April 2008 Archives
Academic institutions would always rather spend their money on high-tech kit rather than mundane things like lighting. Now a programme launched by US LED manufacturer Cree offers universities a way to save money and protect the environment by switching to LED lighting.
The LED University program is an international community of universities working to accelerate the adoption of energy-efficient LEDs. So far, four US universities have joined the LED initiative - North Carolina (NC) state, Marquette, University of California Santa Barbara, Arkansas - while Tianjin Polytechnic in China has also signed up to the initiative.
According to the US Department of Energy, 22% of all the electricity used in the US powers lighting. The hope is that the deployment of LED lighting will reduce energy usage, protect the environment, reduce maintenance costs, and provide a better quality of light for improved visibility and safety.
Each of the participating universities is conducting feasibility studies to determine the cost and environmental benefits of switching to LED lighting in campus applications. The University of California Santa Barbara has installed 23 LED streetlights on a campus road and reports that, compared to its traditional streetlights, it is achieving a 44% reduction in energy use as well as better light distribution and colour rendition.
Other installations include recessed lighting in the chancellor's office and a dormitory in NC State University, while the University of Arkansas has installed the first set of what it plans will be approximately 1700 recessed LED lights in university buildings. Meanwhile, Tianjin Polytechnic University has installed 1500 LED streetlights designed by its graduate students on the campus' main roadway.
"Lighting is a significant energy drain worldwide and if we can significantly reduce the amount of energy used for lighting, we will make a dramatic contribution to protecting our resources and environment," said Pingjuan Niu, a professor at Tianjin Polytechnic University. "Tianjin Polytechnic University is proud to be among the first to join this important lighting and energy conservation initiative."
For the last four years, Europe's politicians and car companies have been collaborating on the Continent's largest road safety project. In theory, the end result could be the uncrashable car, with optics and vision systems playing a crucial role.
PReVENT is an umbrella programme of nested initiatives and research projects working towards next-generation preventive and active road safety applications, encompassing a total of 56 partner organizations and a budget of more than €50 million ($79 million).
The objectives are ambitious and the acronyms are many. PReVENT aims to develop systems allowing the safe following of other cars (SASPENSE and WILLWARN), lateral support and driver monitoring (SAFELANE and LATERAL SAFE), intersection safety (INTERSAFE), and the protection of vulnerable road users and collision mitigation (COMPOSE and Use R Cams).
It's not just Europe that's looking to improve road safety by trusting technology rather than people. Last year we covered the Team LUX entrant in the DARPA Urban Challenge, and described the race's daunting requirement for driverless cars to obey all traffic regulations, safely negotiate around other cars and merge into traffic.
The eventual winner was a car from Carnegie Mellon University, which employed more than a dozen lasers, cameras and radars to view the world. It averaged 14 mph, and left in its wake competitors which variously froze at intersections, turned into oncoming traffic, and two which apparently drove straight into buildings.
These sound like software issues rather than defective optics. Infrared vision systems can sense a car's surroundings at least as well as a human can. It's how to interpret the resulting onslaught of data that remains the problem.
Team LUX's Jorg Kibbel was well aware of this when we spoke to him. "Our scanners have a resolution of up to 0.125°, a range of 200 m, and a field of view of about 200°. Even small objects right in front of the car can be seen. But in urban areas many complex scenarios can emerge, and the algorithms must produce the right answer. Complex crossings, lane changes, u-turns, and of course all the other robots in the race will have to be dealt with. Plus we will have to park the car."
Until accidentally doing so in someone's kitchen can be completely ruled out, PReVENT might have a job on its hands.
Has anyone had any experience of the iris-scanning technology at Heathrow airport that is designed to speed up immigration checks?
The cunningly named Iris Recognition Immigration System (IRIS) is only open to people who have visited the IRIS sign-up offices in the various departure lounges at Heathrow. Sign-up involves an immigration officer checking your passport and then storing this information alongside a picture of your iris.
And this is where the fun begins as photographing your iris involves getting your head into a fairly precise position. The system patiently gives you advice such as "move to the left", "move closer" or "stand back" and eventually you will be in the right position. So as long as you are not in a rush to catch a flight, it's a good way to pass some time and improve security.
