Just like scanner in "Total Recall," the terahertz scanner can spot metallic weapons through clothing.

The New York Police Department is working with the Department of Defense to develop a scanning device that would allow them to detect concealed firearms on a person 80 feet away. The scanner detects electromagnetic waves with a frequency in the terahertz range. Terahertz waves sit at the higher frequency end of infrared on the electromagnetic spectrum, just before the microwave range. The device works the same way an infrared detector does. Just as our bodies emit infrared radiation, so do they emit terahertz waves. These waves can pass through non-conducting material such as paper or clothing but are blocked by conducting material such as a piece of metal – or a gun. So if a person has a piece of metal under their jacket, such as a gun, the police will see the telltale outline of the weapon. The waves also pass unperturbed through wood and brick so the device can scan through walls.

The NYPD has a prototype that they’re testing at the department’s Rodman’s Neck shooting range in the Bronx. Right now, the prototype only has a range of three to five meters, but they hope to eventually be able to scan for weapons on people up to 25 meters, or 85 feet, away.

Of course, we can’t mention police and scanners and people without mentioning the ACLU. The New York Civil Liberties Union isn’t taking a hardline stance against the frisking from a distance. In a statement, the group acknowledged New York’s problem with gun violence and pointed out that using the scanner could decrease the city’s stop-and-frisk rate by a half-million people annually. They also caution that “the ability to walk down the street free from a virtual police pat-down is a matter of privacy.”

New York state’s handgun licensing regulations are among the strictest in the country. As a result, 90 percent of guns used in New York crimes are illegal and from out-of-state. Currently the method for sniffing out guns tucked into jackets and jeans is to stop the person and frisk them. According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, 88 percent of these stop-and-frisks carried out in the city turn up nothing. That’s a lot of inconvenienced, annoyed and embarrassed people. In 2011, however, the NYPD collected over 800 guns – including an AK-47 – through stop-and-frisk. If police were able to park a van on a street corner and scan the people as they walk by – exactly the scenario the NYPD has in mind – the amount of people being screened would obviously increase dramatically. But, as the NYCLU’s point indicates, not everyone’s going to take kindly to being frisked without even knowing it.

No doubt trying to allay these types of concerns, NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly said that the police department has been in discussions with their lawyers for the past three years and that they foresee no constitutional issues with the device, reported NBC New York.

Privacy rights aside, they’re going to have other problems if they stop too many people with concealed iPhones and Androids.

[image credits: Law Enforcement Today and Scrape TV]
image 1: Terahertz
image 2: Total Recall

The scanR App lets you convert photos to PDF and send them via email or fax number. Business just got more mobile.

Smart phones are becoming mobile business centers. Forget about texts, phone calls, emails, and web browsing, phones can now handle the ultimate office technology: the fax machine. Yep, ScanR has developed applications for iPhone, Nokia Symbian, Android, and Blackberry that let you turn the phone’s camera into a scanner and send documents via email or fax. Take a photo and the ScanR app will send it to their server’s to be processed into a high quality PDF that can be sent anywhere via email, or to a recipient in over 90 different countries via ScanR’s fax service. You can try a limited version of the iPhone App for free, or pay $4 for the complete software. I’ve got a quick video of the App in action as well as a sample PDF for you below. Check them out.

Yeah, I’m not sure how much you’ll use the fax capabilities of ScanR, but I can see the scanner (aka PDF converter) as fairly helpful. There are other such scanners in the App Store, but most are slightly more expensive and I can’t find a free one (anyone else want to try?). Executives may be a little wary of sending documents to ScanR’s server to be processed, but everything is automated and (ScanR claims) private. Typical processing times for me were less than 2 minutes, and sometimes much faster, as seen in the video:

Of course, the quality of each scan is really hit or miss. ScanR uses your camera phone after all, so expect all the benefits and tribulations that come with that. The curved surfaces of a book lead to some problems with converting image to text. I ripped a page out of a book (I apologize to librarians everywhere) and placed it on a flat surface. This really helped. ScanR lets you convert photos to PDFs as well, which I tried with a high contrast color photo of some flowers. The result was fairly decent. See for yourself below. Overall I’d say the ScanR App is user friendly, probably pretty helpful, and fast.

Click photo to see PDF document.

The original photo can be seen here.

