7 November 2009 | NewScientist | 27

For daily technology stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/technology

A HAND-HELD satellite-radio called FRED could one day get people out of sticky situations. The Fast Response Emergency Device will bring swift rescue to any subscriber at the push of a button. It was developed by the European Aeronautic Defence and Space’s Astrium unit in Stevenage, UK.

Using 3G, GSM and Iridium phone technology, alongside GPS and Galileo satnav receivers, FRED will do its utmost to alert a rescue centre of your plight, says Astrium’s innovations director Colin Stickland.

The project is an example of Astrium’s ongoing efforts to develop new satellite-based technologies that it hopes will enjoy success akin to that of satnav. FRED was revealed at last week’s European Air and Space Conference in Manchester, UK.

Access internet by SMSIN A world of iPhones and other

smartphones, text messaging might

seem like a humdrum function. But it

could be used to bring internet-based

services to users with basic handsets.

Umesh Chandra of the Nokia

Research Center in Palo Alto,

California, is building a network

protocol that will enable basic phones

to connect via SMS with servers on the

cellphone network. One Facebook-like

app lets people text to find out which

of their friends are in the area, and

the system would use location

information, based on the nearest

cellphone base stations, to send a

response. It would also be able to send

details of any nearby active vendors

on sites such as Craigslist. This is an

improvement on previous location-

based SMS systems, which could only

provide static information, such as the

position of the nearest library.

JAS

ON

LA

RK

IN/G

ET

TY

TECHNOLOGY

Don’t panic, Fred’s sending for help

The character limit for text

messages restricts how much

information can be exchanged . “You

have to be very frugal with what you

put into the message,” Chandra says.

His new system gets round this by

developing a concise syntax system

to encapsulate the information the

user wants. It can also locate the

sender to within 300 metres.

Nearly 400 million Indians have

cellphones, compared to just 30

million with computers. “For a lot of

people in India, the cellphone is the

first communication device and

slowly it might also become a

computing device,” says Chandra.

EVER felt the person on the other end of a video call wasn’t paying attention? Maybe having your animated double facing them could help.

That’s the thinking behind the animatronic “shader lamps” avatar, which uses a theme-park trick to bring a dummy with a robotic head to life for video calls.

Because video callers tend to speak to the screen rather than the camera, communication can become stilted, says Greg Welch, a computer scientist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “It often looks like you

Read my robot double’s lips

are not paying attention,” he says.Welch and his colleague Henry

Fuchs have employed “shader lamps” – a trick often found in theme parks in which a projector changes the appearance of a three-dimensional object – to transform a blank-faced dummy into the animated semblance of the caller.

Before the call, the subject is photographed from various angles to create a 3D model of their head. The 2D video relayed during the call is mapped onto this model before it is projected onto the remote dummy’s face . The dummy also mimics the caller’s head movements, and a slight audio delay synchronises the lips with the words spoken.

–Text to locate nearby friends–

The modest estimate by Anatoly Perminov, head of Russia’s space agency, for building a nuclear-powered Mars-bound craft

$600m

Artificial intelligence researcher Eric Postma at Tilburg University in the Netherlands

says many experts refuse to believe a computer can spot a fake masterpiece more effectively

than they can (The New York Times, 29 October)

“Many art historians are suspicious of our techniques”

“Using location details, the system would let people find out which of their friends are in the area”