Robots have got pretty good at picking up objects. But give them something shiny or clear, and the poor droids will likely lose their grip. Not ideal if you want a kitchen robot that can slice you a ...

Kitchen robots are a popular vision of the future, but if a robot of today tries to grasp a kitchen staple such as a clear measuring cup or a shiny knife, it likely won't be able to. Transparent and ...

Popular three-dimensional (3D) TV or film media primarily relies on misleading our visual system by presenting our two eyes with spatially offset two-dimensional (2D) images. In comparison, volumetric ...

Although we've seen color-changing coatings before, they generally just switch between two solid colors. MIT scientists have developed a new system, however, that allows coated objects to take on ...

Imagine you’re in IKEA, looking for a plastic kitchen stool. You find one, but—darn—it’s turquoise, which just doesn’t match your home color scheme. No problem. You tell a salesperson, who pushes a ...

Picking up transparent objects is hard when you’re a robot. Many of the traditional cameras and sensors just can’t get a good enough view to tell the grasper where to go. The light from infrared ...

How we interact with objects in the world often depends on what colors we perceive them to have, and on how those perceived colors accord with what we know to be the normal or 'canonical' colors of ...

Three-dimensional printing has come a long way since the first 'rapid prototyping' patent was rejected in 1980. We've evolved from basic designs to a wide range of highly-customizable objects. Still, ...

WASHINGTON -- A new imaging technique makes it possible to precisely digitize clear objects and their surroundings, an achievement that has eluded current state-of-the-art 3D rendering methods. The ...

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