Archive for February, 2010
Printing body parts: Making a bit of me
“Dr Atala’s process starts by taking a tiny sample of tissue from the patient’s own bladder (so that the organ that is grown from it will not be rejected by his immune system). From this he extracts precursor cells that can go on to form the muscle on the outside of the bladder and the specialised cells within it. When more of these cells have been cultured in the laboratory, they are painted onto a biodegradable bladder-shaped scaffold which is warmed to body temperature. The cells then mature and multiply. Six to eight weeks later, the bladder is ready to be put into the patient.”
The Economist
ReflectOns: Mental Prostheses for Self-Reflection
“Certain tasks such as figuring out number of calories consumed, or amount spent eating out, are generally far more difficult for the human mind to grapple with. By using in-place sensing combined with gentle feedback and understanding of an individual’s goals, we can recognize behaviors and trends and provide a reflection of their own actions that is tailored to enable better understanding of repercussion of actions, and change their behaviors to better match their own goals.”
fluid interfaces
Screens in Space
“Each helicopter is “a smart pixel,” we read. “Through precisely controlled movements, the helicopters perform elaborate and synchronized motions and form an elastic display surface for any desired scenario.” Emergency streetlights, future TV, avant-garde rural entertainment, and even acts of war.”
BLDGBLOG
Al Gore Joins Richard Branson in Backing GreenRoad
“The GreenRoad system looks simple from the outside: There’s a two-inch device on the dashboard that starts the day with a green light. If a driver brakes hard, swerves or turns recklessly, the light turns yellow. If the driver continues to drive erratically the light stays yellow. If it gets worse the light turns red. That’s it. But like a lot of apparently simple ideas, there’s a lot more going on under the hood.”
Techcrunch
Macmillan’s DynamicBooks Lets Professors Rewrite E-Textbooks
“In a kind of Wikipedia of textbooks, Macmillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks, is introducing software called DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes. Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably, rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations.”
NYTimes.com
Click and Grow – growing plants via computer
“The Click & Grow system doesn’t use soil as a growing medium. Instead it relies on aeroponics – a growing system that grows the plants in an air or mist environment. All failed green thumbs need do is place a plant cartridge containing some seeds into the pot, fill the water tank and upload the proper growth program to the pot and the Click & Grow system will take care of the rest. Although basic models include notification lights to let growers when the water tank needs refilling, more expensive models will even free growers of this task by collecting water from the air.”
Gizmag
3D printed shoes
“This laser-sintered 3D-printed shoe, by Naim Josefi and Souzan Youssouf, was displayed at Stockholm’s Fashion Week.”
Boing Boing
The Surreal World of Chatroulette
“The social Web site, created just three months ago by a 17-year-old Russian named Andrey Ternovskiy, drops you into an unnerving world where you are connected through webcams to a random, fathomless succession of strangers from across the globe. You see them, they see you. You talk to them, they talk to you. Or not. The site, which is gaining thousands of users a day and lately some news coverage, has a faddish feel, but those who study online vagaries see a glimpse into a surreal future, a turn in the direction of the Internet.”
NYTimes.com
Kodak: Print Facebook Photos From In-Store Kiosks
“Over 475 million consumers use Kodak’s
in-store photo-printing kiosks, and now they will be able to print pictures directly from their Facebook photo albums. Google’s Picasa service and Kodak’s own “Kodak Gallery” albums will also be available. ”
i4u
» dilight: luminous little beads
“japan-based dilight are lucky to be nominated with their bead-shaped LED lights installation. the self-claimed branding studio strung the LED beads along wires to create a display and invite the viewer to interact. an electronic current is passed through the wires, ‘which generates the lights when it is reconverted into energy by coils inside each bead’.”
Matandme
A Scent Visualization Tool
“A group of researchers at the University of Illinois have developed an inexpensive way to visualize scent through the use of specially developed inks. The dyes, which are placed on a polymer film, react to various chemicals and change colors accordingly. The resulting images paint a scent profile of what they are measuring. There are myriad applications, but one of the more novel is the ability to detect when you’ve burnt your coffee.”
