Increasingly affordable and accessible, 3D printing is enabling the creation of everything from simple straw holders to prosthetic hands for people with disabilities, whose quality of life can be greatly enhanced with a little technology. These 12 creations help the blind visualize memories, allow kids with muscular dystrophy to play video games, and even restore brain function after devastating accidents.

Touchable Memories: Tactile Photos for the Visually Impaired

An affordable home printer called the Buccaneer can be used in conjunction with ‘Touchable Memories,’ a software by Pirate3D, to turn photographs into tactile 3D-printed objects. The project allows people who have lost their eyesight or been blind from birth to visualize the memories that were photographed, whether in relief form or as freestanding sculptures.

‘Magic Arms’ Exoskeleton

A little girl suffering from a rare congenital disorder that limits her ability to use her arms now has a ‘magic’ exoskeleton that aids her movement and enables her to lift objects. A team at the duPont Hospital for Children created a wearable 3D-printed plastic jacket that’s lightweight enough to be used by small children. Heavier, larger versions of the robotic exoskeleton are hard to use and expensive to replace as the children grow, but using 3D printing means it’s as simple as adjusting the dimensions on the 3D model and printing a new one.

Q-Ramp Modular Access System for Wheelchairs

Most cities aren’t exactly built with wheelchairs in mind, but for a few ramps here and there. Raul Krauthausen of Berlin, who uses a wheelchair full-time due to a genetic bone disorder, had trouble getting around Berlin on his own. Having purchased a 3D printer just for fun, he started envisioning how he could use it to improve his quality of life. The result is a portable, printable wheelchair ramp that’s easy to carry on the back of his chair. Krauthausen put the design up on Thingiverse so others can print their own.

Custom Game Controllers

Conditions like muscular dystrophy can weaken the muscles to the point that even using a game controller is too tiring. Tinkerer Caleb Kraft noted that the special controllers marketed to the disabled were grossly overpriced, and decided to come up with his own solution. His 3D-printed creation is not exactly robust enough for most of today’s more complex games, but it allows a child to play Minecraft.

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Two hundred square feet may sound absurdly small, even by New York standards, but what if you could make it feel three times larger with hidden furniture and other amenities that roll out and unfold at a wave of your hand? A team at MIT’s architectural program has come up with a smart solution for micro apartments that makes it quick and easy to reconfigure the entire space with virtually zero effort.

CityHome consists of a transformable wall system that condenses all the main functions of a bedroom, living room, dining room, kitchen and bathroom into a tiny space without sacrificing most of what you’d have in a larger apartment. You can still cook for and seat a group of six for dinner, sleep in a comfortable full-sized bed and enjoy a movie in a spacious living room.

You tell the room what you need through a combination of hand gestures, voice control and touch elements, with internal motors silently launching the furniture you require at your command. One gesture draws the bed out of the wall, while another calls forth a work desk that doubles as a dining table.

A low-cost, plug-and-play solution, the possibilities for average people are the real key to the design. “This would work well in the 30 to 40 Innovation Cities where young people are priced out of the market,” lead researcher Kent Larson explains. “At $1,000 per square foot in Boston, the extra cost of technology is trivial compared to space saved for a furnished apartment.”

Wave your hand to adjust the ambiance of the room via lighting and window blinds, and move the entire unit against a wall or into the middle of the room at the touch of a button depending on whether you want to divide up the space or gain use of the entire room.

For now, CityHome is just a conceptual proptotype, but MIT envisions turning it into an actual product, possibly through crowdfunding or a layering of individual examples leading up to mass production.

Touch input has already almost entirely eliminated the need for physical keyboards and mouses, but soon, it won’t even be confined to a screen. Researchers are developing systems that can register and translate hand movements in thin air, or even replicate the sensation of three-dimensional objects and textures. Here are 13 intriguing touch tech inventions.

Touch Tech for Artificial Limbs

Prosthetics allow amputees to do all sorts of things they wouldn’t be able to do otherwise, but they’ve been missing one very crucial thing: the sense of touch. That could change, with experiments at the University of Chicago developing a moldable plastic material containing piezoelectric powder that can sense pressure at any point on a surface by turning it into an electric voltage. They were able to translate those electric signals to the human nervous system, so they can be interpreted by the brain as touch. The next challenge is adapting this touchscreen technology, borrowed from smartphones, to the soft and curved surfaces of prostheses.

Feeling Objects in Thin Air

Imagine being able to touch something that’s not really there. A new kind of touch technology being developed by the research wing of the Walt Disney Company allows users to feel textures on a touchscreen as well as touching holographic objects projected into space, as through an Xbox Kinect. Called ‘haptic technology,’ it works by blowing small rings of air at a user to simulate texture, movement or collisions with objects. It could potentially revolutionize the gaming experience, and also be useful in medical settings.

Board Transforms Touch into Sound

Developed by London-based studio Bare Conductive, the ‘Touch Board’ translates touch into sound. Any conductive material can be turned into an interface; in this case, electrically conductive paint is applied to a surface. You connect the touch board to a speaker, and plug it into a micro USB cable. Interaction with any of the electrodes cause an MP3 player to play an associated track from the card.

Transmit Audio Messages With the Touch of a Finger

What if you could hear through someone’s finger? ‘Ishen-Den-Shin’ technology (named for a Japanese phrase meaning “what the mind thinks, the heart translates”) uses the human body as a sound transmitter. A handheld microphone connected to a computer records as soon as it hears a person speak and transforms it into a sound loop which is converted into a harmless high-voltage inaudible signal transmitted to the microphone’s conductive casing. That means whoever holds the microphone becomes a human sound emitter. If they touch an object or another person’s ear with their finger, the small sound vibrations can be heard.

