The Seed Fund recognized their latest winners at a Gala Night award ceremony on March 14, 2012. The winners shared their projects with gala attendees, who included members of our community, management, faculty, staff, KICP (KAUST Industrial Collaboration Program), and local business entrepreneurs. Each award was co-sponsored by Citibank.
Envirola: (Rimantas Kodzius) – A heavy metals detection instrument that provides an ease-of-use portable solution at low cost, with a wide range and high degree of accuracy
iDivers: (Michael Berumen) – The first solution to enable full functionality of touchpad devices underwater
MuseTech: (Steve Cutchin) – A photo-real 3D immersive environment allowing museum visitors to feel as though they have been transported to a remote location
NOMADD: (Georg Eitelhuber) – The NO Water Mechanical Automated Dusting Device cleans desert-based solar installations cost effectively and in an environmentally responsible manner
Seed Fund is a product development funding mechanism that can help move promising ideas further toward commercialization, and ultimately lead to the formation of a new business. We work with KAUST scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs and encourage all to apply for future seed funding.
For more information visit: http://newventures.kaust.edu.sa/seed-fund
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It seems one of the most important value propositions of idivers is
the possibility to send messages underwater between devices and
receive gps signal for geolocation and navigation purposes.
How will this be possible given that WIFI and UMTS are strongly attenuated by seawater!
From Professor Michael Berumen:
We are keenly aware of the problem of EM attenuation underwater. However, my colleagues and I have decades of experience in using underwater communication technologies at frequencies that can travel hundreds of meters or even kilometers through water using a specialized form of acoustic transmissions (kHz ranges). We have deployed nearly a thousand tags on fish to track their movements using this technology. One of the key innovations of the iDivers project is creating a housing that, in addition to enabling full touchscreen use underwater, will also allow device-to-device communication using acoustics. Our goal is not to use BlueTooth, UMTS, or WiFi, but rather to use our own custom-built acoustic transmitters and receivers for basic communication between devices. We are not promising that you can download emails or load YouTube videos online while underwater! (Well, at least not anytime soon — and trust us, we would be the first to take advantage of that if we could!) Even simple text messages, via basic unit-to-unit acoustic communication, will be a huge step forward for many reasons, not least of which is enhanced safety while diving.
As for the GPS and navigation: That does require yet another innovation, the core technology of which is described here:
http://rsrc.kaust.edu.sa/Pages/Integrated-Satellite-Acoustic-Tracking-System-(iSAT).aspx
We are in our third year of development of this surface-based, satellite-enabled unit that will communicate via acoustics to a unit underwater. If the surface unit knows its GPS location and can determine the distance and direction of the underwater unit, then it can provide reasonably accurate location information to a diver.
Our primary motivation to develop these tools was to enhance our research operations, but we have enjoyed working with Economic Development and now the Seed Fund to explore their commercial potential. We have so far received wonderful support from many departments and the whole of the KAUST community, and we look forward to the day when we can let everyone play with iPads underwater!
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document.getElementById(“Ecomment”).innerHTML=”I want to thank The Lens team for editing my comment and making it more suitable to be read by everyone removing the technical aspect of my question. If the ipad case will have its own built in transceiver for sending data underwater that’s really cool! Wish you the best on your project!”;
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