PSFK
MWC: Stantum Multitouch 10-Finger Displays Coming Soon
“Stantum’s resistive touchscreens are reported to be incredibly sensitive. They can handle 10 finger multitouch AND support haptic feedback, pixel precision, and pressure sensitivity. Basically, they are the perfect touchscreens. Stantum says they are capable of supporting up to 11” displays. There’s no word yet on when we can expect to see actual devices that use these wonder-screens, but sometime after Q2 2010 is likely.”
Design Boom
misa digital guitar
“the misa digital guitar is the creation of the sydney-based, misi digital, allowing users to play guitar on a multitouch display. the guitar has buttons for every string at every fret and a large display on the body which shows the user’s actions in a heat-map like pattern. the guitar is all digital transferring the player’s physical actions into digital sounds. the guitar is still in the prototype phase and may soon be available.”
Design Boom
Bell & Ross Peugeot SR1 Watch integrates in futuristic Dashboard
“The Bell & Ross Peugeot SR1 is a wristwatch and also the dashboard clock of the new Peugeot SR1 concept car. Drivers can take off their Bell & Ross Peugeot SR1 watch and attach it easily within the car’s dashboard. On the futuristic dashboard of the Peugeot SR1, the Bell & Ross watch is the only analogue instrument, which does not really work for me as a concept. It looks forced. On the other hand the Geneva Motor Show 2010 is a fine place to advertise luxury watches.”
i4u
Phone Game Needs No Server
“The game uses a computing middleware system, called Ibis, originally developed for high-performance, distributed computing tasks, such as image processing or astrophysics research, but which Kemp and colleagues have adapted to run on Android phones. “It allows each phone to run a lightweight communication server,” says Kemp. The devices can communicate directly with the game, which is hosted on both handsets, using a 3G connection or Wi-Fi. Known as Photoshoot, the game offers a modern-day take on the old gun-slinging shootouts of the Wild West by fusing the real world with virtual play”
Technology Review
Experiencing Abstract
“To demonstrate the systematics, we built three interactive installations. By using them you become an interactive diagram in a virtual mirror, cause virtual water-pollution in a water-basin or compare the time you have to work in different countries to buy a big mac or some bread. All of these installations show a different approach of immersive data transfer.”
New Ways of Interaction
Try On Watches at Home Thanks to Augmented Reality! (a Concept)
“Clip out a placeholder watch, log on to their site and actually try products on.”
Gizmodo
PleaseRobMe website reveals dangers of social networks
“The site scrutinises players of online game Foursquare, which is based on a person’s location in the real world. PleaseRobMe extracts information from players who have chosen to post their whereabouts automatically onto Twitter”
BBC News
Sound Scape Music System by Hyunsoo Choi, Hyori, Kim & Gisung Han
“The system beams out relaxing images (via the LED projector located in the circle) of clouds, water and other “nature-beauty” stuff. The size of the projected image can be customized via the sensor parameters that accompany the system. Basically it focuses on making you happy with visual treats, when you play some music.”
Yanko Design
Online network for tweens requires offline introductions
“Created by parents concerned about whom their kids were communicating with online, FaceChipz caters for tweens, who have outgrown traditional children’s websites but aren’t yet ready for the open social networking experience. FaceChipz has all the features of any other social network, but the one major difference is that kids can only interact with people with whom they’ve physically exchanged unique tokens—FaceChipz.”
Springwise
Fitness device coaxes users into action
“The device has an indicator light that changes colour according to how much energy the wearer is burning over the course of a day, and it vibrates if the user has been inactive for too long: a polite reminder that it is time to get moving.”
Springwise
Artificial Foot Recycles Energy With Every Step
“In tests on subjects walking with an artificially-impaired ankle, a conventional prosthesis reduced ankle push-off work and increased net metabolic energy expenditure by 23% compared to normal walking. Energy recycling restored ankle push-off to normal and reduced the net metabolic energy penalty to 14%.”