But what about when you arrive back in the UK? When you reach immigration, follow the IRIS signs that direct you to separate booths where you are required to go through the same iris-alignment procedure. You step into a booth and battle the jet-lag to get into your iris into the right position but that's it - no need to show your passport.
My first attempt at getting back into the UK via IRIS worked fine, although it did take me a while to get into the right position. That said, I was probably just as quick as if I had shown my passport to an immigration officer. I guess practice makes perfect when it comes to iris alignment and I'll certainly be giving the IRIS system a try next time I pass through immigration at Heathrow.
My recent holiday to New Zealand gave me the perfect opportunity to see optics in action. Two highlights from my trip were a visit to the Franz Josef glacier to see some amazing blue ice structures and a visit to the Mount John observatory and New Zealand's largest telescope.
First, lets talk about glaciers and blue ice. Nothing can really prepare you for your first walk on a glacier. Pictures in magazines and television documentaries don't really do it justice. It is only when you set foot on the glacier and see the sheer scale of the surface structures and their deep colours that you truly appreciate their beauty.
Franz Josef glacier is around 12 km long and our plan was to get in a helicopter and land 3 km up from the glacier's terminal moraine. Flying over the glacier gave us our first glimpse of just how many cracks and structures are on the surface, and it wasn't long before we had struck it lucky and were gazing open-mouthed into a deep blue crack in the ice.
Why does the ice appear blue? Here's the quick answer: In ice, the absorption of light at the red end of the spectrum is greater than at the blue end. A lack of reflected red wavelengths produces the blue colour that the human eye observes.
Two hours and over 200 photographs later (the joy of digital!), we were back in the helicopter and on our way back to the Franz Josef township. What a brilliant experience!
A few days later, our journey took us through Lake Tekapo, which is roughly in the centre of New Zealand's south island and around 700 meters above sea level. The mountains surrounding Lake Tekapo protect it from coastal weather systems so the township enjoys some of New Zealand's highest sunshine hours - the perfect place to build an observatory.
The observatory is situated a further 300 meters above sea level on the top of Mount John. There are four principal telescopes at the observatory, of which the largest is a 1.8 meter telescope dedicated to the "microlensing observations on dark matter" (MOA) project.
Here, the team uses a gravitational microlensing technique to make observations of extra-solar planets, among other things. The microlensing technique enables a distant star to be magnified by the gravitational field of a nearer collinear star, which effectively acts a lens. There is a lot more information on this on the MOA homepage.
I have never been to a large-scale observatory before so it was great to have the opportunity to see inside a dome. A 1.8 meter diameter mirror is bigger than you imagine it would be and certainly puts the challenge of developing mirrors for projects such as the ESO's very large telescope (VLT) into perspective.
The VLT will consist of four 8-meter telescopes which can work independently or in combined mode. In the combined mode, the VLT will provide the total light collecting power of a 16-meter single telescope, making it the largest optical telescope in the world.
An added bonus of our trip to Lake Tekapo was the night-time star-gazing tour that the observatory runs. This gave us the opportunity to see just why Mount John is an excellent place to build an observatory.
The sky was clear and the number of stars was incredible - so many more than you can see from a light-polluted city. Our guides pointed out a number of constellations - including the Southern Cross, which I had never seen before, and Orion, which is upside down to what we are used to in the Northern hemisphere. We also got the opportunity to view Alpha-Centauri (the closest star to our solar system) and did you know that this is actually a system of three stars?
So if you are ever in New Zealand, the Mount John Observatory is worth a stop!
Trouble continues to brew in New South Wales, where the federal government is attempting to deal with multiple incidents of aircraft pilots being distracted by hand-held laser pointers shone from the ground at Sydney airport.
The problems are said to be escalating due to the easy availability of green laser pointers, which are widely used by astronomers, architects and other professions. Unlike older red pointers, which are typically under 1 mW in power, green sources can deliver more than 20 mW and are apparently long-range enough to reach aircraft on final approach to landing.
