Japanese company Sanyo Homes has introduced its MIRAI SANZO Android-based robot

Japanese company Sanyo Homes has introduced its MIRAI SANZO Android-based robot for the Japanese market. It connects to external networked devices, and allows them to be controlled via voice commands or remotely, through a smartphone. This is yet another device which proves that Google’s Android OS has applications beyond its original smartphone purpose.

MIRAI SANZO’s cartoon style of design leaves no doubt that this spherical smiling robot is meant for the Japanese market. The robot is part of Sanyo Homes’ line of devices aimed at creating smart homes for "families of the future." It’s WiFi-enabled, touchscreen- and voice-operated and rather small, at 22 cm (8.66 in) in diameter. Sanyo did not reveal which version of Android is used. Activation and deactivation of the unit is possible via touch sensors.

The robot connects to such devices as cell phones, computers, routers and access points; air conditioners; heating systems; intercom phones, house alarms, call buttons and electric locks, or AV power plugs.

Of course, these devices must be networked, so using MIRAI SANZO might necessitate the purchasing of more products from its makers.

The robot can perform tasks such as switching on and off the heating or AC, filling the tub with hot water, or sending a message to the user’s cell phone when the fire alarm is triggered. It can also respond to inquiries in a spoken language (Japanese, of course), and glows in seven different colors, which represent its current status. It is available now in Japan.

It seems like the Japanese always have the coolest technology–in this case quite literally. The hip new way to stay cool in an increasingly energy-conscious Japan: cooling foam or gel spray-cans that go right on the skin and provide an instant cool down.

These cooling sprays apparently aren’t brand new, but a thing isn’t a “thing” until it goes mainstream in Japan, and this summer that’s what’s happening. City-dwellers are using the products to cool down on the subways or on the streets. Particularly cool: the foam-like spray that hardens quickly out of the can, so users can make cooling wristbands or neckbands to help keep their core temps under control.

Play the guitar without having to learn the guitar

Researchers at Tokyo University, along with some help from Sony, created a device that straps onto your arm, sort of like a blood pressure cuff, and sends electrical signals to your fingers that can move them in precise ways. It’s called, of course, the PossessedHand.

The PossessedHand uses an Arduino microcontroller, the low-cost tool of choice for DIYers, and 28 electrode pads that are applied externally. There have been other devices that do this sort of thing, but they’ve often been pretty clumsy, needing electrodes to be inserted into the skin (ouch!). The PossessedHand is entirely external and painless, and, according to PhysOrg, "is said to feel more like a gentle hand massage." The signals are also not unpleasantly strong, apparently feeling more like a nudge to move rather than a forceful automatic movement of the fingers and wrist.

The uses for such a device are pretty clear, especially as you can preprogram strings of signals. It could be used in music education, to teach the proper finger movements and placings, or it could translate spoken language into sign language, which your hand performs automatically. There are potential medical uses as well; teaching stroke victims how to use their hands again, that kind of thing. It’s not a prosthesis, really, but it could prove useful to a totally new set of people. And it’s definitely more useful than Daito Manabe’s face-electroshocking hobby. Here’s a video of it in action from New Scientist:

This Japanese cooking pot converts the heat from a boiling pot of water to electricity that can charge your smartphone at the same time it cooks a delicious meal. The invention, inspired by footage of Japan’s earthquake victims building fires to keep warm, could prove a boon after a natural disaster, when all you’d have to do to keep communication open would be to light a campfire.

The Hatsuden-Nabe thermo-electric cookpot contains strips of thermoelectric ceramics that use the difference in temperature between the bottom of the pot and the water boiling inside it to generate electricity. Using this method, the device takes between three and five hours to charge an iPhone–not much longer than using a crazy space-age AC charger.

In addition to helping victims of natural disasters and being useful for camping trips, the cookpot could provide citizens of developing countries with a method of charging mobile phones, even if electricity is spotty. The device went on sale this month in Japan for $300.