Gizmodo
GoBandit HD Tracks Your Extreme Sporting With GPS
“If you don’t quite think you have what it takes to GoPro, now you have another option: GoBandit. This waterproof, GPS-enabled videocam can capture your finest moments in HD and then overlay the footage with location, speed, and altitude data. In addition to capturing 720p video, you can set the GoBandit to take 5 megapixel snapshots every 2 or 5 seconds”
Gizmodo
Controlling Phones With the Body Electric
“The company built a chip into a cellphone that detects disruptions to an electrical field around the device. So if the phone rings, you just need to pick it up and hold it in the palm of your hand to answer the call. Goodbye, talk button. By contrast, if you grab the phone, peek at it quickly to check the number and then put it back in your pocket, the phone will go silent and send the call to voicemail. As the examples show, the iDent chip is sensitive enough to detect subtle differences in how strong or where a person grips the cellphone. At its heart, the technology relies on measuring how dramatically an electrical field has been affected by the human body.”
NYTimes.com
Hollrr Takes Foursquare’s Badge Strategy, Pins It To Social Product Discovery
“Hegarty says that unlike some sites, Hollrr’s badges aren’t just based on simple tasks like sharing a lot of items. Instead, the site rewards users for sharing items that people actually found useful. And there’s also a set of ‘trailblazer’ badges, which rewards users who recommend a product that later goes on to become popular. These aren’t things anyone can do — the idea is that these users will be able to look back at these badges and feel some pride in their accomplishments.”
TechCrunch
New role for robot warriors
“Dr. Arkin has begun work on an ethical system for robots based on the concept of “guilt.” As a robot makes decisions, such as whether to fire its weapons and what type of weapon to use, it would constantly assess the results and learn. If the robot established that its weapons caused unnecessary damage or casualties, it would scale back its use of weapons in a future encounter. If the robot repeatedly used excessive force, it would shut down its weapons altogether – though it could continue to perform its other duties such as reconnaissance.”
CSMonitor.com
Wired has me sold on the iPad
“Unlike Sports Illustrated’s poorly-presented e-magazine demo, Wired’s looks like the real deal. People have been promising us interactive magazines ever since the advent of the CD-ROM, but now it looks like we’re finally getting it: The combination of a useable tablet and Wired’s intelligently-designed layout seems prepared to deliver a truly fantastic multimedia magazine experience.”
Core77
3D printing comes to ceramics
“After some calibrating I decided to print a test design that would be hard to make using conventional techniques: a double walled vessel with fins connecting in- and outside. I was expecting mostly failure but it finished without to much trouble! Due to the restrictions of Skeinforge expecting 3d models, the walls are double filament (1.5mm total).”
Boing Boing
aikon drawing robot
“the aikon project began in 2004 at goldsmiths university of london as a mechanical system designed to mimic strategies deployed by an artist to represent faces with a line. the second iteration of the project came into being around 2008 and aims to go deeper to identify how artists can capture something with a few lines, in a few seconds?”
Design Boom
Digital Cosmetic Mirror: Try On Makeup Virtually
“By using augmented reality, customers can now try on makeup on virtually. The customer sits in front of a camera, which scans their face. Shoppers can then choose to try assorted colors, shades, products, and techniques by interacting with a touchscreen. The machine then gives recommendations, based on the face scan, and produces a ‘before/after’ image reference (with specific product recommendations highlighted) for the shopper to assess which products are right for them.”
PSFK
New technology allows for simultaneous high-speed video and high-res stills
“The technology, called Temporal Pixel Multiplexing (TPM) was developed by scientists at the University of Oxford. They wanted a better way of imaging the rapid changes in light intensity of fluorescent molecules, inside heart cells. The scientists built their system using off-the-shelf components of digital cameras and projectors, for a fraction of the price of the equipment currently needed for similar results.”
