UK to establish emerging tech centre

A £17 million technology research facility is to be established in Cambridge to find new ways of improving the UK's infrastructure, writes Taylor Vinters.

The University of Cambridge's engineering department will unveil its Innovation and Knowledge Centre on Smart Infrastructure and Construction to examine the potential of emerging technologies such as manufacturing processes, data management and sensors.

Professor Robert Mair, principal investigator of the grant, says much of the UK's infrastructure is more than 100 years old and the centre has an important role in making this more efficient.

Nasser Peyghambarian of the University of Arizona and his colleagues have developed a new form of holographic technology that can project a near-perfect 360-degree image to another location, Startup Smart.

“We foresee many applications including, for example, car or airplane manufacturing. They can look at the hologram and design the system they have in real-time and look at the model and make changes on it as they go,” he says.

Peyghambarian notes surgeons around the world would also be able to participate in complex operations at the same time. To create the hologram, cameras take colour images at multiple angles and send them over an Ethernet line, which is a series of frame-based computer networking technologies for local area networks.

Mirrorless camera makers are forging ahead with innovations, making their cameras smaller and easier to use, in the hope of attracting would-be point-and-shoot camera buyers, states The UK Independent.

While still a new category, mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras offer users the benefits of a large image sensor (for high quality pictures similar to those captured with a base-level digital SLR camera), the flexibility to use different lenses and a compact camera body.

Panasonic has made their latest Micro Four-Thirds camera, the Lumix GF2, smaller and lighter than their existing models in the hope of convincing consumers that mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras are the future of consumer-level photography.