The ideal solution would be an outbreak of sense among those with the pointers, but in the absence of that Australia's legislators are getting twitchy.
After an incident involving an air ambulance, it seems that New South Wales will now class the most powerful types of pointer as if they were firearms, with proposed sentences of up to 14 years for carrying one without a permit. Holders of the old fashioned red variety will be treated more leniently, on a par with carrying a knife. Western Australia has reached similar conclusions, classing the pointers as controlled weapons with 12 months jail for their illegal use.
The NSW Premier has talked of banning hand-held lasers to "stop the potential for mass murder". No sensible person underestimates the importance of air safety, but what is language like this doing to the public perception of a very simple scientific tool? How long before the phrase "death ray" makes an appearance?
Is banning the pointers the only option?
This little number is the Sintesi, a concept car from the Pininfarina design house that made waves at this year's Geneva Motor Show. The brochure talks of "transparent mobility", and a chassis design based on "liquid packaging" that's said to free up space normally occupied by the engine. What's happened to the engine is perhaps a question for later.
LED experts may be more interested in the view from head on. Instead of two separate headlights, Pininfarina has chosen a continuous narrow strip of 16 Osram Ostar power LEDs, each of which consists of five chips connected in series. All the other lighting tasks in the vehicle are also handled by Osram LEDs, including indicators, side lights and interior illumination.
The rear design is equally striking, a "pure application of the coda tronca, in which the volume of the car is cut off with one gesture." The result looks like it might divide opinion, but also allows another strip of Osram LEDs to be used as tail lights.
Despite the uncertain adoption of solid-state lighting by automotive manufacturers to date, notably Honda's move back to incandescent lamps in the Accord, Osram are confident that their many years of LED development opens up all sorts of options for automotive lighting. How long until the fruits of their optimism are parked on your driveway remains to be seen.
Domestic robots have been a dream for decades, along with jet packs and nuclear powered cars. But unlike some of the more wild predictions for the World of Tomorrow, progress towards feasible household robots continues to make headway.
One major stumbling block has always been how to convey instructions to your tame robot. Making them understand human gestures is notoriously difficult and speech recognition can be a recipe for disaster. So a team at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University uses a less ambiguous method: the user illuminates an object with a green laser pointer, and El-E (pronounced like the name Ellie) trundles off and retrieves it.
El-E is a robot designed to help people with limited mobility, by picking up indicated objects and taking them either back to the user or to another location. It uses an omnidirectional vision system to triangulate the laser spot's position, and a laser range finder to locate the object itself. A camera in the gripping hand distinguishes the object from the texture of the floor or table it's sitting on, after which the gripper and its sensors do the heavy lifting.
Admittedly El-E isn't much of a looker and might not be able to give Robbie the Robot a run for his money, but the Georgia team think they've solved a key challenge on the way to making robot assistants a practical proposition. The relative simplicity of the point-and-fetch system should benefit users and ensure that El-E behaves as intended, although the acid test may come when a user accidentally targets the cat.
Web usage is a fascinating thing. A quick look at the optics.org visitor stats revealed that almost 50,000 people have viewed one specific article in the last month. Which article had piqued the interest of so many readers? Well, it wasn't a recent news item, but an article about an optical lock that we published back in 2004 (see Optical lock foils thieves).
Further research revealed that the article had been picked up by StumbleUpon, a website that claims to "find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests". It's strange to think that 22 people (at the time I wrote this) felt moved to comment on work that is now at least four years old, but for the record most respondents were skeptical that it would work in practice. Click here for the full "discussion".
"The world optoelectronics market will surpass $1.2 trillion by 2017." That's the staggering prediction made by Steve Anderson, chief editor of Laser Focus World (LFW) in this afternoon's industry perspectives seminar.
Based on LFW's 2008 market review and forecast, the optoelectronics market gained about 7% in 2007 to reach $620 bn, and the predicted annual growth rate is around 7.7%. The main contributor to this growth comes from components, which was worth $350 bn in 2007 and is expected to reach $675 bn in 2017. The biggest drivers for this growth are flat-panel displays, which has a predicted growth compound growth rate of 7.4%.