Gizmag
TweetCatcha: Visualizing Tweets of NYTimes News Articles
“All the tweets are arranged around a set of 24 rings, one for each hour in the day. The location of a tweet is based on the time difference from the article posting to the time the tweet was created. If a tweet was posted less than an hour after the article, then it would be very close to the inner most ring, and vice versa.”
information aesthetics
The Clavilux 2000
“For every note played on the keyboard a new visual element appears in form of a stripe, which follows in its dimensions, position and speed the way the particular key was stroke. Colours give the viewer and listener an impression of the harmonic relations: Each key has it’s own color scheme and “wrong” notes stand out in contrasting colors”
New Ways of Interaction
Tableau Public: Visualize and Share your Data Online via the Desktop
“Tableau Public is specifically designed for anyone who likes to post content to the web as interactive charts, graphs, maps(!) or dashboards, with data that can be shared online, think bloggers, journalists or sports stats fanatics. Its biggest difference with its many competitors sits in the necessity to download a (~16MB) desktop application first. Tableau Public can connect to Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, and multiple text file formats, and is limited to a (probably still generous) 50MB online storage restriction. The desktop program saves all work to the Tableau web servers, so that nothing is saved locally on one’s computer”
information aesthetics
Sensor Controlled Interface For Sharing Music Libraries
“Amusity is an interactive interface, designed to make the act of sharing music with friends a coffee table experience. The platform reacts to commands initiated by Speaker, Video, and Audio “Objects,” which are sensor-based physical items that trigger the control of the interface when placed on the screen. The design incorporates intuitive visualizations of users’ music libraries, as well as natural gesture movements for initiating commands.”
PSFK
Pa++ern: Tweet-to-embroidery production
“This art installation, originally designed by Daito Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi, allows Twitter-users to tweet instructions to web site that replies with an example output. Upon approval it sends the design to a bank of industrial sewing machines which then embroider the resulting pattern onto a t-shirt”
Make
New Nanofiber Tech Could Make Your Clothes Positively Electrifying
“Forget grades of wool—the clothing of the future’s going to be measured in millivolts. Researchers at UC-Berkeley have created electricity-generating nanofibers that could someday be woven into your clothing. The fibers are about 100 times thinner than a human hair, but can generate electrical outputs of up to 30 millivolts. Even better, their piezoelectric properties allow them to mechanical stress and twisting into electricity:”
Gizmodo
TED 2010: Wired for the iPad to Launch by Summer
“Aside from a technical glitch that halted the demo at one point, Clark moved smoothly through pages, horizontally and vertically. Readers can sift through the contents horizontally and when they find an article they want to read, touch and drag their finger on the first page vertically to browse through the pages up and down. They can also turn the device horizontally to take advantage of the automatically-rotating display to view two pages side by side like a magazine and zoom out to see thumbnails of the content all at once.”
Wired.com
“Living Goods” Barcode App Makes Buying Local a Breeze
“One of 18 Greener Gadgets finalists, the AUG/Living Goods Program is a conceptual mobile phone app that scans product barcodes and then instantly gives the low-down on the producer, how far the food has come, if the product is in season, historical pricing, detailed consumer ratings and your own purchasing history.”
Inhabitat
Wi-Fi School Bus Promotes Good Behavior
“A school district in Arizona is testing out a new method for expanding study time and keeping the peace on school buses. After installing a wireless router on one of their school buses, the Vail school district has found that rowdy behavior has dropped, and students are actually getting work done on the ride to and from school.”
PSFK
Delight Cloth
“Delight Cloth is a light-emitting textile comprised of thousands of fiber optic strands. With a diameter of only 0.25 to 0.5 mm, the optical fibers are woven into a large translucent tapestry that can be hung vertically or horizontally. The material may be used for wall or ceiling treatments, as well as banner signage or clothing. Delight Cloth can be fabricated with imbedded graphics or logos, and may be used to emit a wide variety of colors of light.”
Transmaterial
Nature’s hot green quantum computers revealed
“The evidence comes from a study of how energy travels across the light-harvesting molecules involved in photosynthesis. The work has culminated this week in the extraordinary announcement that these molecules in a marine alga may exploit quantum processes at room temperature to transfer energy without loss. Physicists had previously ruled out quantum processes, arguing that they could not persist for long enough at such temperatures to achieve anything useful.”
