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This week’s Digital Content Expo at Miraikan is one of the less corporate tech shows on the Tokyo calendar, so it’s no surprise to see some pretty kooky engineering like the Funbrella from a grad-student team at Osaka University.

Remember the delightful bipedal ‘bot from Masanao Koeda that we saw 18 months ago? The research platform was all about teaching robots to move more like humans and turn around on the spot easily.

As the world’s supply of fossil fuels shrinks, it’s heartening to see one company pressing ahead with serious plans for alternative ways to power our homes.

When I visited NTT last October for a private demo of its new cellphone RFID loyalty-card system, it was still in its early stages of development, so there wasn’t a great deal to write home about at the time.

The Osaka-based electronics maker will be investing a whopping ¥6 billion ($65 million) to build a new solar cell plant in Kaizuka, Osaka Prefecture.

Next-generation smart tags could be produced using memory that is made not from silicon, but instead is squirted out of an inkjet printer.

Hey – you know those boring old forms of carbon we’re so familiar with? Yeah - diamond, graphite, amorphous carbon, fullerenes and nanotubes, right?

NTT DoCoMo’s corporate videos have long been a Big Deal for the 800lb gorilla of a phone company, so it’s always worth checking out the latest to see the public face it wants to present to the world.

Details are scarce on this one, but sources in Japan are reporting that Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings is seriously engaged in research that aims to move the chemical industry away from oil dependence towards a future based on something altogether more illuminating.

The marvelously named Pacific-Rim Symposium on Image and Video Technology, which kicked off this morning here in Tokyo, is home to many wondrous devices, but few as likely to alter our lives as a piece of software from Toshiba.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen phones that purport to translate between languages, but NEC’s claims for its new mobile travel interpreter are certainly among the grandest.

Hydrogen fuel cells are clearly a great idea, but the fact that much of the gas that goes into them still comes from fossil fuels is a bit of a problem. That’s why researchers are looking at alternative sources of hydrogen from substances as diverse as dough and sewage.

A thin mat that creates electricity from footsteps has been installed at Tokyo’s Shibuya train station to harness the kinetic energy they expend as they pass through ticket gates twice a day.

If you thought – like most of the scientific community – that quantum computers using photons of light for calculations were half a century away, then think again.

When it comes to safely storing hydrogen for car fuel cells, Buckytubes may be the future, but the here and now appears to be carbon fibers that can contain a lot more of the pressurized gas.

Voice-powered technology can be pretty hit and miss at the best of times, but a new approach to creating remote controls that hang on our every word looks promising.

A signature on a piece of paper in Japan this week means that the country can now start work on commercializing a new generation of high-tech trains that make the current bullet trains look like pedal-bikes.

We don’t have any photos of this for you yet and if we did it wouldn’t really help, so it’s going to have to suffice if we tell you that Panasonic claims it has just created the world’s first 3D HD plasma home cinema system.

Less than a year after it launched the world’s first OLED television – the XEL-1 – Sony is looking to compete with an entirely different line of next-generation displays called FEDs.

Personally, I think Panasonic‘s DSM-Hand is cool not because it can grab a glass without either dropping it or breaking it (I can do that sometimes), but because it uses gears instead of motors to drive its joints.

One other cool thing I saw at the super-funky Panasonic Center last week was the company’s take on a wall-mounted surface computer.

Not satisfied with a future vision that already includes flexible screens and wafer-thin phones, a pair of Japanese companies has pushed the envelope to come up with far-fetched gadgets that do all of the above without ever going near a power socket.

Should Homer Simpson ever try to smuggle his unqualified identical twin brother into work in his stead, a new biometric identification system that will be used to secure nuclear plants is sure to prompt a “D’oh!” or seven.

We recently lifted the lid on just how useful – not to mention pervasive – RFID technology is in Japan, so it’s with a glad heart that we bring you news of a move that’s sure to help it spread more quickly in the West.

The field of disability aids has seen many devices controlled by computers that visually track the eye movements of paralysed people, but none that reads the electricity given off by swiveling eyeballs.

Robots are good for plenty of things, but having a meaningless chat generally isn’t one of them – something that has to change if a group of Japanese researchers are to be believed.

One of the more low-key exhibits at the Display 2008 show in Tokyo was a new kind of e-paper that promises an electronic experience far closer to real paper than anything we’ve seen before.

Aside from flashy 3D displays, the other big draw for fans of future tech at Display 2008 in April was electronic paper in at least 57 flavor-packed varieties.

Flat-panel displays are so mainstream these days they have an entire massive exhibition dedicated to them – the Display Expo in Tokyo. That’s where the technologies we’re likely to see in the shops over the next few years get an early airing, and we were there last month.

Alternative fuel is all very well, but it’s pretty damn hopeless, regardless of good intentions, when all you can get on Main Street is regular gasoline by the liter.

Ever wondered what we’ll all be reading on the hover bus in The Future?

Most of the breakthroughs in high-speed data connections that we hear about are of purely theoretical value in the short term, but Oki Japan seems set to buck the trend by committing to making its latest technology commercial in the near future.

Call us cynical, but it’s a sad world when a researcher has to sex up his work by linking it to ‘cool’ things like iPods before it gets any press attention.

A seemingly bizarre experiment in genetically engineering plants has come up with a strain of rice that could make vaccination injections a thing of the past.

Now that it’s all grown up and mature, electronic paper is stating to get out a bit more and enjoy life – its latest sortie sees it appearing on train station ticket gates as a variety of advertising posters.

One welcome side-effect of the new breed of ultra-thin TVs has come to light in a recent report from Hitachi Japan – apparently, they’re better for the environment.

If you happen to stop over at Kita Kyushu airport in the southwest of Japan this month, don’t be surprised if the porter offering to carry your bags is a four-foot green chap with an oddly metallic voice.

As we’ve mentioned in the past, the new breed of OLED televisions represented by Sony’s XEL-1 have plenty of assets, but an active lifespan shorter than that of LCD or plasma screens isn’t one of them.

If you’ve ever had the misfortune to dial into a virtual private network (VPN) for a spot of long-distance telecommuting, you’ll doubtless be overjoyed to hear of a new technique that gives the slowcoach technology a boot up the backside.

The idea of a far-distant future where we can upload our very essence to some digital repository in the ether is both compelling and repulsive in equal measure, but a less sci-fi alternative may be closer than we think.