thetic material also has a long shelf life, which could make it particularly useful in fi rst-aid kits. The material’s fi rst application will probably come in the operating room. Not only would it stop the bleeding caused by surgical incisions, but it could also form a protective layer over wounds. And since the new material is transparent, surgeons should be able to apply a layer of it and then operate through it. “When you perform surgery, you are constantly suctioning and cleaning the site to be able to see it,” says Ram Chuttani, a gastroenterologist and professor at Harvard Medical School. “But if you can seal it, you can continue to perform the surgery with much clearer vision.” The hope is that surgeons will be able to operate faster, thus reducing complications. The material may also make it possible to perform more procedures in a minimally invasive way by allowing a surgeon to quickly stop bleeding at the end of an endoscope.
Chuttani, who was not involved with the research, cautions that the work is still “very preliminary,” with no tests yet on large animals or humans. But if such tests go well, Ellis-Behnke estimates, the material could be approved for use in humans in three to fi ve years. “I don’t know what the impact is going to be,” he says. “But if we can stop bleeding, we can save a lot of people.” Ellis-Behnke and his colleagues are also continuing to explore the material’s nerve regeneration capabilities. They’re looking for ways to increase the rate of neuronal growth so that doctors can treat larger brain injuries, such as those that can result from stroke. But such a treatment will take at least fi ve to ten years to reach humans, Ellis-Behnke says.
Even without regenerating nerves, the material could save countless lives in surgery or at accident sites. And already, the material’s performance is encouraging research by demonstrating how engineering nanostructures to self-assemble in the body could profoundly improve medicine.
FINDING YOUR WAY around a new city can be exasperating: juggling maps and guidebooks, trying to fi gure out where you are on roads with no street signs, talking with locals who give directions by referring to unfamiliar landmarks. If you’re driving, a car with a GPS navigation system can make things easier, but it still won’t help you decide, say, which restaurant suits both your palate and your budget. Engineers at the Nokia Research Center in Helsinki, Finland , hope that a project called Mobile Augmented Reality Applications will help you get where you’re going—and decide what to do once you’re there.
Last October, a team led by Markus Kähäri unveiled a proto type of the system at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality. The team added a GPS sensor, a compass, and accelerometers to a Nokia smart phone. Using data from these sensors, the phone can calculate the location of just about any object its camera is aimed at. Each time the phone changes location, it retrieves the names and geographical coördinates of nearby landmarks from an external database. The user can then download additional information about a chosen location from the Web—say, the names of businesses in the Empire State Building, the cost of visiting the building’s observatories, or hours and menus for its fi ve eateries.
The Nokia project builds on more than a decade of academic research into mobile augmented reality. Steven Feiner, the director of Columbia University’s Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Laboratory, undertook some of the earliest research in the fi eld and fi nds the Nokia project heartening. “The big missing link when I started was a small computer,” he says. “Those small computers are now cell phones.”
Despite the availability and fairly low cost of the sensors the Nokia team used, some engineers believe that they introduce too much complexity for a commercial application. “In my opinion, this is very exotic hardware to provide,” says Valentin Lefevre, chief technology offi cer and cofounder of Total Immersion , an augmented-reality company in Suresnes, France. “That’s why we think picture analysis is the solution.” Relying on software alone, Total Immersion’s system begins with a single still image of whatever object the camera is aimed at, plus a rough digital model of that object; image- recognition algorithms then determine what data should be super imposed on the image. The company is already marketing a mobile version of its system to cellphone operators in Asia and Europe and expects the system’s fi rst applications to be in gaming and advertising.
Nokia researchers have begun working on real-time image-recognition algorithms as well; they hope the algorithms will eliminate the need for location sensors and improve their system’s accuracy and reliability. “Methods that don’t rely on those components can be more robust,” says Kari Pulli, a research fellow at the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, CA.
All parties agree, though, that mobile augmented reality is nearly ready for the market. “For mobile-phone applications, the technology is here,” says Feiner. One challenge is convincing carriers such as Sprint or Verizon that customers would pay for augmented-reality services. “If some big operator in the U.S. would launch this, it could fl y today,” Pulli says.