New Scientist
Wearable Robot Provides Shared Virtual Experiences
“The device allows for an interactive telepresence experience, giving the controller of the device the ability to virtually share in the experiences of the wearer. Proposed applications have included everything from uses for the elderly and disabled, to rudimentary Avatar-like implementations.”
PSFK
Power-generating wearable tech couture
“Dandelion is a wearable kinetic sculpture that generates electricity through small, flower-like windmills.”
Make
eVouse Mouse Concept Bridges Regular Mice With Air Mice
“This concept, which designer Marcial Ahsayane shoved a Microsoft logo on, transforms from a right-side-up B2 bomber in regular mouse mode to a holy-crap-stop-turning-so-sharply B2 bomber in air mouse mode. You use the latter mode to do stuff “like drawing, “optical pens” do, like drawing and pointing at stuff”
Gizmodo
Writing: OmmWriter – Write those Posts/Papers Quicker…
“As such i thought i would write a quick post about OmmWriter, a new kind of word processor that somehow takes away the distractions, presenting a full screen experience without any icons or clutter in sight. In fact the only thing i can see at the moment, as i type, is a winter scene and a tree lost in mist at the bottom right of the screen – such is the interface. While your typing OmmWriter also plays gentle calming music, its all very new age and to be honest something we would normally run a mile from. Its certainly a long way from the ethos that is all things digital and urban.
Yet, there is something strangely compelling about the whole experience”
Digital Urban: Writing
MASTABA: Family Digital Shrine
“MASTABA is a household shrine in the future where families including some generations hands down their memories through digital pictures. In MASTABA user can see the pictures when they were at the same age side by side. And user can select the age when the picture was taken, with lighting the caracole consists of 100 steps indicating age 0 to 99 years.”
MASTABA
Corky Mouse Generates Energy With Every Click
“The Corky mouse uses piezoelectric elements to generate energy every time you click or move it around on your desk – even rolling the scroll wheel will generate a few watts. We’ve seen many watches that harvest kinetic energy, so the technology is definitely available, and it makes a lot of sense in this application. Since computer mice function through movement, why not harness that expended energy? Adele is also considering the device’s sustainability from a systems-based approach – something we love to see in industrial design. Plans are included for regional sourcing and assembly, product take-back and recycling, and disassembly data will be easily accessible for recycling centers.”
Inhabitat
Dog-e-Minder Reveals What a Bad Pet Owner You Are
“Each button has a symbol related to an activity. The “fire hydrant” symbolizes walk time, the “dog bone” represents feeding time and the “RX” symbol records the last time medication was administered. When you perform any one of these activities, simply hold the corresponding button down for three seconds and the current date and time is saved. To view stored information, just press the appropriate button once, and the display shows the last time the task was completed. When idle, the Dog-e-Minder also acts as a dog identification tag, displaying important pet name and owner contact information.”
Gizmodo
World’s Smallest Solar Sensor Could Run Indefinitely
“The measurements are an amazing 2.5 x 3.5 x 1 millimeters. The sensor uses an ARM Cortex M3 processor and consumes about 2,000 times less power in sleep mode than current commercial products. Its total average power consumption? Less than one-billionth of a watt. And while it needs a half a volt to operate, its Cymbet battery outputs close to 4 volts. Not only is it an impressive feat of engineering, it could eventually find all kinds of practical medical uses, up to and including being placed in the body and running on heat or movement”
Gizmodo
Auto bodywork composite doubles as a battery
“The prototype material is a composite of carbon fibers and a polymer resin which can store and discharge large amounts of energy much faster than conventional batteries. Unlike these there is little degradation in the material over time because there is no chemical process involved, and this also aids more rapid recharging. It is lightweight and strong enough to make car body parts, and could be plugged into the household power supply for recharging. Researchers say the next stage is to further develop the composite in order to store more energy. This may be achieved by growing carbon nanotubes on the surface of the carbon fibers which will increase the surface area, thus improving its storage capacity.”
Gizmag
No need to touch – just give it a wave!
