S-STEM Scholar Andre Ta's Blog

      This past week, I went to the Interactive Wonderspaces Museum in Scottsdale, and found something that took me by surprise. There was this attraction called the Human Study by Patrick Tresset and it was a machine or set of machines that worked in collaboration to draw photos of humans.       According to Patrick Tresset's website, it's a form of arm where the human becomes an actor. As seen in the picture above, the actor is placed in a seat in front of multiple robots and are woken up by an assistant. The robots are all identical except their eyes, which are either digital cameras or webcams. The object of the human study is to create robots that are minimal in design that are capable of drawing from observation. The drawing style of the robots is very minimal and looks like sketches. I think the most interesting thing is how the robot moves. It comes off as very human in the way it will move its up eye and down from the human to the paper a...

      Unfortunately, I have been stumped on the direction I want to take my application after seeing similar ones fail, but I've been on a huge technology kick just researching a lot about new products that are coming out and how they are changing the future of how we experience things. The most recent thing I've been researching is OLED screens. Nowadays, OLED has become a staple in almost every single field that involves a screen of some sort. Nintendo just recently released their OLED Nintendo Switch. Samsung's latest phones have all included an OLED screen to complete with Apple's Liquid Retina Pro Displays. Even TVs are adopting OLED and evolving it from OLED to QD OLED.            According to an article by Hong Jae Shin and co., OLED stands for organic light-emitting diodes. This means that each diode or pixel on a screen emits its own light. This differs from regular LED or even mini LED because they require backlight to showcase...

      I did a lot of personal research this week about something that absolutely blew my mind. There was a smartphone that released earlier this year that had all of the standard specs that someone could ask for in a phone; 5000mAh battery, HDR10+, 108MP main camera, and a Snapdragon 888 processor. All of this sounds amazing in a phone, but the thing that blew me away is the fact that the company that created that phone, Xiaomi, somehow figured out a way to safely incorporate fast charging of up to 120W.     Just to put that into perspective, an article by AppleInsider did multiple tests to see how fast Apple's iPhone 13 Pro Max charged with their 30W charger. According to their tests, Apple's phone charged from 0 to full in about 86 minutes with their charger maintaining about 27W for about 30 minutes and then caps off at 22W for the rest. For comparison, both phones use a Lithium-ion battery and both phones are roughly the same size with the iPhone having a 6....