San Francisco artist Tanya Vlach lost her eye in 2005 in a car accident and had to wear an acrylic prosthetic eye. Now she wants to do something that has attracted the attention of engineers — to build a mini video camera into her prosthetic eye.

“There have been all sorts of cyborgs in science fiction for a long time, and I’m sort of a sci-fi geek,” said 35 year old Vlach. “With the advancement of technology, I thought, ‘Why not?’”

She issued a challenge on her blog — for tech experts to construct an “eye cam” for her prosthesis that can dilate with light changes, and zoom, focus and turn on/off with a simple blink.

Dr. William Danz, Vlach’s doctor, states: “I’d always given thought to using cameras to restore sight to the blind. This is a little different, more like James Bond stuff.”

Tanya Vlach claims that she has “a lot of ideas floating around” including sync’ing the video feeds wirelessly to a smart phone or even record her entire life and shoot a reality TV show from her perspective.

“It is possible to build a wireless camera with the dimensions of the eyeball,” said Want, a senior principal engineer at Intel Corp. “You can find spy cams or nanny cams designed to fit into inconspicuous places in the home…. In a world where eye cams are common, they might serve as a kind of computerized backup to people’s memories.”

Lets say you have a home movie that is dear to you, one in your favorite house, the one that always felt like home, no matter what. In that video, (maybe it’s your kids’ first steps, your college graduation, whatever) there is an offending spot. It could be a picture of an ex you had a nasty breakup with or your in-laws or just a really bad choice of decor. Hey, we all make the mistake of thinking that a print of “The Scream” will look good in our living rooms, and the sad clown painted on velvet that you replaced it with is much better anyway, right? What if there was a way that you could get rid of that unsighly photo or decorating faux pas? A way to change the past and make everything pretty again.

No, I’m not talking about hypnosis of time travel. Just a little bit of technology.

Thanks to a group of collaborating researchers at Stanford University you may be able to do just that in the near future. The group, originally working on artificial intelligence, came up with a piece of software that allows the user to do exactly that. The software can put an image on almost any planar surface in a video, whether wall, floor or ceiling. That being said, you are not just limited to still photos, you can also use a video.

So other than goofing off what are the potential applications for this technology.  The researchers have suggested that anyone with a video camera might earn some spending money by agreeing to have unobtrusive corporate logos placed inside their videos before they are posted online. The person who shot the video, and the company handling the business arrangements, would be paid per view, in a fashion analogous to Google AdSense, which pays websites to run small ads.

The question then becomes do you want ads in your home movies? I can’t say that everyone will, but I am sure that there are a few people who will take the offer when it comes around.

You can see a demo at http://zunavision.stanford.edu/.

Have you ever wondered what you would look like if you could be as beautiful as a super model? It is only human nature, at least for those of use who were born without the perfect genetics, to try and figure it out.

Well researchers at the Tel Aviv University may just give you the chance to find out, without the amazingly high bills and associated risks of getting plastic surgery. They have built a computer designed to enhance the human face, a kind of instant beautifier for your photos.  How does it do this, why with that most sexy of fields, math.

Beauty, contrary to what most people think, is not simply in the eye of the beholder,” says lead researcher Prof. Daniel Cohen-Or of the Blavatnik School of Computer Sciences at Tel Aviv University. With the aid of computers, attractiveness can be objectified and boiled down to a function of mathematical distances or ratios, he says. This function is the basis for his beauty machine.

Of course, these type of things always come with a debate.

Beauty is, after all, a quality that has captivated artists since time immemorial, and its definition has eluded even the world’s greatest philosophers. Prof. Cohen-Or sees things more scientifically.

“Beauty can be quantified by mathematical measurements and ratios. It can be defined as average distances between features, which a majority of people agree are the most beautiful,” says Prof. Cohen-Or. “I don’t claim to know much about beauty. For us, every picture in this research project is just a collection of numbers.”

I bet that you are wondering how they made up that algorythm after all turning personal preference into hard data is no easy task. Well, I will tell you how it was done:

In a study, recently published in the journal Siggraph, for  computer graphics, Prof. Cohen-Or and his graduate student Tommer Leyvand  together with two colleagues  surveyed 68 Israeli and German men and women, aged 25 to 40, asking them to rank the beauty of 93 different men’s and women’s faces on a scale of 1 to 7. These scores were then entered into a database and correlated to 250 different measurements and facial features, such as ratios of the nose, chin and distance from ears to eyes.  From this, the scientists created an algorithm that applies desirable elements of attractiveness to a fresh image.

While this technology is not on the market yet you could end up seeing it in a lot of different places like:

- The offices of plastic suregons who want to develop more natural guides for working on their patients.

- In the offices of magazines, where cover models are often used.

- In your next digital camera. Imagine looking like a model in all of your family photos.

I know what you are thinking, “Is this really a breakthrough? I bet I could do the same thing at home with photoshop.”