Looking specifically at lasers, the world market was worth $6.9 bn in 2007 with diode lasers taking a 55% market share. Anderson cites the biggest trend driving growth as miniaturization, followed by the development of new wavelengths, faster pulses and greater beam delivery options.
In terms of laser sales, the three largest sectors are materials processing applications, which in 2007 were worth $1.3 bn, followed by telecoms at $1.7 bn and optical storage at $1.6 bn. "The telecom laser market exceeded the optical storage market for the first time since 2001," said Anderson. "This is largely due to the huge growth of fibre to the home that we have seen recently."
Living in the US, Anderson is all too aware of the current financial uncertainly the country is experiencing. "Device manufacturers are cautious about new investment due to shaky consumer confidence," he said. "This has a knock-on effect to component manufacturers. An indication of this is the news that AMD, a major device manufacturer, announced major lay-offs this year due to the drop in demand for chips."
But it's not all bleak, with the global laser market forecast to grow by 7% in 2008 to reach $7.4 bn. Green photonics, such as photovoltaics - and especially thin-film photovoltaics - also represents an excellent opportunity (see earlier entry for more details on the photovoltaic market). The optical storage market also recovered from a 15% decline in 2006, growing by 7.7% in 2007 to $1.60 bn mainly due to blue diodes used in Playstation 3 games consoles, Blu-ray discs and HD DVD players.
Another area to watch is bio-optics, particularly diagnostics and imaging technique such as optical coherence tomography (OCT). According to Anderson, the medical therapy market is predicted to grow by 10% to reach $614 m.
Could the off-cuts from fish be the next breakthrough optical material? James Grote from the US Air Force Research Lab certainly thinks so, as he presented his research into the optical applications of waste fish at Thursday morning's hot topic seminar.
"Where silicon is today's fundamental building block for inorganic electronics and photonics, biopolymers hold promise to become tomorrow's fundamental building block for organic photonics and electronics," he said.
His approach uses the DNA derived from waste salmon caught in Hokkaido in Japan, and there's plenty of it - 10,000 tons/year to be exact. "DNA from this biowaste is abundant, inexpensive and green," said Grote. "It has the potential to compete with, or maybe someday even replace, fossil-fuel based plastics for applications ranging from eyeglasses to LEDs, transistors and solar cells."
The fish is first prepared in a series of processes, including breaking down the skeleton, removing the protein, decolourization and freeze drying. During this process the DNA maintains its double helix structure and can be doped with various other polymers to enhance certain optical properties.
"With careful doping, the biopolymer demonstrates low optical losses of less than 0.5 dB/cm over a broad wavelength range, electrical conductivities 3-10 orders of magnitude higher than other polymer materials, and they are tunable," said Grote.
So far, Grote and his colleagues have made the first all-DNA electro-optic (EO) modulator, which exhibits lower losses compared with current polymer EO modulators, and operates at significantly lower power. The group has also demonstrated the first red, blue and green bio-organic LEDs and the first bio-organic field effect transistor.
Much work still has to be done before these DNA-based polymers can compete with inorganic optical materials, but Grote is optimistic that his research is taking the first important steps towards creating biopolymer-based solar cells, LEDs and lasers.
At Michelson Diagnostics' booth they believe that more is definitely better - for optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging anyway.
The EX1301 OCT microscope uses four laser beams focused at different depths to provide double the lateral resolution of competing technologies.
A laser beam with a wavelength of 1300 nm can be brought to a focus of around 20 µm over a depth of focus of 1 mm. However, by using four lasers centred around 1305 nm, the beams can be brought to a lateral focus of better than 10 µm over a depth of focus of 0.25 each, providing a total focal range of 1 mm.
The microscope could provide clearer real time images offering more clinical detail and is designed to see within excised tissue such as skin or complete organs without causing damage.
This robotic companion has an artificial optical skin, which can detect touch and respond accordingly. Probo is so clever that it can differentiate between different types of touching such as tickling, poking, slapping and petting and reacts with the appropriate facial expressions and noises.
The designers hope that Probo could be used to comfort hospitalized children who often have long periods in quarantine conditions where a real pet would be inappropriate.
