The problem with 3D cinema - other than the sheer crappiness of most of the movies - is that it's a distinctly passive experience. Wouldn't it be better if the film reacted to you too?
That's the thinking behind Scenario, a positively creepy 3D interactive experience that combines 3D and AI to create something really quite disturbing: a cinema experience where you need to overcome sentinels to collect body parts. Thankfully it's unlikely to turn up in your local fleapit any time soon.
The knee bone's Kinected to the thigh bone
Scientists have found a way to control surgical robots with Kinect, solving a key issue with robo-surgeons: they have no sense of touch, so it's easy to lop off something you shouldn't.
Electrical engineering professor Howard Chizeck of the University of Washington thinks Kinect technology could be the answer.
It doesn't mean surgeons controlling the bots by dancing, however: the hacked Kinect sensor is at the other end, providing depth and location information that is relayed to the surgeons in the form of force feedback if they get too close or too stabby.
DON'T WORRY: Nobody's trying to control one of these through the medium of dance [Image credit: Wikimedia / Nimur]
Bird's-eye baldy cam
Men! Are you worried about receding hair? Then we have good news: at this year's CeBIT electronics show, Hong Kong firm Spec unveiled what we've decided to call The Baldy Brush.
It's a super-smart hair brush with a built-in camera and magnifier, and whenever you brush your hair it films your head, analyses the footage and works out whether the dreaded male pattern baldness is putting in an appearance.
SMOOTH: Do you really need a high-tech hair brush to tell you that your head looks like this?
We're sure you'll agree, that's much easier, cheaper and more sensible than touching the back of your head and seeing how smooth it is.
The eyes have it
Yahoo News clearly knows how to draw us in: "Ever wish your eyes were lasers?" it asks. Sadly, our dreams of zapping slow-moving pedestrians remain mere dreams, because Yahoo's talking about an eye-tracking laptop rather than a kick-ass superpower.
Lenovo's prototype uses Tobbii's eye-tracking technology, twin infrared lights and cameras that look for "glints" from your eyeballs and reflections from each retina.
The cameras can pinpoint exactly what you're looking at - so your eyes could control the mouse, or a game character could maintain eye contact with you. Commercial versions are just two years away.
The Time Traveller's Strife
The problem with time travel, as we all know, is the Grandfather Paradox: if you went back in time and killed your grandfather, then you would never have been born - so you'd never have existed to go back in time to kill him and so on. But it turns out that there's an alternative to the kill him/don't kill him binary, and we don't mean kicking him really hard in the nuts.
According to a Physorg article that, to be honest, Weird Tech doesn't understand a word of, researchers have worked out "how time travel might be accomplished even in the absence of general relativistic closed timelike curves". We know! We thought general relativistic closed timelike curves were pretty much a prerequisite!
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