This is too cool: Sixth Sense, a wearable device with a projector that “enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data”. Awesome video!
The Inamo restaurant in London uses interactive dinner tables to let you browse through menus, play games and select different colour moods.
There is a wonderful video on Youtube of a kid explaining the system:
I love the idea of the kid showing how easy and fun the system is to use, its great PR for the restaurant.
This is great. A couple in America have put RFID readers in their cats collars. When the cats go in and out of the catflap a message is generated and automatically posted up to Twitter!
“Gus used the door 19 times yesterday, enjoyed the outdoors for 11 Hrs, 39 Min and the indoors for 12 Hrs, 20 Min. about 6 hours ago from web“
This is very cool. Instead of using the mouse or keyboard to control the dials in Reason or Final Cut (or any other knob twiddling software) Girtonlabs have created magnetic knobs which you can stick onto your computer screen:
You then twist the knobs to control your software! Very nice, much more satisfying that trying to twist knobs and dials with the mouse.
Powercursor allows you to simulate haptic feedback creating a tactile experience in GUIs.
Simluate pressure, stickiness and roughness in your GUIs!
There is a lot of cool work being done with wearable computers delivering real work haptic experiences. Check out http://www.cutecircuit.com. You give your partner a hug whilst they are wearing the shirt, the shirt remembers the pressure of the hug, then when you are away on business your partner can press a button and recreate the hug!
Philips have created a shirt which promises to deliver “emotional immersion“; shivers up the spine and muscle contraction.
Beautiful projection from phedhex made by beaming light onto an array of vertical wires, giving the illusion of 3d objects floating in space:
What’s even cooler is that the entire project is open source so you can build your own!
I love the idea of this poster. Instead of tearing off paper tabs from the bottom you break off stakes to kill pesky vampires!
Trueblood promotional poster in New Zealand
Apparently all the stakes were actually nailed down, but it’s still a cool idea.
But what about zombies? How do we protect our brains (or our second brains)? In Texas they’ve come up with an excellent solution:
I just came across these beautiful kinetic sculptures; robots only powered by the wind:
Check out Strandbeest for more info.
For an acoustic version of this listen to Aeolian Wind Harps: musical instruments played by the wind.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency researchers have got one step closer to developing programmable matter – think the T1000 liquid metal!
A material that can ... transport particles and assemble shapes.
From the DARPA press release:
Professor David R. Liu’s Harvard team is relying on DNA base pairing as a sort of molecular Velcro to program the assembly or disassembly of “smart” materials. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor Daniela Rus has created an innovative computational origami of two- and three-dimensional functional structures, through the “folding” of matter.
http://www.darpa.mil/news/2009/ProgrMatter.pdf
In the future perhaps downloadable design will become a reality for all worldy objects. Perhaps you could download the latest shoe design into your pool of matter and see it assembled before your own eyes! Imagine if you could download physical objects from the internet like food or drink – some crazy possibilities.
I guess we are a step closer now to all being turned into grey goo…
I like the idea of crowdsourcing, why use your own brain when you have access to everyone else’s!
OpenAd and CrowdSpring are becoming more and more popular with clients. Post your brief, get sent loads of ideas then pick your favourite!
Mixx has launched an interesting section of it’s site:
User-driven social media website Mixx is offering marketers a chance to trial their online ads against its top members for peer-reviewed feedback before launching ‘the big spend’.
Advertisers, such as Orange, can upload up to five creative executions in Sifter at a time, where over the course of a week, Mixx users rank the overall content on a scale of one to five.
Users also provide qualitative feedback for the ads, their likes and dislikes, while advertisers receive the data along with the gender, age and general interest snapshot of those who voted.
http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/902019/Mixx-sparks-dialogue-marketers-consumers/
It would be nice to think this could result in a ‘Ruby on Rails’ type development approach to advertising. 37 Signals (Ruby on Rails founders) are famed for delivering short bursts of code onto the web, which might not be completely finished, which lets their userbase define where development should head next.
Finally bragster (though not technically a crowdsourcing site) lets you setup dares with its online community. Tango did a fun bet recently turning their logo upside down.