“Gesture Cube uses 3D spatial movement tracking to help transform navigating a device into a magical intuitive experience. The underlying GestIC® technology detects your hand´s approach and movements – your favorite apps and media all at a wave of your hand.”
Gesture Cube
World’s First Solar-Powered Circuit Could Revolutionize Touchscreen Tech
“Solar chargers are certainly nothing new, but this circuit is embedded right in the touchscreen, so you don’t have to set the device on its back to catch light. It’s not a reality yet, but it might be soon, courtesy of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania.”
Inhabitat
Wearable System Allows Robots To Mimic Human Actions
“The harness detects and tracks the movement of the wearer, translating it into commands for a remotely controlled machine that mimics human action.”
PSFK
Ikonoskop A-cam3D Records 1080p 3D Video
“The Ikonoskop A-cam3D is a 1080p three-dimensional video camera that seems to have been stolen from Han Solo’s Welcome to Hoth backpack. There’s not a lot of information about it, but the first specs look very good: Records two images at 1920 x 1080 as individual RAW files in DNG format. Color depth: 12 bits. Speed: 25 or 30 frames per second.”
Gizmodo
Huge Interactive Signpost Shows the Direction to Favorite Locations
“This gigantic, interactive signpost sponsored by Nokia Ovi Maps in the form of a dynamically rotating electronic LED screen allows passers-by to send in their favorite location and coordinates via text or email. The giant pointer, hung on a 60ton construction on height of 50m, then automatically rotates to the given direction and displays the submitted description to the world.”
information aesthetics
Brain scan allows unconscious patient to communicate
“Owen and his collaborators repeated their fMRI experiments on 54 patients who had previously been classified as either vegetative or “minimally conscious” (a condition in which a patient may inconsistently respond to commands, but cannot communicate interactively). They found that five of these 54 patients responded to commands to imagine playing tennis or navigating through a familiar house. Four of those five patients had been classified as vegetative, but when clinicians repeated their assessment following the fMRI study, they found evidence that two of those four should instead have been classified as minimally conscious.”
Scientific American
The Attractive City Generator
“The students task was to explore urban design methodologies with the use of parametric programs based on object oriented programing, with their particular area of interest focosed on interactivity in urban planning.”
Digital Urban
Hard Drives: Our Society’s Working Memory
“Modern drives might not fare so well, though. The storage density on hard drives is now over 200 gigabits per square inch and still climbing fast. While today’s drives have sophisticated systems for compensating for the failure of small sectors, in general the more bits of data you cram into a material, the more you lose if part of it becomes degraded or damaged. What’s more, a decay process that would leave a large-scale bit of data readable could destroy some smaller-scale bits. “The jury is still out on modern discs. We won’t know for another 20 years,” says Murrell.”
PSFK
Energy Generating Soccer Ball Brings Clean Power to Off-Grid Areas
“The ball works by capturing kinetic energy through an inductive coil mechanism, which works in a similar manner to those flashlights that are powered by shaking. As the ball is batted about, it draws a magnet through a coil, creating current that is stored in a battery. According to the designers, the device weighs little more than a standard soccer ball, and 15 minutes of play produces enough energy to illuminate a small LED for three hours.”
Inhabitat
Noticings : The Game of Noticing the World Around You
“Noticings is basically a game about learning to look at the world around you, as their site states – Cities are wonderful places, and everybody finds different things in them. Some of us like to take pictures of interesting, unusual, or beautiful things we see, but many of use are moving so fast through the urban landscape we don’t take in the things around us. You need a camera, and a way of recording where a photo was taken. That might be adding it by hand to the image within Flickr, or it might be a GPS. The ideal device to play Noticings is a camera with GPS built-in, such as the camera on a Smartphone like an iPhone or Android device.”
Digital Urban
IBM Preps Carbon Transistors for Post-Silicon Era
“The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors predicts that the silicon-based CMOS transistor technology used by microchips today will run out of steam by the end of the decade, but IBM Research (Yorktown Heights, N.Y.) has a ready replacement already on the drawing board: carbon-based transistors.”
