Monday, October 22, 2001		Lens on IT

A new vehicle called "the pod", developed by Japan's Toyota Motor Corp and electronics giant Sony Corp, will smile, frown and cry, not to mention take your pulse and measure your sweat. It has been designed to show emotion and learn from driver experience and will be on display for the first time at the Tokyo Motor Show that begins this week. 

England and Manchester United player David Beckham is seen as a computer-generated image launching a new computer game called 'David Beckham Soccer'. Beckham fans will be able to practise match winning shots with this new game for Sony PlayStation and Nintendo Game Boy Advance platforms. 

A passerby walks in front of an advertisement for a job hunting Website in Hong Kong. Hong Kong's unemployment rate surged to 5.3 per cent in July- September, its highest level in 17 months, as the economy slowed and the government warned of more job losses to come.

A model shows how the recently developed pill camera, which has just been successfully tested on 13 Australian patients, is swallowed during a display in Sydney. The capsule, developed using Israeli military technology and with the U.S. space agency NASA, contains a colour video camera, a light source, transmitter, antenna and a battery. A belt containing an information processor is strapped over the abdomen, with the patient then swallowing the pill and it travelling through the gastrointestinal tract viewing areas beyond the reach of an enteroscope. Around seven hours of video footage is condensed into two hours which is then viewed by a doctor to look for any intestinal bleeding. 

— Reuters photos