At Mobile Marketing were proud to help tech companies showcase their cutting-edge solutions; the Startup Showcase at our Mobile Marketing Summits gives a platform to those companies, and brings audiences one step closer to ideas and developments that are breaking new ground in the market.

In that spirit, our Innovation Lab feature takes a step beyond the world of apps, ads and handsets with slightly bigger screens, in order to share some of the tech worlds innovative ideas. They might be interesting, disruptive or just outright strange, but these are the stories that have caught our eye over the past week.

Samsung Unveils Mirrored and Transparent OLED DisplaysWhile Samsung has abandoned OLED in its consumer televisions in favour of Quantum Dot LCD, its found a new use for the technology in the commercial sector with these newly unveiled mirrored and transparent displays that resemble something out of Star Trek or Minority Report.

The displays integrate Intel RealSense technology, enabling users to control them using gestures, while the clear and mirror designs open up a world of possibilities and applications. Samsung says their focus with the technology is “making the consumer purchasing experience more visually engaging,” indicating a clear drive towards the high-end retail market.

The displays, which were unveiled showing a virtual necklace from the Chow Sang Sang jewellery company, can serve as a virtual fitting room, enabling customers to see clothes projected onto their reflection in real-time.

“Samsung Displays revolutionary Transparent and Mirror OLED display solutions will drive retail and digital signage leaders, and their customers, to further innovate through greater manipulation of the Intel RealSense platform order to deliver highly differentiated, exquisitely personalised customer experiences,” said Jose Avalos, worldwide visual retail director of the retail solutions division at Intel Corporation.

YouTube Engineer Builds Laser Shotgun

“There’s no, no good reason for anybody to own something this powerful, but because it wasn’t illegal for me to build, I decided to build it anyway.”

YouTube personality Styropyro gives us some words to live by in his video detailing how he constructed a laser shotgun. The device projects eight laser diodes through a focusing lens to produce a single 40-watt beam, in the same way the choke on a shotgun funnels the pellets into a tighter pattern.

For some perspective, most conventional laser pointers tend to have a power of around two milliwatts, while the most powerful lasers on the UK consumer market sit at around one to two watts.

The video shows off the power of the device, which pops balloons almost instantaneously and sets fire to ping pong balls, flash paper and a block of wood in a matter of seconds. Certainly something to add some excitement to your next PowerPoint presentation

Work Out While Flying Through Virtual Space

Staring at the same terrible music channel or Sky News every time you run on the treadmill or use the rowing machine at a gym can be enough to make anyone question their fitness regime. German design firm Hyve has come up with a novel solution with their Icaros concept home gym.

The device uses smartphone accelerometers to monitor user activity then translate it into actions in a virtual world, enabling users to fly over the Moon, down the Amazon or through a crashing wave as they work out.

The horizontally mounted set-up means that the device creates an immersive sensation of flying, while the articulated braces for your arms and legs allow you to work out your shoulders, abs and quads as your power yourself to Mars or swim into a volcano.

A Holographic Display The Whole Family Can Enjoy

The Holus, created by H+ Technology, aims to turn holograms into a family-friendly tech that everyone can gather around and enjoy, utilising a unique pyramid-shaped display to enable the projections to be viewed from any angle.

The device, currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, includes a motion-tracking interface, wireless pairing through wi-fi or Bluetooth, and features a dock for tablets or mobiles to connect so content playing on them can be holofied.

The Kickstarter offers backers the option of a Pro model that includes an SDK tool, enabling developers to experiment with the limits of the device, but the main aim seems to be in creating something that can be used for family games, education and even holographic video calls. Who knows – perhaps were looking at the television of the 21st century?

US Government Working on Software to Identify Tattoos

Teaching computers to identify images has been one of the famous long-standing problems in programming, but when those pictures are drawn onto someones arm or back, the issue becomes even more complex.

Thats why the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US hosted a technology challenge earlier this week, asking computer scientists to help the government develop a way to automate tattoo recognition, enabling faster identification of criminals and victims of crime.

“The state-of-the-art algorithms fared quite well in detecting tattoos, finding different instances of the same tattoo from the same subject over time, and finding a small part of a tattoo within a larger tattoo,” said Mei Ngan, the computer scientist at NIST who organised the challenge. “Improving the quality of tattoo images during collection is another area that may also improve recognition accuracy.”

Current law enforcement systems for tattoo identification rely on manual entry and searches based on keywords, both of which are time-consuming, flawed and prone to human error. An automated database could help law enforcement considerably, especially given the fact that one in five Americans now has a tattoo.