Narrator AR

Technology in education is moving at a fast pace. As early childhood educators look for ways to integrate technology into their classroom, they find quality tools are scarce. Pioneering immersive technology for kindergarten, Narrator AR is an Augmented Reality App for writing that uses the AR technology to animate handwritten letters off the page.

It encourages children at this vital stage of early childhood education to engage the essential fine motor and cognitive skills associated with handwriting. With simple and intuitive controls children choose a rocket or unicorn character to trace the letters they have written. The letters appear in AR as a layer of almost magic rocket dust or rainbows over the child’s original work.

More information:

https://technologyeduc.com/narrator-ar/

3D Printed Organs

Progress is being made in the development of 3D bioprinted organs, with researchers at Israel's Tel Aviv University anticipating transplantation-viable organs to become available in a decade. Milestones to date have included Poland-based researchers’ bioprinting of a functional prototype of a pancreas that realized stable blood flow in pigs, and U.S.-based United Therapeutics’ 3D-printing of a human lung scaffold. Multilayered skin, bones, muscle structures, blood vessels, retinal tissue and even mini organs all have been 3D printed. While none of the printed products are yet approved for human use and the first 3D bioprint from live cells to be implanted in a human, marks a significant moment along that progression.

In 3D bioprinting, the name of the game is cells. The process begins by generating the cells that researchers want to bioprint, which are then instructed to become organ specific cell types. The cells are then rendered into a printable living ink, or bioink, that involves mixing them with materials like gelatin or alginate to give them a toothpaste-like consistency. Stanford’s lab is studying how stem cells might naturally form such a consistency if crammed together at high density, which could lead to 3D printed organs made strictly from a patient’s own cells. However, most researchers put the idea of full-sized 3D-printed organ transplantation in humans somewhere between 20 and 30 years away.

More information:

https://fortune.com/well/2023/02/15/3d-printed-organs-may-soon-be-a-reality/

ChatGPT Controls Robots & Drones

Microsoft scientists are controlling robots and aerial drones with OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot. The researchers used ChatGPT to simplify the process of programming software commands to guide robots, because the AI model was trained on massive datasets of human text. They initially outlined in a text prompt the various commands the model could use to control a given robot, which ChatGPT used to write the computer code for the robot. They programmed ChatGPT to fly a drone and have it perform actions, as well as to control a robot arm to assemble the Microsoft logo from wooden blocks.

Although the research shows ChatGPT’s potential in robotics, the approach still has a key limitation: the chatbot can only write the computer code for the robot, based on the initial prompt or text-based request the human gives it. Hence, a human engineer must thoroughly explain to ChatGPT how the application programming interface for a robot works, otherwise the AI program will struggle to generate applicable computer code. Still, the other limitation is how it appears the robot needs to be constantly connected to ChatGPT.

More information:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-researchers-are-using-chatgpt-to-control-robots-drones