If you want to see what Earth looks like from space, become an astronaut (or, barring that, a space tourist). For the next best view, pay a visit to Tokyo’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation where a massive, nearly 20-foot spherical OLED orb–the world’s first large scale spherical OLED–offers a satellite’s-eye view of the planet in super high resolution.

“Geo-Cosmos” is made up of 10,362 OLED panels that display continuously-updating satellite footage of our tiny blue marble, representing what our planet looks like from space in something close to realtime. It replaces an earlier model covered in LED panels, offering museum-goers a full 10 million pixels, a resolution 10 times greater than its predecessor.

And like any good museum exhibit, Geo-Cosmos is interactive. Touchscreens surrounding the globe allow viewers to tap all kinds of earth science data streaming in from all over the world, like simulations showing the origin of the March 11 earthquake that devastated Japan and the dispersion of all of that energy via tsunamis that reached all the way around the Pacific. See it for yourself below.

When you think of mind control, you know you dream of having furry cat ears of your own that you can control with your brainwaves. And why not? They’re adorable. They’re also the latest fashion in Japan.

The ears, created by a company called Neurowear, sit on top of a headband which incorporates sensors for brainwave reading. The ears spring to attention when you focus intently, and fold down when you relax your thoughts. Neurowear designed them to act like a natural body part.

We’ve seen a fair amount of brainwave-reading tech, but not much as cute as this. While you can’t compose a symphony with the ears, it is a step toward the sort of science that may help people whose health problems make communication difficult. But what’s next on the science fashion front? Maybe a set of matching whiskers.

A student at Tokyo’s University of Electro-Communications has invented a robotic tongue device for online kissing

Services such as Skype have certainly made things a little easier for geographically-separated romantic partners, but when the tele-chat is over and it’s time to say good night, sometimes a little air kiss blown towards a webcam just isn’t enough. While there are products that cater for the long-distance physical needs of couples, those might be a bit much for everyday situations. There’s also the KissPhone, which attempts to simulate the sensation of one partner’s lips against the other’s. Sitting between those two extremes, however, is the "Kiss Transmission Device" – a prototype gizmo designed to allow its users to virtually lock tongues.

The KTD is designed "for communications within the mouth, in other words, the goal is to obtain the feeling of kissing," according to its inventor, Nobuhiro Takahashi, an Information Systems graduate student at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo.

The system consists of two computer-connected bilaterally-controlled devices, each one with its own motorized, bent tubular "tongue." As one user rotates their device’s tongue inside their mouth, the tongue on the other device moves in the same way – given that the tongues appear not to be able to extend or twist, the possibilities for individual "artistic expression" seem to presently be pretty limited. In the future, however, Takahashi would like bring factors like taste, breath and mouth moisture into the mix. A tonguier-looking and -feeling tongue might be a good idea, too.

Once the device is better developed, he sees it potentially being used not only by couples, but also by celebrities. Pop stars, for instance, could "record" a French kiss on the device, which their eager fans could then play back in their mouths. No … really.

Although both devices are currently connected to the same computer, Takahashi believes it would be easy enough for them to communicate via the internet, on two separate machines. Combined with something like the wriggling, creepy-looking Telenoid R-1 telepresence doll, the possibilities of the technology could be very … well, we’ll just let you pick your own word.

Oh, don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it.

There you are in the restroom. And, just for a fleeting moment, you wish there would be something more you could do than stare at an ad. Or at the graffiti that says Josh loves Ginny. Or Jimmy.

You’d love to be able do something a little more interactive. Sega understands the warmth and depth of your emotions. This is why the company has announced Toylets, video games controlled by your urine stream.

The games are for those who cannot live without being a first-person shooter.

Toylets, according to Japan’s Akihabara News, are truly repositories of both pleasure and pressure.

To prevent fulmination during urination, a pressure sensor is slipped inside the toilet bowl. You, the gamer, must focus and direct your urine at that sensor. The display on an LCD screen above the toilet grades your efforts.

To keep it exciting, there are four games, each with its own intellectual stream.

Mannequin Pis calculates how much urine you have released into the great beyond.

In Graffiti Eraser, you must attempt to urinate as forcefully as you can in order to remove graffiti from a virtual wall on the gaming screen.

