Filed under: Transportation

Oh MIT, do the wonders that come from your halls ever cease? Yet another remarkable development is emerging from the fabled institution, and this time it’s an autonomous wheelchair that can remember important places in a given building (read: the hospital ward, your house, the local arcade, etc.) and then take you there on command. In other words, the voice recognizing chair could understand phrases of direction, such as “head to the kitchen,” and it would take on the burden of navigating the halls while letting the rider chill. The researchers are implementing a system that can learn and adapt to the individual user, and in the future, they’d like to add in a collision-avoidance system and mechanical arms to help patients lift and move objects. Say, can regular joes / janes buy these? We’re totally feeling this over the Segway.

[Via medGadget]

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Filed under: Portable Audio

There’s nothing we love more (okay, that’s an exaggeration — but barely) than blatant overkill, and this here prototype from PS Audio fits that description to a T. Granted, we fully expect audiophiles to blindly stand up for this thing — even though no one outside of the company has a clue just how incredible (or not) the innards actually are — but here’s the skinny. This not-yet-named CD transport reportedly transfers audio tracks from standard CDs onto internal memory for as long as the disc remains inside; apparently, this design “nullifies any jitter” and “other possible audio degradation.” Theoretically sound as this logic may be, we can think of quite a few other ways to listen to music stored on flash memory (or similar) without spending $2,000. Who knows though, maybe that wood is incomprehensibly exotic.

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