Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed an optical switch that is capable of rerouting light between computer chips within 20 billionths of a second. The new device is faster than any similar devices, and it could be integrated into low-cost silicon chips due to its low voltages. When it redirects light, the chip suffers very low signal loss. The new chip will have big implications for computing, and it will help develop a computer that processes information using light rather than electricity. There are several advantages to using photons in order to transport data including faster travel and energy efficiency.

Researchers at the University of East Anglia, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon University and Disney have created a way to animate speech in real-time. With their method, rather than having skilled animators manually match an animated character's mouth to recorded speech, new dialogue can be incorporated automatically in much less time with a lot less effort. To do this, the researchers recorded over eight hours of audio and video of a speaker reciting more than 2500 different sentences. The speaker's face was tracked as they spoke, which was used to create a reference face for an animation model. Off-the-shelf speech recognition software was then used to transcribe the speech sounds.