“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/.

In order to drive these rotary applications directly, efficiently and in a controlled fashion, there must be electrical drive systems with the appropriate rpm and engine power. Up to now, industrially-deployed motors have normally reached 250,000 revolutions per minute. Now, however, researchers from ETH Zurich’s Department of Power Electronics have developed a drive system in cooperation with its industrial partners that can achieve over 1,000,000 rpm.

Of course, this speed record was set in a lab, not on a track and it’s more to do with revoltions than it is with MPH, but still, you may at some point find it driving down the street next to you, or even in the sky above you. In future it can be expected that the drill used in material processing will become even faster and the compressor used for vehicles and airplanes even more compact.

Of course, you may end us seeing it used to make the technology in the palm of your hand too. Based upon the results of this research, Christof Zwyssig and Martin Bartholet, also a post-graduate in the same department, founded the spin-off company, Celeroton, in August 2008. It will make the lab partners industrially viable with a view to providing ultra-high revolution electrical drive systems for different branches of industry and areas of application. Celeroton is set to become a supplier for manufacturers of, for example, fast-spinning drill or milling machines.

The trend towards increasingly smaller cell phones and other electrical appliances means that increasingly smaller holes have to be drilled for the elec-tronics. This is only possible using a drive system that boasts a high rotational speed. “In my view, a spin-off company is the most direct way of transferring research results to industry. Our findings will rapidly be converted into concrete applications and products,” explains Johann Kolar, Head of the Department of Power Electronics.

Now you are wondering how big this thing that it can drill tiny holes in the cell phones of the future. The new drive system, which generates an output of 100 watts, is barely bigger than a matchbox.

As for construction, the recipie goes a little something like this, The rotor construction has a titanium shell that is able to withstand extreme centrifugal forces and the ball bearings are optimized for extremely high speeds. Ultra-thin copper wire is used for the windings which are inserted in a cylinder made of special iron previously unused for machines. In addition, the machine is fed by electronics specifically designed for such engine speeds.

Rochester Institute of Technology is collaborating with a team led by the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine that recently tested technology, which allows for the transmission of high quality, real time video to multiple locations. Using a secure, high-speed network, an endoscopic surgery at the University of Puerto Rico was broadcast to multiple locations in the United States. The experiment also included a multipoint videoconference that was connected to the video stream, allowing for live interaction between participants.

Of course, this is just a new application of an older technology used to broadcast surgeries in a more limited capacity.

“The University of Puerto Rico has been performing this type of transmission between two sites for more than a year, but we are now able to utilize a combination of technologies that allows us to transmit to multiple sites simultaneously,” notes José Conde, director of the Center for Information Architecture in Research at the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus.

“Being isolated geographically from major research centers, we need to use information technology to foster research collaborations with scientists around the world,” Conde adds.

“Previous efforts in telemedicine have been hampered by the quality of the video stream produced and the potential for network interruptions,” says Gurcharan Khanna, director of research computing at RIT and a member of the research team. “This test demonstrates that by using the speed and advanced protocols support provided by the Internet2 network, we have the potential to develop real-time, remote consultation and diagnosis during surgery, taking telemedicine to the next level.”

The system uses a 30-megabit-per-second broadcast quality video stream, and configured it to be transmitted via multicast using Microsoft Research’s ConferenceXP system. This system allows for extremely high resolution images.

In the future there are other, non-surgial applications avaliable for the system.

“Today, physicians often need to travel to both examine patients and conduct consultations,” says Khanna. “Given the growing capacity of Internet technologies, the development of live remote consultation with high quality video could revolutionize medicine and greatly enhance the care patients can receive while reducing overall costs to the health care system.”