TEC Japan has created the Tobidasu Menu, a touchscreen embedded into restaurant tables that allows patrons to browse a digital menu by touch and view food in 3D.

The menu also packs a few other neat tricks. For example, place a hamburger bun on the screen and when you lift it up there will be a juicy 3D hamburger sitting there (picture of this after the jump).

Tobidasu Menu is a clever idea, and comes at a time when touchscreens are popping up all over the place. TEC has not said if or when the system would be available in restaurants, but we wouldn’t mind ordering our food via touchscreen sometime soon. If it’s anything like a real menu, though, the real food won’t look anywhere near as good as its virtual counterpart. Read more »

Japanese researchers have developed a fire alarm that sprays the strong smell of horseradish, just in case you can’t hear the noise.

The alarm is suited towards deaf people who will now know with the rest of us when there’s a fire in the house. It will probably be a help to the heavy sleepers as well.

In tests, the alarm was able to wake up 13 out of 14 people without making any noise at all, with deaf subjects much more receptive to the smell.

Those clever Japanese are always coming up with ingenious solutions, and this is another one of them. This alarm would surely be a great help to society, keeping deaf (and sleepy) people much safer. The only thing is… would people really have to change the horseradish substance in the alarm every time it goes off?

Japanese researchers are working on a device that will let you control all sorts of gadgets by simply blinking your eyes.

The system, called the Kome Kami Switch (or “Temple Switch”), monitors movements of the temple using a single-chip computer and two infrared sensors. It is so tiny that it could be built into the side of a pair of eyeglasses.

Controlling an iPod is the most prominent use right now. Deliberately closing both eyes for a second turns the iPod on, and doing it again turns it off. Winking the right eye skips to the next song, while winking with the left eye skips back a song. Read more »

Toyota has developed a system that automatically puts on a car’s brakes when it expects a stop sign. The Navi Brake Assist system works by combining data from the GPS system and a rear-mounted camera to know exactly when a stop sign is coming up and using that data to help you come to a stop at the perfect spot.

It sounds a bit unsafe, but the system uses the camera to cross-reference road markings with the locations of stop signs it expects to make sure the car is exactly where it thinks it is. Once the car is within 100 meters of a stop sign, the Navi Brake Assist signals with a sound and soon after starts applying the brakes on its own.

A system like this is hard to get right as any sort of software bugs could mean huge trouble. The system is undergoing trials in four Japanese cities right now, so we’ll see how well it really works.

Hitachi has just announced the W61H cell phone, a sleek device that features a 2.7-inch E-Ink display on the backside that can show one of 95 predetermined patterns on it (users can change the pattern shown).

In addition to the ‘Silhouette screen,’ the phone features a 2.8-inch display with a 240×400 resolution, a 1.97 megapixel camera, and a built-in 2GB micro SD card.

The phone has launched in Japan only, with no current plans to release a US version anytime soon.

The inclusion of the E-Ink display is pretty cool, but it’s very unfortunate that it’s only for aesthetics. Would be nice if it would show incoming calls, the time, or something else useful. More pics after the jump. Read more »