Augmented Reality Touchscreen Interface

An augmented reality touchscreen interface from Fujitsu Laboratories can turn any surface into a touch screen using off-the-shelf cameras an projectors. Users can trace their fingers across a document on a table, copy it as digital data, and display it virtually. The camera measures irregularly shaped objects on a table, and automatically adjusts the coordinate systems that make it possible to match finger movements and touching of objects to the digital display projected onto physical objects.

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You can’t really get a feel for a Rembrandt painting by looking at a flat print – there’s just so much detail missing in the texture of the brushstrokes, the physicality of the paint. But just like it’s revolutionizing so many other areas from medical devices to full-scale architecture, 3D printing is making it possible to experience some of the world’s most valuable classic paintings as they were meant to be seen.

Dutch researcher Tim Zaman has built a photographic scanning system that uses two cameras and fringe projection to scan the surface of a painting. An exact reproduction is then generated with a high-resolution 3D printer. That replica maintains all of the surface texture of the original, revealing paint build-up and every little brushstroke.

In fact, extreme close-ups captured with the digital scans show the paint from angles in which it’s never been seen before, even on iconic images like Van Gogh’s sunflowers. “Paintings are not unlike sculptures, paint as a material has a huge impact on the way a painting looks. By illuminating a painting with light, it automatically gives highlights and shadows that form the way we see it,” says Zaman.

The 3-D imaging method used to create the prints yields an enormous depth map while also capturing exact color. The resulting print has a resolution of 50 microns, easily fooling the average observer into thinking it’s an original. Look closely and you’ll see the tiny drops, painted mechanically with the nozzle. “We noticed that things like glossiness and transparency that are in each painting are very distinguishing in the original, and we are not yet able to reproduce.”

One hundred years from now, will we be living on other planets, teleporting from place to place, communicating to each other telepathically, or even becoming immortal by shifting human consciousness from our biological bodies to artificial ones? These predictions for the distant future seem outrageous and virtually impossible to achieve, yet steps are being made toward them at this very moment. The seeds of the potential future wonders of the world have already been planted, and in many cases, it’s not a question of whether they’ll happen, so much as when.

Teleportation

(images via: physical review focus, ail)

As unlikely as this may sound, teleportation isn’t entirely sci-fi. Physicists have already succeeded in teleporting photons – but right now, it’s not so much about teleporting matter from one location to the next, as it is information. Quantum teleportation is a complex topic involving concepts like ‘entanglement’, the connection that links the quantum states of two particles no matter who far apart they are. Teleporting a single particle is one thing, but what about human beings, Star Trek style?

As PBS’ The Nature of Reality column explains, “Remember that we wouldn’t be moving Kirk’s molecules from one place to another. He would interact with a suite of previously-entangled particles, and when we read the quantum state we would destroy the complex quantum information that makes his molecules into him while instantly providing the information required to recreate his quantum state from other atoms in a distant location. Quantum mechanics doesn’t forbid it. The rules of quantum mechanics still apply whether you’re talking about a system of two particles or human being made of 1027 atoms.”

The verdict? Teleportation is certainly possible, and scientists may soon begin working on attempts to teleport living matter, like viruses. Physicist Michio Kaku believes that the transport of a molecule will happen within the next ten years, followed by DNA, but that teleporting an entire human is probably still centuries away.

Artificial Intelligence Surpassing Human Intelligence

(images via: mashable)

How long do we have until human-level artificial intelligence is achieved? H+ Magazine surveyed experts, asking when they estimated AI would meet four major milestones: carrying on a conversation well enough to pass as a human, solving problems as well as a third grade student, performing Nobel-quality scientific work, and finally, surpassing human intelligence altogether. Robots can already see, hear, learn, solve problems and respond to questions, and some are even getting senses of smell and taste. The Eccerobot is creepily human in its movements thanks to artificial muscles and bones.

The general consensus was that we’ll have AI at the human level or beyond will happen by the middle of the century, or maybe even sooner – but may not surpass humans for a hundred years, if ever.

Space Settlements

(images via: space.com)

Applications are now open for a one-way ticket to a private space settlement on Mars. The Mars One project intends to land supplies on the red planet in 2016, and get settlers there by 2023; about 78,000 people have already applied. The company responsible, Lansdorp, insists that the technology needed to achieve this lofty goal already exists. And according to a group of astronauts, researchers and space flight firms who met in May 2013 for the first Human to Mars Summit, establishing a permanent, sustainable outpost on another planet might be a matter of saving the human species.

Supplies would be dropped off first, and then a crew of either humans or robots would construct the base. There are a lot of obstacles, not the least of which is the question of transportation between Earth and Mars, and whether Mars inhabitants could maintain their own food source, rather than relying on interplanetary deliveries.

Will it really happen? it’s hard to say. Private companies with an interest in space colonization are working with some of the same companies that have completed commercial cargo missions to the International Space Station. Lansdorp intends to make the technology developed during its mission available for sale, to fund Mars One and help speed up progress for additional colonies.

Body-Embeddable Electronics

(images via: io9, sync-blog)

In the future, it might be possible to hack other human beings thanks to all manner of body-embeddable gadgets. Many futurists and technology experts believe the trend for future devices isn’t to go smaller, but rather to integrate them into ourselves. Scientists have already developed tiny chips that can translate tiny bodily movements into energy to power gadgets, as well as devices that can be implanted into our bodies. Everyday electronics can already be implanted into human tissue, and medical devices are paving the way for recreational. Ready or not, the bionic human is on the horizon.

Researchers have also developed the first electronic sensor that can be printed directly onto human skin, creating a sort of ‘smart tattoo’ that could theoretically enable people to communicate with each other and our environments with thought commands. The devices, which are thinner than the diameter of a human hair, can detect electrical signals linked with brain waves, communicate wirelessly and receive energy.

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