Milk from Nose asks you to consider who was the previous occupant of your stall and to see whether you can beat the person in the maximum flow department.

You will be wondering why on earth such a beautiful concept would be called Milk from Nose. Well, the gaming visual here is a couple of sumo wrestlers who emit milk from their noses–the jets of which thrust their opponent out of the ring.

You will, hopefully, already be snorting physical elements from your nostrils before I tell you about The North Wind and Her.

This delightful repository of lavatory joy is a game in which your urine represents the wind. It is a wind full of mischievous humor, for the more strongly you manage to release your matter, the more likely you are to raise a woman’s skirt above her waist.

Sega is currently testing these lavatorial labors of love in Tokyo metro stations.

Perhaps some might wonder what possible social benefit might be gained from these games. Might this be an attempt to ensure that urine is sprayed more accurately, reducing the potential for ill-directed splashing?

I fear not. Instead, this seems to be an attempt to get you to pay a little more attention to advertisers, whose pitches will be released intermittently between the streams of action.

However, there is one facet that I know will excite many before they venture to the faucet. Should any player do especially well at any particular game, they will be able to, um, download the information and save it to a USB stick that may, temporarily, resemble a USP stick.

I know I express the feelings of millions when I say I hope this Toylet training run will be a vast success. I know there is nothing more that I would like than to install one in my own home, so my dinner party guests can enjoy special entertainment between courses.

Trangram lets you connect devices around the home to each other and to the web

Back at Tokyo Make Meeting earlier this year, there was a fun demonstration showing us what kind of things might be possible if we connected various electrical devices around the home to the Internet, using a system called Trangram. Since the event, we’ve spoken with Hirotaka Hatayama, who has been working on this project together with his partner, Mr. Kinukawa.

"The original idea was that we thought it would be fun to be able to arrange and mash up electric parts just like web services, such as the ‘Gakken EX-System’ from Gakken which is famous in Japan," he told us. "We did not know how to explain but felt that it would be very attractive."

For those who may not remember the Gakken EX-System, it featured small connectible blocks with electrical components inside, that could be physically fitted side-by-side to create more complex electrical systems.

According to Mr. Hatayama, Trangram‘s current concept is to use a browser interface to put together electrical parts and web services. This "wiring editor" looks very much like Yahoo Pipes, allowing for a very intuitive and logical way to connect all the components by simply dragging and dropping.

Connecting various devices around the home to each other and to the web can result in some fun combinations. For a fuller explanation of how Trangram works, see the demo video of the first prototype below.

One Trangram demonstration shows that by using an iPhone as an input device, you can turn off lights from outside the home via the web. I wonder if I could connect it to a doggy door to let my dog in and out of the house while I’m outside? Now that would be really useful!

While this current version of Trangram is just a demo, Mr. Hatayama says that the next step is to "provide this system to some users for real use," and he’s looking at next summer as his target.

Toirettsu, SEGA’s Bathroom-Based Gaming Interface

There was a time when you had to go down to the arcade or pizza shop and pump quarters into machines if you wanted to enjoy a video game experience. Then computers and home gaming consoles brought video game entertainment into our living rooms. Now Sega is cornering the niche bathroom gaming market with a gaming interface named “Toirettsu” in which the user controls the game by peeing on sensors in a urinal.

If you can’t go standing up, perhaps Toirettsu isn’t for you (sorry ladies, but your hands-free method allows you to play Angry Birds on the can anyhow). Toirettsu targets restaurant and retail environments, ostensibly in hopes that by giving users goal-oriented mini-games to focus on, their men’s room floors might stay a bit cleaner as gents have somewhere to aim. And, of course, it gives establishments (and Sega) somewhere to place an ad.

We’re not so sure that urinal gaming is going to keep floors any cleaner – in fact, it’s not difficult to imagine it making floors dirtier (ever thrown your controller during a particularly frustrating round of Halo?). But it will make peeing in public toilets more fun. Layer in a multiplayer, head-to-head (pun intended) function and pretty soon men will be going to the bathroom in pairs too.