good idea? Probably not. I liked this better when it was just a stupid 80s movie.

Presumably. I’ve never actually seen an Astronaut drink beer in space. But if they did, it would be in a pouch. It seems like a strange idea, but supposedly it tastes a whole lot better. No aluminum can taste for one. The CarboPouch by the Beverage Pouch Group is designed for those fancy artisan beermakers.

The idea is that they would fill you up a six pack to go on-site. This way smaller brewers don’t need to buy any cumbersome beer-filling assembly line machines to sell their buzz-juice.

England is a very innovative country. They’ve created such things as Policemen in tall hats, Palace guards that don’t flinch, Time-traveling Police boxes and now they are powering their supermarkets with their own parking lot.

At least one supermarket in England is setting up a high-tech parking lot that will generate energy simply from cars driving back and forth on it. The energy created will power things like cash registers and lights inside the store. It may even “power your savings”… At least, that’s how I would pitch it to customers.

The system will work using a series of plates that, when driven over, will create a rocking motion underground which turns generators. As more cars drive over it, more energy is created. About 30kw of energy an hour. It’s a smart idea. Hopefully …

Getting video on a small screen is not a huge thing and it’s not new. But how about video on a screen that’s insanely small? Kopin has managed to pack a liquid-crystal display (LCD) with VGA resolution (600 x 480 pixels) onto a screen that measures just over a quarter-inch diagonally. To put that into perspective, that means that the individual color dots are 2.9 x 8.7 micrometers. A typical piece for paper is about 100 micrometers thick.

So who is going to use such a tiny screen? Who is this screen for? Kopin thinks the new screen is a stepping stone on the way to creating a screen with 2,048 x 2,048-pixel resolution the size of a postage stamp. Great HD quality…If you are an ant.

When you really start to think about the sheer number of gadgets in the world, it’s amazing they aren’t littering the streets and roadways like cold tech corpses. After all, we keep buying them and them throwing them out to buy another.

But we aren’t here to preach. We’re just impressed by this beautiful reminder of our consumerism in the form of sculpted cardboard gadgets. These are works of art really. They are from British designer Kyle Bean and they are really nicely detailed.

There’s a new trash can in Philadelphia. Several in fact. These brand new solar trash cans are being installed on philly sidewalks and are entirely powered by the sun. The city hopes that you will use them. They can accept close to eight times as much waste as a regular trash can. They go by the name of Big Bellys and they will save the city close to 12 million dollars over 10 years!

The first Big Belly was recently inaugurated by the Mayor at 15th Street and JFK boulevard at JFK Plaza. Over 500 of the units will be installed by July. 210 of those will also feature an additional recycling bin component. Since the compacting bins only have to be emptied 5 times per week (Regular bins which must be emptied 19 times), the city will see huge savings on staff time, fuel costs, and greenhouse gas emissions.

Skyscrapers are literally everywhere. Which means that you have to think about safety in times of danger. During the 9/11 attacks people were jumping out of the World Trade Center and falling to their death. What if they had had a way to at least try to get down safely?

Kevin Stone has designed the Rescue Reel, a device to help people vacate skyscrapers in during just such emergencies. Much like a fishing reel, the device is a simple harness to lower people to the ground, letting the individual plan his own escape. The user would open a small container, which is hooked to an anchor, then the user can slip into a one size fits all harness and use automatically controlled centrifugal braking to manage their descent.

Pixel Qi is showing off its latest line of displays that are more energy efficient compared to your standard LCD display. The screens will feature two modes: A backlit mode with full color saturation and an ePaper mode that will not use the backlight in order to use less energy.

The ePaper mode also makes the display easier to read when in bright sunlight compared to most displays. The image above is of a Pixel Qi display modified to for an Acer Aspire One in ePaper mode, chillin in the sun.

iVisit is working on an application called SeeScan that can help blind people identify everyday objects around them, which we take for granted. The program uses your cameraphone to detect objects using image recognition software, while reading aloud what the phone identifies it as.

There are many practical applications, like telling the difference between denominations of paper money for example. It could certainly make life easier for the blind and may help them speed up some of their activities during their typical day.

RunPee is a useful tool if you truly love movies and have an overactive bladder. RunPee is a movie review site that doesn’t care if the movie sucks or not. It’s not about praising great works of art or panning celluloid crap.

RunPee is all about telling you which scenes are the best parts for you to leave for a few minutes, so you can go pee. Get it? RunPee? From what I hear about Terminator Salvation, you can just get up any old time and you won’t miss much. Feel free to be constipated and read a newspaper or three.

Edmund Dohnert has always had some uncertainty about whether he’s an artist or an engineer. We don’t really care. His works are just plain cool. And yes, they are both art and engineering. Just plain fun to look at and watch.

For instance, the Victor Rat Trap No. 1 pictured above has a knight repeatedly attacking an evil jester in order to save He-Man’s life. The only power source is a simple rat trap on a wooden base. The rat trap’s spring can be pulled all the way back and held, thanks to a cord and roller arrangement attached to a crank shaft.

Despite a weak economy, Flat-panel sets are selling like hot-cakes. And Vizio is in first place among LCD TV manufacturers. The folks at DisplaySearch have some interesting new numbers on the flat-panel TV market, which has surged over the last year.

About 7.2 million flat-panel sets were sold in the first quarter of 2009, which is a 23% increase over the numbers from the first quarter of 2008. The numbers show Vizio’s market share at an impressive 18.9%. Higher-end brands like Sony and Samsung didn’t fare as well during the economic downturn and they saw their sales decrease compared to the same period last year.

Electrical engineering researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a flexible, stretchable OLED that acts like rubber. It doesn’t tear or break when stretched. They produce the material by spraying a layer of carbon nanotubes with a fluoro-rubber compound, which creates a rubbery, conducive material.

At 10-centimeters square, the current monochrome display prototype has a resolution of just 256 pixels and can apparently be folded about 1,000 times with out degrading, falling apart, or tearing. In short, our future may be filled with rubber bouncing balls that have OLED screens.

Giant snakes powering homes? What is this, the Flintstones? Are we to play our non-vinyl granite records with bird beaks? Man, I hope not. But as it turns out, reptiles are a good source of energy. Not real ones. Fake snakes. A company called Checkmate is using these creatures to help provide cheap and clean power for up to 50,000 UK homes within five years.

The company is testing 200m long rubber devices which would be tethered to the sea bed and are designed to swim against the current and produce up to 1MW of power each. The waves cause a bulge to ripple down the length of the snakes and power turbines at the tails.

This awesome mind-controlled wheelchair prototype has been developed at the University of Zaragoza in Spain. As you might expect, it uses an EEG cap worn on the head, a P300 neurophysiological protocol and automated navigation.

It works like this. The user sees a visualization of his surroundings on the screen in front of him and then concentrates on the space where he wants to navigate to. The wheelchair obeys. The mind and the wheelchair are doing all of the work. Mostly the wheelchair. Check out the video below.