Cool tech announcements this year: 2013 in Review

Google Glass is a wearable computer that will enhance your life / invade your privacy / get you thrown out of restaurants / need charging often / make you cool.  

With videos, photos, maps, directions, search, email and Path it promises to become the indispensable accessory for savvy geeks.  

Mercedes-Benz has created an invisibility cloak for a car. This technology uses flexible LED mats which reproduces the background image of the car’s surroundings.

There is a camera mounted on the opposite side of the car. The image that is recorded is transmitted to the LED panel which displays the background whilst the car moves.

It was only a matter of time before this became a reality. The world’s first metal, not plastic, 3D printed gun was produced this year.  It successfully fires bullets too.

The gun was made from of 30+ 3D Printed components with 17-4 Stainless Steel and Inconel 625 materials. The hand grip is also printed using 3D "Selective Laser Sintered (SLS)" technology.

Google-owned Motorola Mobility submitted a patent application that will be a device “that comprises an electronic skin tattoo capable of being applied to a throat region of a body.”

The tattoo will contain a microphone embedded in the electronic skin tattoo, a transceiver that enables wireless communication, a power supply to receive energizing signals from a personal area network (PAN) associated with the mobile communication device.

There is a controller and audio detection from the throat and near field communication field communications system to communicate with the personal area network.

The hyperloop super fast transportation system will be an elevated tube built between two cities. Pods would run back and forth inside the hyperloop tube and accelerated at up to 800 miles per hour by electric motor pulses.

Cushioning and friction reduction would be possible using air bearings placed near the underside of the pods. The proposal also mentions vacuums situated at the front of the pods which will suck in air and reduce friction.

On Cyber Monday Amazon announced that it would be using drones to carry out of its future deliveries. The drones, which could carry up to five pounds for 10 miles , would cover 86 percent of the goods Amazon sells.

Planned drone deliveries could become reality in four or five years.

Andrew Ng, from Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab and his team have created a massive neural network which is over six times the size of Google's 2012 achievement.

Google’s previous network had 1.7 billion neural connections taught itself to recognise cats on YouTube videos. This new network has 11.2 billion neural connections.

Mind controlled cars are not a completely new idea. In 2011 technology was developed in Berlin to drive a car using your mind. Now Alejo Bernal a graduate from the Design Academy in Eindhoven  has created a concept to control a toy car with the mind.

It is intended to help overcome concentration problems associated with attention deficit disorder. To drive the vehicle, users wear an electroencephalography (EEG) headset that measures electrical activity within the neurons of the brain which converts the activity into signals that control the toy car.