While you can enhance your images with photoshop there is a difference between the two methods. Unlike heavily processed Photoshop images that can make magazine cover models and celebrities unrecognizable, Tel Aviv University’s “beautification engine” is much more subtle. Observers say that the final image it produces retains an unmistakable similarity to the original picture, unless, as it turns out, you happen to be a celebrity.

“We’ve run the faces of people like Brigitte Bardot and Woody Allen through the machine and most people are very unhappy with the results,” Prof. Cohen-Or admits. “But in unfamiliar faces, most would agree the output is better.” Of course, if you are a celebrity, you could just pay for a team of professionals to air brush you, then you won’t need the software.

Engineers at Boston University are developing the next generation of wireless communications technology – LED lights. Information will be transmitted through visible light rather than radio waves. This “Smart Lighting” will use low power light emitting diodes, or LEDs, to deliver faster, more secure data communications wirelessly.

Essentialy, these LED lights would become the equivalent of a Wi-Fi access point.

BU Engineering Professor Thomas Little commented: “Imagine if your computer, iPhone, TV, radio and thermostat could all communicate with you when you walked in a room just by flipping the wall light switch and without the usual cluster of wires. This could be done with an LED-based communications network that also provides light - all over existing power lines with low power consumption, high reliability and no electromagnetic interference. Ultimately, the system is expected to be applicable from existing illumination devices, like swapping light bulbs for LEDs.”

With properly placed LED lighting, a wireless device in sight of the data-filled light would have access to the internet and network. Initial speeds of 1 to 10 megabit per second is expected. Furthermore, because light is unable to travel through solid walls, the data is less prone to “eavesdropping.” Less energy is also consumed by this method as opposed to traditional radio wave technology.

The core of this novel idea relies on the flickering of lights so rapid that it is unnoticable to the human eye. The flickering of light in different patterns would mean different signals, enabling data to be transmitted without noticeable change in room lighting.

Professor Little hopes to bring the technology outdoors to automobiles, in which brake lights of vehicles in front of a driver can be detected and warns the rear vehicle’s driver instanteously or even actively assisting in the braking.

New speculation arises about the Apple “Brick” — it is an advanced manufacturing process where computers will be cut directly from a solid block of aluminum.

Apple is known for two things: secrecy and innovation. Both comes into play certainly when talking about the new Apple product codenamed “Brick.” Although Apple just recently lifted its non-disclosure agreements to further iPhone application development, the company remains on the hush when it comes to the “Brick.”

Much speculation has come to this mysterious product. Some believe it is simply a new Mac Mini redesign while some say it is the fabled touchscreen Tablet Mac notebook computer.

However, a new rumor has emerged admist all the talk. According to 9to5Mac Apple has spent the last several years perfecting a new manufacturing process that uses lasers and high speed jets of water to carve MacBooks out of bricks of high-quality, aircraft grade aluminum. Advantages would include stronger and lighter design, elimination of screws and seams, and more room for creativity.

Although this claim seems pretty far-fetched, you never know with Apple and 9to5Mac claims to have a very good track record. The “Brick” will be revealed on October 14, so we will see how accurate this rumor is.

Virgin Galactic, a private company to provide space tourism to wealthy tourists, was offered a million dollars to shoot a sex video while the participants are floating freely without gravity. Will Whitehorn, president of the company, said the offer “was $1 million, up front, for a sex-in-space movie. That money we had to refuse, I’m afraid.”

The offer came from an unidentified party and was not disclosed any further during the International Astronautical Congress in which Whitehorn announced he rejected such a deal.

Beginning late 2009 or early 2010, Virgin Galactic – part of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group — will be offering two hour space flights per person for $200,000. The flight begins at Sierra County, New Mexico and will be carried to 100 kilometers in altitude by the WhiteKnightTwo aircraft, which in turn will release the SpaceShipTwo craft that will allow passengers to experience five minutes of weightlessness as the vehicle reaches the boundaries of the Earth’s atmopshere.

Virgin Galatic has spent about $100 million to develop its business, mainly in research and development of the aircraft by Scaled Composites LLC of Mojave, California and has already received $40 million in deposits from 280 customers.

“Virgin” Galactic did not reveal their reasons for rejecting the million dollar offer for the sex-in-space movie. At $200,000 per person for just five minutes, it would certainly cause hardship to shoot a long one.

Some of the most outrageous ornaments are going to be attached to Nokia headsets. Although Nokia has produced stereo headsets in the past, this time they are getting a huge aesthetic overhaul with the help of the public.

Nokia launched the Music Almighty Headset Competition to find the most quirky design for their upcoming new headsets. Five winning design concepts will be tailor made into actual, fully functional products.

Going through the competition gallery, you can find pretty ridiculous ornaments ranging from spikes to feathers to metal rods. The competition runs until the end of December. Anyone can vote for the best designs, with the top ten highest rated being narrowed down to the final five by an official panel of music and design experts. If all goes well, let’s hope Nokia allows the public to design their phones too.