Smell-o-Net, Earwax Cinema, Mechanical Tiger, Silent Speaking Translation, Better Nut Shelling, Walking/Throwing Bots, Shake-and-Sweat Exercise, Robotic Parking Garage, Deep(est)-Sea Diving, a Giant Spiderbot and Your Own Techno Sanctuary! Here we offer an array of oddly interesting machines and tech toys.

Tower of Babel Translator
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University are developing a “Tower of Babel” device that should enable all users to silently mouth a word in their own language for it to be translated and read in another.

The translation systems currently in use work via voice recognition software, but this requires people to speak out loud and then wait for the translation to be read out, making conversations difficult.

With the new device, however, electrodes are attached to the neck and face to detect the movements that occur as the person silently mouths words and phrases. Using this data, a computer can work out the sounds being formed and then build these sounds up into words, BBC News has reported. The system is then able to translate the words into another language, which is read out by a synthetic voice.

As of last fall, the team had two prototypes: one that could translate Chinese into English and another that could translate English into Spanish or German. If the prototypes used a small vocabulary of about 100-200 words, they worked with about 80 percent accuracy, researcher Tanja Schultz said.

Smell-o-net and Smell-o-vision
A South Korean think tank recently released its latest prognostication paper, not only imagining that mobile phone batteries will last two months between charges by 2012, but that the Internet will be used to deliver smell data by 2015.

Reminds us of news mid-last year from NTT Communications, which announced that technologies used for its Web-linked fragrance system were specially employed at selected theaters in Japan for showings of the Colin Farrell/Christian Bale film “The New World.”

Moviegoers experienced various scents to heighten their sense of joy, love, sadness, etc., during key scenes. The system used a special scent-emitting device programmed with information obtained via the Web, and scents were emitted into the theaters using devices placed under viewers’ seats.

Now Showing: ‘Earwax Excavation’
But forget about going to the theater for another Colin Farrellized adaptation of an old TV show — when Japanese company Coden offers a line of products that combine a pick with a small video camera that allows you to actually watch what’s going on inside your ear while you scrape around to clear out the wax.

The GXL model of the company’s line of Ear Scopes comes with a personal eyepiece to navigate through your ear while the Ear Scope TV sports a separate LCD screen for a bigger view and possible screening session, according to Engadget just last week.

The strange ‘Scopes start at about 16,800 yen ($140).

Mecha Tiger
Below is a custom-built mechanical tiger created by an artist and taken out for its first ride in Brugge, Belgium. Tiger Shiva has a 50 horsepower, four-stroke Rotax, liquid-cooled engine with six gears, according to the artist’s Web site.

Better Sheller
An estimated half-billion people rely on peanuts as their primary protein source. Yet many sun-dried peanuts are too hard to shell by hand.

Jock Brandis, a North Carolina inventor and TV/movie engineer, has devised the Malian Peanut Sheller, “an inexpensive, virtually indestructible machine that lets an operator shell nuts 40 times faster than by hand, cranking out 125 pounds per hour,” according to Popular Mechanics. “The real beauty of Brandis’s butter-churn-size concrete sheller is that it can be made anywhere, using a pair of fiberglass molds.” (Video)

A documentary has even been made about the hand-operated peanut sheller. Next up: a pedal-operated sheller that Brandis is perfecting.

World’s First Dynamically Balancing Walking Humanoid Bot
Here’s a great video of a robot developed by a U.S. company called Anybots. In this video clip, “Dexter” shows off its ability to “dynamically balance” — it even manages to take a shove from a bullying wheeled bot without any problem.

Exercise: Shake it Up, Sweat it Out
As if holding a pose isn’t difficult enough (try yoga), Ironman’s Resolution Vibration Trainer ($2,000) claims to help users lose weight by shaking them as they pose. Seriously. You hold a sequence of positions, including squats and legs-in-the-air crunches, for up to 90 seconds at a time while the platform vibrates. Ten minutes of this, says Ironman, is equal to 60 minutes of “conventional strenuous exercise.” (Video)

Another new machine promises to shed pounds simply by standing on it. TurboSonic ($12,995) uses sound waves that produce frequencies to stimulate your cells, claiming to improve muscle strength, flexibility, bone density and circulation. In only 10 minutes a day, according to Vibration Health Systems, you get the benefits of a complete workout in the gym.

