Lighting

Bringing Multispectral Imaging to Industrial Applications

A mere 20 years ago, machine vision system designers did all they could to avoid color imaging applications due to higher costs and greater system and software complexity. But as...

Positional Sensor Measures Rotational and Lateral Displacements

Positional sensors have applications where a very accurate measurement of position is needed over a limited range. One example of such an application is in manipulation of a...

See Objects Hidden Around Corners

A driverless car is making its way through a winding neighborhood street, about to make a sharp turn onto a road where a child’s ball has just rolled. Although no person in the car can see that ball, the...

How Sophisticated Wearable Sensors are Changing Healthcare

In the traditional model of healthcare, a patient would visit a doctor regularly for checkups or for evaluations when there’s an ailment. This model, however, isn’t ideal for...

Guiding the Way in Automotive Plants

Vision-guided robotics commonly used in today's automotive plants enables robots to “see” the object they are working on so they can perform the required activity accurately on/to an object that is...

Paired Sleep Tracker and Light Therapy Tools Retrain Circadian Rhythms

Spinoff is NASA’s annual publication featuring successfully commercialized NASA technology. This commercialization has contributed to the development of products and...

New Products: May 2018 Photonics & Imaging Technology

Portable Laser Scanner

Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence (North Kingstown, RI) has announced the Leica Absolute Scanner LAS-XL, a new ultralarge scale portable laser scanner. Designed...

Compact Science Experiment Module

Crew time on the International Space Station (ISS) is extremely limited for any operations on science payloads. Autonomous science experiments in small, self-contained, cubical payloads are highly desirable...

Direct AC LED Engines

As the lighting industry continues to mature, vendors continue to pursue inexpensive lighting solutions that offer universal compatibility and are easy to install. For OEMs and manufacturers, LEDs have proven to be a...

Products of Tomorrow: May 2018

This column presents technologies that have applications in commercial areas, possibly creating the products of tomorrow. To learn more about each technology, see the contact information provided for that...

New on the Market: April 2018

Polarization Camera

Lucid Vision Labs, Richmond, BC, Canada, announced the 5-megapixel Phoenix polarization camera that can be used to detect stress or defects in manufacturing of materials such as plastic,...

Wobbly ‘HOIP’ Semiconductor Has Researchers in Excited State

Physical chemists at the Georgia Institute of Technology discovered an emerging class of semiconductors with some unexpected moves.

New Phosphor Material Improves LED Color Quality

A team led by engineers at the University of California San Diego has used data mining and computational tools to discover a new phosphor material for white LEDs that is inexpensive and...

New Products: January 2018 Photonics & Imaging Technology

High-Speed Cameras

iX Cameras (Woburn, MA and Rochford, UK) has added a new, value-priced camera to the premium ultra-high-speed i-SPEED 7 Series line. The new i-SPEED 713...

Innovators Recognized for "Creating the Future" 2017

The Create the Future Design Contest has helped stimulate and reward engineering innovation over the past 16 years, drawing more than 14,000 product designs from engineers, students, and...

Products of Tomorrow: October 2017

This column presents technologies that have applications in commercial areas, possibly creating the products of tomorrow. To learn more about each technology, see the contact information provided for that...

Machine Vision System

A number of instruments have been built to obtain range images — a two-dimensional array of numbers that gives the depth of a scene along many directions from a central point in the instrument. Instead of measuring...

Choosing a Light and Color Measurement System for LEDs

LED-based lighting and display systems are becoming increasingly popular due to their low cost, flexibility, and efficiency. Measuring the light and color output of LEDs is, therefore,...

Researchers Craft New Material That Could Improve LED Screens

Researchers working at the Ultrafast Laser Lab at the University of Kansas successfully created a new bilayer material, with each layer measuring less than one nanometer in...

New Phosphors and Next-Generation Lighting

Researchers from KU Leuven in Belgium, the University of Strasbourg, and CNRS have discovered a new phosphor that could make next-generation fluorescent and LED lighting even cheaper and more...

Graphene-based TEs for flexible, efficient OLEDs

The arrival of a thin, lightweight computer that even rolls up like a piece of paper will not be in the far distant future. Flexible organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), built upon a plastic...

Physicists develop polymer with tunable colors

By inserting platinum atoms into an organic semiconductor, University of Utah physicists were able to "tune" the plastic-like polymer to emit light of different colors – a step toward more...

Infrared Lighting Module

Vision Components (Ettlingen, Germany) has introduced the new VC Flash infrared area lighting for OEMs. The lighting module has been developed specifically for traffic surveillance applications. Fitted with 24 high...

Light Source Calibration Services

Gamma Scientific (San Diego, CA) now offers a range of light source and sensor calibration services from their ISO 17025, NVLAP accredited (NVLAP Laboratory code 200823-0) facility. Specifically, the company...

Researchers Develop Power-Generating Shoes

An energy-harvesting technology developed by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers captures the energy of human motion to power mobile electronic devices. The footwear-embedded energy...

'Invisible' Wires Improve Solar-Cell Efficiency

Scientists from Stanford University have discovered how to make the electrical wiring on top of solar cells nearly invisible to incoming light. The new design, which uses silicon nanopillars to...

LED Lighting Enables Better Sleep and Wake Cycles

Because NASA is planning for future visits to distant locations like Mars, the agency is researching how to grow plants in space. Live plants on space missions provide a nutritious food...