The flexible skin-like foil was created by the Polymer Chemistry and Biomaterials Research Group at the Universiteit Gent, who teamed up with the Robotics and Multibody Mechanics Research Group of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, both in Belgium. The 'skin' is composed of optical fibre sensors embedded in flexible silicon, which is supple enough to allow the robot to move, but strong enough to protect the fibre from damage (against slapping presumably).
Plastics are conventionally thought to be unsuitable optical materials compared with glass because of their poor quality. However, Koike's research at Keio University in Japan seems to go someway towards challenging this assumption. Koike has developed a highly scattered optical transmission (HSOT) polymer for LCD backlights that exhibit almost twice the brightness of conventional backlights.
The design takes advantage of the scattering effect that occurs when light hits particles with a diameter in the order of micrometres. By adjusting the size of the dopant, Koike found that the direction, angle and intensity of scattering could be controlled. "By injecting a dopant that scattered light at right angles to the surface, we have forced forward scattering only, which has almost doubled the brightness," said Koike.
The HSOT polymer can already be found in a range of laptops including the Sony Vaio, Panasonic Let's Not, Samsung and Dell.
"OLED lighting could be the fastest way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions," said Peter Visser in this morning's industry perspectives seminar on multimedia, displays and lighting.
Visser is the project manager of OLLA - a €21 million European project that aims to develop flexible OLEDs with colour changing options in the next five years. OLLA is made up of 24 partners, including 10 from industry (such as Philips and Osram), and Visser believes that commercial interest in OLEDs for lighting applications will tap into a very valuable market.
"The lighting market is currently worth €58 billion Euros, of which lamps make up 25%, the rest are fixtures, electronics and controls," said Visser. "OLEDs offer a very efficient alternative to lamps, they contain no harmful substances, can produce high quality light -with a colour rendering index (CRI) of over 80 and require an operating voltage of only around 3 V."
Visser believes that OLEDs also offer many potential future options such as flexibility, varying colour and full transparency. The OLLA project hopes to develop a 30x30 cm white tile with a lifetime of 10,000 hours, efficiency of 50 lm/W, brightness of 10,000 cd/m2, and a CRI greater than 70 to compete with existing light sources.
To achieve these goals, the group is investigating various materials and processes, and is also looking into lower cost solutions such as fabricating OLEDs without costly indium tin oxide contacts. "So far we have achieved small OLEDs, which are suitable for decorative or signage applications," said Visser. "But in the future we hope to integrate OLEDs into many applications in the home, the office and in vehicles."
Visser painted a very bright future (quite literally) - predicting OLED ceilings in the home that emulate beautiful blue skies during the day and red sunsets at night, OLED wallpaper, OLEDs within glass shower screens, furniture and advertising and in the control panels of cars.
Much hand-waving and gesturing can be seen at Fraunhofer's booth today as its "Free 2C kiosk" invites you to move a projected 3D object with your finger, without touching the screen.
How does it work? Two cameras at eye-level detect the position of your eyes in order to project the correct 3D image from your viewpoint. A row of LEDs at the base of the screen illuminates your hand with infrared light. This light is reflected back down to two infrared cameras, which open and close at the same frequency as the LED pulses. This information is fed into a computer, which determines the exact position of your hand and updates the display accordingly.
Future systems from Fraunhofer will allow you to use two fingers to expand/ reduce the size of an image or rotate it. So watch this space for even more frantic gesturing!
New to this year's event is the industrial perspectives programme, designed to provide market perspective into various application areas. Kicking off the photovoltaics session was Gaeten Rull from the market research firm Yole Developpement.
Rull believes that photovoltaics will become a competitive energy source by 2015, thanks to multi-billion investments by many solar cell manufacturers. "From the 25MW fabs of the past few years, we expect to see gigawatt fabs within the next few years," he said.
Growth has been slow in the photovoltaics market due to the lack of availability of polysilicon but, according to Rull, this is about to change as more money is spent on silicon production. This will boost the manufacture of silicon wafer-based cells, which are typically expensive to make because of the costly raw materials used.