But things are going to get much better. There’s at least one group out there trying to put far superior scanning technology in your phone. Eventually you could scan an entire book as easily as I scanned a single page. Smart phones already serve as fairly functional mobile business centers now. In the near future they’ll become what they were always meant to be: single point access to the rest of humanity, and the collective knowledge of the world.

[screen capture and video credit: Singularity Hub]
[image credits: Singularity Hub via ScanR]
[source: ScanR]

Finger goes in, Coke comes out. Easy, huh?

The biometric sensor in Hitachi’s new vending machine uses light to scan and read the number and orientation of veins in your finger tip without directly touching a sensor. This provides a unique code for access to a credit card account that has to be established independently of the vending machine. While the machine is only a prototype, and Hitachi hasn’t yet decided whether or not to make a commercial version, the concept itself is more than enough to be causing a buzz. It’s far from the first use of a biometric sensor, but it has the potential to be the most commonly seen application of the technology.

Even if the vending machine industry doesn’t jump on Hitachi’s band wagon, the biometric sales option is ready to be explored. With credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard already providing a “tap and pay” system for cards, consumers may become more confident with payments that don’t require signatures or even human-human interaction. This means that finger scans could very well become a break-out technology. If you’re willing to tap a card, why not just point your finger instead?

Hollywood movies often portray biometrics as added levels of security for very expensive items or collections. Eye scans to enter bank vaults spring readily to mind. The speed of biometric verification, however, makes it just as sensible to go in the other direction. Need to pay $5? Just let the machine count the veins in your index finger. It’s faster than reaching for your wallet. Which may or may not be a good thing. It’s unclear if the hassle of paying for things has a profound affect on the way we spend money. There may be a lot more impulse purchases when you can pay for things by just tapping your finger.

Amazingly, this isn’t the only way that vending machines are getting complex. There are vendors with LCD display and touch screens, and others with conveyor belts or claws instead of those twisting springs. I think that they serve as a good testing ground for emerging commercial technologies. After all, like new high-tech ATMs, they are one of the few public machines that interact with hundreds or thousands of people each day.

With biometrics looking to identify you through your ear, or even your brain, the finger vein technology from Hitachi seems like a more acceptable option. It will be interesting to see if the concept of linking credit cards to a biometric scanner becomes widely popular. Perhaps it will be adopted somewhere else. iTunes? Kindles? Pay toilets?

Lots of lasers and stuff...

The idea behind it is fairly simple.  Well, as simple as one can get when lasers are involved.  The laser scans the object and takes a 3D snapshot of the face, employing the devilishly tricky wave-particle duality theories to get 400 data samples per square inch.  The computer then automatically takes the data points and strings them together to make a 3D computer model that is easily imported into other CAD software.

Depending on how big the item is, a couple of scans at different angles might be required.  That might sound daunting but, with the visual editing software that comes bundled with the package, it’s a cinch.  What, you say?  Too lazy to go through and put your own 3D scans together into one image?  Then sit back and let the AutoPositioner automatically move the sample.  No, serious.  It’s pretty neat.  Check it out in the video below.

NextEngine says it takes about two minutes to complete a scan and that about 12 scans will get an article fully scanned.  Call it about a half hour to cheat reality?  That seems like a win for NextEngine.  They also claim that, at a price of only $3000, their scanner can operate better than the competition at a tenth of the cost to the consumer.  Things just seem to be getting better for the company.  They’ve even got Jay Leno on their case.  Check that out below as he scans a broken part and creates a new one out of plastic using a 3D printer.  The scan is so good that they even scanned an adjustable wrench and, after printing it out in plastic, it was fully workable.

3D printing has been around for quite a while, but this type of scanning is not as old hat.  But it is yet another way that humans can interact with computers and bring the two worlds closer together.  That pairing of man and machine is exactly what the future holds.  So, there’s no brain-interlink to make it so the user no longer needs to press buttons.  Who cares?  This scanner can turn the tangible into the digital.

Combining the 3D scanning technologies with 3D printing allows for objects to flow freely between the real world and that of computers in ways that only thoughts and ideas could flow previously.  Yes, parts have been designed on the computer and fabricated in real life for quite some time now, but this is the beginning of an age where anybody can bring a 3D object into their computer, edit it to suit their needs, and print it back out in a fully functioning form.  3D printing might not be perfect yet, but it seems that 3D scanning is already getting there.