osaka

The city of Osaka in Japan recently took the wraps off the largest shopping mall in the country, and it features a nifty fountain that can display the time as well as artwork with drops of water.

The attraction, located in the South Gate Building of the new Osaka Station City complex, is a large rectangular water display created by local firm Koei Industry.

As the vid below shows, Koei's Space Printer fountain shows a digital-style time readout, spitting out numbers three times, as well as scrolling patterns including floral motifs in 2D. It can also display text.

The "clock" started ticking in March, but the complex, home to two department stores, only opened last week.

The printer emits illuminated water droplets in carefully controlled patterns to reproduce images that are stored on a PC. Founded in 1987, Koei has produced entertainment fountains and landscape displays in various cities in Japan.

Ancient civilizations produced many water clocks such as the clepsydra, which were devices that measured time by the passage of water. I wonder if those inventors of yore would have reacted to the Space Printer like the kids in this video. … Read more

Japanese engineers are developing robots that look like kids to study human cognition. They may be creepy enough to be understudies for Chucky, but these humanoids may pave the way for better robot-human interaction.

The researchers led by Osaka University professor Minoru Asada and colleagues at the University of Tokyo recently introduced Noby, based on a 9-month-old baby, and M3-Kindy, modeled on a 5-year-old child, respectively.

The aim is to advance knowledge of cognitive development--and by extension, artificial intelligence--by getting robots to mimic human growth through interaction.

Noby is infant-size and weighs about 17 pounds. It's embedded with 600 … Read more

Living in Japan, you have to sort your household garbage into burnable trash, non-burnable trash, recycling, and probably one other category I've forgotten. Each goes to the curb on a different day. I'm tickled to see that Japanese researchers have built a recycling robot that automatically sorts different kinds of plastic by using laser-sensing technology. They call it the first of its kind in the world.

The engineers at Osaka University's Photonics Advanced Research Center and automation firm IDEC, along with Mitsubishi Electric Engineering, say the sorting robot is designed to improve low recycling rates for plastics … Read more

If a child ever had skin as ashen as this kid, it would end up in the emergency room. Fortunately, this is not a real tyke, but a "Child Robot With Biomimetic Body" (CB2 for short) that's meant to mimic its living counterparts and teach lessons about child development.

The kid-bot, which comes to us from a team at Japan's Osaka University, is equipped with 51 air-powered motors and 197 tactile sensors under the soft, light gray silicone skin covering its body.

CB2 measures about 4 feet, 3 inches tall and weighs 73 pounds, which size-wise would put it in the third or fourth grade. However, it was designed to function as a 1- to 2-year-old.

Since the eerie-looking bot first terrified the blogosphere in 2007, it has resurfaced as a more advanced creature.

Its creators report that CB2 is slowly developing social skills by recording human's facial expressions via eye cameras, matching them with physical sensations, and then clustering them into basic categories (sad, happy, etc.) on its circuit boards.… Read more

The key railway artery in Japan, the Shinkansen or "bullet train" line between Tokyo and Osaka, will introduce Wi-Fi by March 2009, Japan Railways announced.

These trains are already incredibly comfortable, primarily because they are clean and quiet, and they usually deliver you to a key central location in each city. Another perk is the on-platform food vendors who sell totally passable box lunches, sometimes including sushi, without much of a mark-up.

The main drawback to these trains is they're not cheap. And while the JR announcement (in Japanese) doesn't mention whether there will be a … Read more

I was wandering the Loft department store at Shinsaibashi in Osaka, Japan, last week when I found a display surrounding this video. Give it a watch and see if you can tell what it's advertising...

Well, did you get it? From the Pen Spinning Association Japan comes the Penz'Gear line of sticks to spin artfully in your fingers, complete with an instructional DVD to teach you techniques for the following techniques: Normal, Reverse, FingerPass, BackAround, Harmonic, and Tornado.

You're not going to catch me saying that this proves "the Japanese" are weird. On the contrary, … Read more

Forget about brain waves--the next biometric remote control may come from your mouth.

Researchers at Osaka University are trying to produce something positive from the irritating habit of grinding one's teeth, according to Digital World Tokyo. So far, the Japanese scientists have limited their experiments to a "simple switching system" that's linked to the often-unconscious act of molar-crunching, developing infrared sensors that can detect the motion of jaw and head muscles involved. Their contraption determines whether true grinding is taking place and, if it is, the system turns a CD player on and off accordingly.… Read more