From the Contra Costa Times
UC students show "Next Big Thing" inventions
By Suzanne Bohan
You step into your closet to consult a computer on the attire most appropriate for the weather and your business meeting. At work in hard labor you don a black belt that warns when a movement might hurt your back. At a project conference, you and colleagues use digital pens to chart the progress in planning for a goal. When the work flow depicted as water fills the reservoir, you're done. These are among the possibilities of the rapidly developing digital world as envisioned by a group of UC Berkeley students. Kimiko Ryokai asked her students to design inventions for a future in which computer interactions are ubiquitous. "Today's computers are getting smaller and cheaper, and they're everywhere," Ryokai said at a demonstration this week of 11 interactive inventions in her School of Information class. "We need to think about interacting beyond the desktop," she said....