Robots now enter the agriculture industry, too. First the award-winning rice-transplanting robot, now this: Major Japanese conglomerate Fuji Heavy Industries has developed an agricultural robot that can tend fields autonomously.

Pioneer has showcased the Floating Vision at the Digital Contents Expo in Tokyo (that ended Sunday), another 3D display that doesn’t require you to wear glasses (yawn) to view 3D images. It’s not bad at all though, even though visitors flocked to Sony’s booth to see their stereoscopic 3D display (which was a bit cooler).

You can connect the Floating Vision to a PC via USB 2.0 to view images or videos “floating” over the display (5.7 inches, 640 × 480 VGA resolution). What’s pretty cool is that you can “interact” with the image, as the device detects your hand movements. It’s also possible to “control” an image with your voice (the device has a mic on its front). Both Windows PCs and Macs are supported.

Tire maker Bridgestone isn’t the first company that comes to mind when thinking about electronic paper, but the company has been experimenting in this field for quite some time now. Today, Bridgestone claimed that it has developed the world’s first flexible e-book reader [JP]. The device, which is pictured above, uses electronic paper (instead of, say, an LCD) and will display the content on the screen even after you turn it off.

The Tokyo Polytechnic University has showcased c-loc at this year’s Digital Contents Expo, a spectacular mapping software for “time and space” that runs on a touch screen. The technology looks super-futuristic, and it not only works but is actually useful, too.

Not much info on this yet, but NEC is apparently preparing a mobile PC that’s reportedly as “capable as a personal computer” for business customers. The yet to be named device features three main buttons and a 7 to 8-inch LCD display (which appears to be a touch screen). Sorry, the small picture is all that’s available at this point.

The Koike Laboratory from the University of Electro Communications in Tokyo was responsible for one of the most spectacular booths at the Digital Contents Expo that ended in Tokyo yesterday. They developed an “augmented tabletop video game with pinching gesture recognition”. The device is basically a touch screen running an action game.

Video after the jump.

Hello Kitty is 35 years old now, and she still continues to be the dream cartoon cat of millions of teenage girls. If you’re one of these people and have a penchant for gadgets on top of that, this new and strictly limited music player might be the right thing for you. The so-called Hello Kitty Music Player Crystal [JP] is the result of a cooperation between iriver Japan, Hello Kitty company Sanrio and luxury brand Swarovski Crystal.

Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology has showcased its most spectacular robot at the Digital Contents Expo in Tokyo today, the “cybernetic human” HRP-4C. The humanoid can’t move her legs, but the way she moves her arms, head and facial muscles is unbelievably human-like. Or you could say unbelievably creepy.

I stumbled upon this strange thing today at the at the Digital Contents Expo in Tokyo, a virtual reality capsule chair developed by the Iwata-Yano Laboratory at the University of Tsukuba. The so-called “Media Vehicle” mounts a spherical display and is supposed to let passengers move around both in the real world and a virtual reality environment.

Sony is demoing a 3D display at the Digital Contents Expo that takes place in Tokyo right now, and today I went there and made a few pictures and shot a video of the device, too. Two of the 360 stereoscopic displays were displayed to the general public, and the tech is pretty impressive.

Sharp Japan announced today it has developed a solar cell with the world’s highest conversion efficiency [press release in English]. The new product features an conversion efficiency of 35.8%, while Sharp only achieved 31.5% with the previous model. The latest model is a compound solar cell, in which two or more elements form photo-absorption layers (see the graphic below).

The hardware designers at JVC Victor in Japan seem to have seen 2001 – Space Odyssey once too often.Or why else would their new speaker system (specifically made for Apple music player) look like they’re straight out of that movie? The XS-SR3 [JP] will be available in black and white.

Toshiba has been announcing fuel cells for home use for ages now, but it seems the announcement [press release in English] they made today is really serious. The company has unveiled the Dynario today, a mini fuel cell that can charge mobile devices on the go. Japanese mobile gadget geeks can already order the fuel cell on Toshiba Japan’s online store (where it’s available exclusively).

The Tokyo Sky Tree broadcast tower, currently under construction, has been announced as the tallest building in the world once it’s completed (which will most probably be the case in the spring of 2012). But now Japan obviously fears to lose this (future) title to a tower currently under construction in Guangzhou Province in China, which seems to achieve a height of 610m.

Tokyo-based home electronics company Lancerlink [JP] has announced the Finemini720 today, a palm-sized LCOS projector. Sized at just 50×150×125mm, the device weighs 800g. It’s equipped with a 25W LED, produces 55 lumens of brightness and produces 1,280×768 resolution images.

56 year old German entrepreneur Klaus Richter is selling ready-for-use condom factories, meaning you can order a complete manufacturing facility from him, and he ships practically everywhere. What may sound as a joke at first is serious business: Richter has so far sold over 100 factories worldwide.

Tokyo-based Solid Alliance is slowly but surely evolving into a serious competitor for Thanko in the wacky gadget department. So far, the company gave us a USB Ninja knife, a USB Terminator 4 skull and a spectacle-shaped USB stick. And now this: The aptly named “Crazy Earphones” [JP] (that’s their official name).

Sanyo has rolled out a number of projectors in the past months, but brightness-wise, their new LP-XF1000 [press release in English] beats them all. The dual lamp projector boasts not less than 12,000 lumens, made possible by two 330W lamps. Needless to say, this is the industry’s highest brightness (in an AC 100V device).

Japan’s second biggest mobile phone carrier KDDI au showed their new cell phones [JP] for this winter. The first of the eleven models will be available in Japan as early as this month.

Complete line-up after the jump.

First the dish washing robot, then an assist cart robot: It was a big day for Panasonic’s robot division. This cart robo, a one-seater, is specifically designed for use in hospitals and nursing homes where it’s supposed to move medical equipment and things like wheelchairs.

We have reported about a number of household robots from Japan in the past. Those machines covered areas like preparing sushi or pancakes, cleaning the house or the toilet. Last December, we reported about a kitchen robot that’s able to do your dishes without breaking them. And today, Panasonic showcased an updated version of that very robot in Tokyo.

The Pentax K-x was announced last month, and it seems to be a very decent entry-level camera. We already reported the device will be available in a few different colors in Japan, while the US only gets black, white, and red models. And today Pentax said in Tokyo [JP], they are ready to roll out a very special version of the K-x, which is a particularly colorful model inspired by the so-called Kore Ja Nai robo toy [JP].

It’s not really a secret: Japan loves vending machines. So it’s not really surprising this newest (and quite unique) model is made in Nippon, too: A vending machine that lets you buy luxury wines through a pre-paid card. The machine is supposed to soften the negative effects the current recession has for wine lovers.

Deutsche Telekom’s e-book reader probably has gone the way of the Dodo, but the Germans are still getting a home-made Kindle competitor. The device, dubbed txtr, was announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair that’s happening in Deutschland right now, and it will become available in that country as soon as December 1 (as pre-order).

The txtr is the product of a Berlin-based start-up of the same name. It features a 6-inch grayscale e-ink screen, a microSD slot (an 8GB card is included in the package, 1GB flash), an ARM11 CPU (532MHz), 64MB RAM, a micro-USB port and “ultra-long battery life” (company quote). The device is sized at 151×131×12 mm and weighs 281g.

Mitsubishi Electric has announced [JP] the LPV-HC3800 for the Japanese market today, a full HD DLP projector that features a contrast ratio of 3,000:1, 1,200 lumens brightness and a DDP3021 full 10-bit panel driver. The device comes with a 230W lamp that has a lifespan of 5,000 hours and depending on the operating mode, it can be as quiet as 25dB.