See also: Electronic Treats

Under the Sea
The Industrial Technology Research Institute’s new second-generation POPO — a robotic fish — can go for extended swims, during which it relies on an advanced artificial intelligence system and an ultrasound emitter to avoid collisions with moving and stationary objects, according to DigiTimes. Taiwan’s ITRI, the developer of the little guy, is actively trying to create a new underwater life form as part of its Aqua project. Like many of the items in this post, we’re not completely sold on the revolutionary implications of this. But who knows?

Perhaps even more interesting (though not exactly new), scientists at the University of Washington have developed an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that can stay out to sea for up to a year and dive to depths of nearly 9,000 feet — “nearly three times deeper than the deepest-diving military submarines,” according to Wired. Deepglider, the 71-inch long, 138-pound device, is made of carbon fiber that can withstand the deep ocean’s immense pressure. The energy-efficient, battery-powered glider carries sensors to measure oceanic conditions including salinity and temperature — information that is key to oceanographers understanding climate change.

Ballin’ Bot
We just fawned over Anybots’ dynamically balancing robot Dexter (three items up), and now Monty (Dexter’s bro?) already has a new trick. It might not look like much, but according to Dexter’s developers:

Throwing a ball to someone is difficult, but even more difficult is using visual information of a ball in flight to put your hand in the right place within a few hundred milliseconds, and then actually *close* that hand within a few tens of milliseconds.

There is little (i.e. none) information on the Anybots Web site about how this throwing/catching process works, or whether or not the robot is capable of tracking a subject (e.g. an elderly passerby) and hurling a ball in the subject’s direction.

Ford SYNus Mobile Command Center
Still in the prototype stages, the Ford SYNus seems to be intended for the day when we no longer have houses and we just rove the streets in our armored vehicles, like classy versions of the Road Warrior. Described as a “techno sanctuary,” the SYNus is meant to provide comfort in a congested (Get it? SYNus? Congestion? Ugh.) area with a mini-home theater with multi-configuration seating and multimedia workstation, and 45-inch LCD from Sharp. The whole thing is controlled by your laptop via Wi-Fi. When parked and in “secure mode,” it deploys bulletproof shutters over the windows and windshield (which are bullet-resistant, anyhow). It also has a driver-side combination lock for people who forget their keys a lot.

We presume it will be available in any color you like; the color pictured above, we presume again, is “post-apocalyptic gloomy gray.”

Robotic Parking Garage
The latest breakthrough in gee-whiz convenience: the robotic parking garage, a machine that stores and retrieves your car — unmanned — in 90 seconds.

Built beneath a new Chinatown condo and developed by AutoMotion, New York’s first automated parking system uses a combination of elevator mechanics, lasers and motion sensors to pack 67 cars into a basement that would only fit 24 spots under traditional configurations.

According to Popular Mechanics:

You pull in from the street and a flatscreen monitor prompts you to park on a grooved pallet platform. Then you lock the car and leave, taking your keys with you. Motion sensors double-check that you’re gone and close a retractable door while four overhead lasers create an invisible tent to make sure your car fits on the pallet. Punch a few buttons on the interface in the garage lobby, and the systems sensors, software and motors begin lowering the pallet underground for its 90-second journey to its parking space.

Once lowered inside the underground garage, the pallet holding your car slides onto a massive, track-riding lift, and a new pallet slides onto the elevator, ready to accept the next vehicle. Meanwhile, the lift travels through the middle of the garage, rotating your car on a turntable so that it faces the street when you retrieve it. As your car nears its space, the lift slows to a stop and the pallet slides gently into a cubicle.

Giant Spiderbot Tractor
Below is a very strange tractor from a now-defunct Finnish subsidiary of John Deere, Plustech. A few years old (we posted this video on IMT once before), nonetheless the Plustech Oy Walking Machine would adapt to the forest floor terrain by making what we can only imagine as deft usage of its six articulated legs. Forward, sideways, diagonal — whatever it took, this machine could handle. Its motions were all computer-controlled, and the user interface to the operator was — wait for it — a good ol’ joystick.

Imagine stumbling across one of these on an afternoon nature hike.