Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Prometheus Mapping Balls Soon to be a Reality


I'm always interested to learn about examples of sci-fi technology becoming real.  Remember the balls used in Prometheus to map the cave containing the decapitated Engineer and the alien eggs?  Referred to as "pups," they fly around the cave emitting red light and the data they send to a computer on the Prometheus is used to create a 3-D map.  An inventor named Francisco Aguilar has created something very similar.  Known as the Bounce Imaging Explorer, the device is a baseball-sized throwable probe containing several cameras and other data collecting instruments.  Aguilar designed it for use in disaster zones where rescue workers can throw the high-tech balls, which will take pictures and measure the presence of poison gases and send the data to a synched phone or tablet that will generate a panorama of the area with environmental warnings.  He hopes the device will make the jobs of first responders a bit safer. 
       

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