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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.

Whatever your opinion of the ever-increasing number of surveillance cameras pointed at us, their proliferation creates a tricky logistical problem for those doing the watching – how do we make sense of the information overload of so much video?

We’ve heard a only little before about the three-dimensional computer processors that promise to be the way ahead to an even faster future, so it’s encouraging to see that Honda has succeeded in creating a working 3D chip.

Although small robots like Aibo and its ilk and flashy bipedal ‘droids such as Asimo tend to hog most of the robotic limelight in the non-specialist press, it’s generally well known among researchers that machines that boost the ability of humans to do tasks they find difficult are most likely to change our lives in the near future.