New projects and investments in thin-film manufacturing and III-V cells are also expected to boost the photovoltaic market. "III-V cells are not just used for military and space applications anymore," said Rull. "We are starting to see them used for terrestrial communications applications also."
According to Rull, the key players remain the same, but rival companies are beginning to emerge. "Sharp enjoyed the largest solar cell production capacity in 2007, with 15% share of the market," he said. "Interestingly, the Chinese company, Suntech Power jumped from seventh to third in 2007 with a 6.3% share of the market."
Alongside commercial investments, Rull added that much research and development is being carried out all over the world with the aim of increasing solar cell efficiency.
Could this device be just the answer to Heathrow's lost luggage problems? That's the thought that struck me during this morning's optical and digital image processing conference, which presented a smart camera for postal sorting applications.
The smart camera can acquire and process information such as bar codes on envelopeswithin milliseconds and, according to Julien Dubois from the University de Bourgogne in France, could replace conventional PC-based postal sorting systems.
Developed in joint a joint partnership between the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and the University de Bourgogne, the design combines a CMOS camera, FPGA interface and processor boards.
"Think of the smart camera as an intelligent sensor," said Dubois. "It can process 30 letters per second at speeds of up to 8.0 m/s compared with the old system, which can process only 15 letters per second at speeds of 4.0 m/s."
Not only is the camera faster, but it is also more compact than the original system and requires much less power.
Dubois believes that although processing time is similar to the old system, at 40.88 ms, the use of a co-processor allows for image acquisition and processing tasks to take place in parallel. Use of CMOS sensors allows a region of interest to be selected, which also helps to speed up the process overall.
A total of 1190 people have registered for the event, and I think I must have been travelling in with most of them as the trams were bustling this morning. According to Amy Nelson, SPIE Europe's press relations manager, hundreds of papers from countries all around the world are to be presented in 17 technical conferences, while a total of 151 exhibitors will be on hand to show off their latest products and innovations.
"We are very happy with how the event is going so far," said Nelson. "There is a great energy here, the programme has attracted some big names in the field and technical attendance has increased by 10% from the last event in 2006."
New to this year's event is the Industry Perspectives programme, which is designed to provide a series of executive briefings covering key technologies and sectors. Also on offer this year is a careers workshop designed for students and early career professionals. The workshops will discuss the pitfalls, opportunities, challenges and skills required to succeed in the photonics industry.
The organizers hope that Photonics Europe will be seen as a uniquely pan-European event that enables research and industry to be brought together to share expertise. "We think that this event allows the people who have the ideas to meet with the people who can implement the ideas," said Nelson. "With full attendance at the plenary talks and Industry Perspectives programme, we believe that this is a good indication that people are very interested in this kind of meeting."
You may be as surprised as I was to learn that despite Strasbourg being the seat of several European institutions such as the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, the only direct flights from the UK are from London City Airport.
So after battling across London to reach the airport, it was extremely refreshing to arrive in Strasbourg to find an efficient tram and bus network servicing the entire city. Within 30 minutes I had reached my hotel and was settled in, making final plans for the talks and exhibitor stands that I will be visiting tomorrow.
As I prepare my schedule, I find myself spoilt for choice with a long list of conferences on offer on topics ranging from semiconductor lasers and silicon photonics to metamaterials and photon management. The conferences are supplemented by a series of special events, including a packed industry perspectives programme, the photonics innovation village, and plenary sessions.
If you have any tips on what not to miss, please feel free to use the commenting tool or stop by our booth #312 to let us know.
Welcome to optics.org's exclusive online resource dedicated to the forthcoming Photonics Europe conference and exhibition, which kicks off this week in Strasbourg.
Over the next few days I will endeavour to bring you some of the latest optics and photonics research from an event that promises to bring together different disciplines, technologies and perspectives from across Europe and around the world.
So make sure you remember to check back here for regular postings about the event. For those of you who are attending this year, why not stop by booth #312 to meet the optics.org team. If you need more incentive to search us out, - how about a free laser pen when you sign up for optics.org or our sister magazine, Optics and Laser Europe? Sign up is free and the pen is available for all qualified sign-ups.
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