Smarter Technology
Turn Your Monitor Into a Touchscreen That Can Detect 16 Fingers, Using a Polymer Film
“It’s not just glass that Displax is claiming their film will work with—apparently plastic and wood can be made into an interactive screen, which will detect as many as 16 fingers making shapes on its surface and even recognize when someone is blowing across it.”
Gizmodo
YouMe: Control Real People In Real Time
“The service will let users (”Yous”) control real people (”Mes”) in real time. Yous give instructions to the Mes via bluetooth headset or text message, and the Mes escapades are captured by video camera and streamed live. Almost anything is game as far as requests, barring illegal or sexual activity.”
PSFK
Waldemeyer outfits Imogen Heap’s Twitter dress at the Grammys
“When Imogen walked the red carpet to collect her Grammy, fans could send messages and photographs directly to her dress. The messages scrolled across the collar while the images were displayed on her Fendi handbag. How does it work? The Fendi bag contains an iPod Touch that receives the messages (thanks to Memo Akten for programming this). It displays the pictures and passes the text on to a flexible LED display in the collar.”
Make
Pyxis OS, an operating system for Arduino
“Based around the Arduino hardware platform, it adds some pretty impressive features, such as the ability to run programs from an SD card, read/write to a FAT filesystem, and easily display graphics and GUI elements on a color LCD. It looks like it could be lots of fun to play with, and if you want to peer under the hood, a great way to learn how to build complex systems on tiny microcontrollers.”
Make
Intelligent Home Energy Management by Intel & IDEO
“Developed in partnership with IDEO, the system features a large Hello/Goodbye switch on the top of the device which activates pre-arranged settings to help the users save energy and money. Wireless outlet sensors feed energy usage data to the dashboard, which also acts as a centralized home information center, monitoring security systems, package tracking, home maintenance and more. ”
MOCOLOCO
An Augmented (Hyper)Reality
“Keiichi comments below on some of the issues he was attempting address: media intrusion, tech-dependence etc. “It is,” he writes, “like most sci-fi, a critique of the present rather than the future.”"
Creative Review
Making Digital Content on the Mobile Phone Physically Graspable
“The weight-shifting method allows a phone to communicate to users where to walk by dynamically changing its gravitational center along two axes. The shape-changing method is able to convey where more information is located outside of the screen by changing the thickness of a phone at its corners. And lastly, the ‘living‘ method allows a mobile phone to display emotional states due to a continuous heartbeat and breathing-like motion that can be felt ambiently in your trouser pocket.”
information aesthetics
Nuvo’s Ritmo is an advanced sound system for the next iPod generation
“Stretching a pair of headphones over an ever-increasing belly can be a little challenging – so if you think you are housing a budding child genius – or music critic – the Ritmo could be just what you need. It’s a soft and stretchable fabric belt that attaches to your MP3 player and provides listening pleasure for both you and your little one.”
Gizmag
ClientShow Debuts Realtime Collaboration App For Creative Pitches
“The application, which is built on Adobe Air, includes a dashboard which lets the agency view client lists, projects and pitch sessions at a single glance. The dashboard acts as an organizational launching pad, where you can see attached notes and images about upcoming pitches and a schedule of sessions. The second feature is a “work” section which actually lets you set up and prepare for the sessions. You can drag and drop your files into the application, where you can view the projects. To engage in a virtual “pitch,”clients are given a link that lets them view the session in their browser. While the users who are pitching the idea are using an Adobe Air application, the client will see the actual pitch within their browser. Here’s where ClientShow brings in the collaboration angle: as you are pitching an idea, decision makers on a client team can approve (or dismiss) different ideas and files and give feedback automatically by adding notes and comments to the pitch that are updated in realtime.”
TechCrunch
Adidas Builds Augmented Reality Game into Shoe
“Consumers hold the shoe in front of a webcam, and the code then gives access to an area on Adidas’ website that has a series of interactive games in which the shoe actually becomes the game controller. Adidas is developing a series of five shoe styles, scheduled to debut Feb. 15, called the Originals AR Game Pack, for this promotion. The series will kick off in February, and one new game will launch every month until April”
MarketingVOX
