Never have a messy room ever again

Trash cans haven’t really changed much in the past, but this Japanese genius just made all the wait worth it.

He has created the Smart Trashbox, a moving can which uses a Kinect to track airborne garbage and make sure you’ll never miss ever again.

Check out the video of it in action.

A lot of work went into this project and the creator (Modder FRP) states that there is still a lot of work to be done, but right now it is pretty impressive.

@maniac13

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Everything will be touchable with Touché

Disney Research is always working on some cool stuff and now they are showing off a pretty cool and quite sophisticated touch-sensing technology called touché.

Compared to capacitive touch screens that measure 1 frequency this new technology is measuring a range of them which means it not only can detect multi touch and gestures, but also distinguish between different objects or parts of the body.

It will also add touch to non-traditional surfaces, like liquid.

Check out the video below and see some of the examples on how Disney sees this technology being implemented in the future.

@maniac13

Are you related? – Genetic Portraits

Ulric Collette, canadian-based artist and photographer, put together photos of his family members and friends and photoshopped them together for his gallery of genetic portraits.

He calls it Research work on photographic genetic similarities between members of same family.

There are a lot more here

@maniac13

Use your phone as a virtual projector

Researchers in Germany, Canada and the US may have come up with an elegant solution that can work with any smartphone and an external display: virtual projection.

The system works by using a central server that constantly takes screenshots of the external display and compares them with the images from the phone’s camera to track its location.

It then replicates what’s on the handset’s screen, while allowing you to add multiple image windows and position and rotate them.

Additionally, multiple users can collaborate and virtually project pictures or videos onscreen at the same time.

Personally I think your battery life will suffer the most, but in general it is a cool idea.

check it out in action below:

@maniac13

Christmas Party Teaser

Christmas is a lively time of the year with everyone feeling quite festive and eager to have fun, last year Amnesia celebrated it whilst lawn bowling and it reminded me of a bad episode of ‘Murder she wrote’, (sorry Jessica Fletcher)

Put it this way if the grinch stole Christmas that year, I wouldn’t exactly be over-exerting myself to try and stop him.

This year a few of us decided to stir things up and let me tell you…you can never have enough sauce.

The 2011 xmas party is a secret yet to be revealed and we decided to make a teaser trailer as a lead up to our short film to get everyone excited.

Check out the youtube video below!

@Kreyman

The next generation shadow puppets brought to you by Microsoft

I have been writing about Microsoft Research quite a bit and lately it seems that they are showing off our future every few days.

Last week was no different and they gave us 3 different projectors that allow you to interact with them through shadows and augmented reality.

 

3 devices, split up into camera, room and SLAM models, incorporate pico projectors, coaxial IR cameras, inertial measurement units (IMUs) and the company’s Kinect to project augmented visions onto surrounding surfaces. The environmentally aware systems allow for shadow- and touch-based interaction with the CG overlays, offering pinch functionality, icon selection and even painting.

Pretty cool you think? Check out the video

 

One day we might all have one of those to check out the latest furniture and what they will look like in our home.

@maniac13

Disney’s Appmates – the future of iPad gaming

If you have kids and a tablet you know that your kids love them and you hardly get any time with it yourself.

Disney is going to release their Appmates toys next month and then you won’t get your tablet back at all from your kids.

So what is Appmates? It seems to be a new iPad interface which lets the user (or small and big Kids) control a Cars-themed iPad games using the toys above.

The toy cars have special conductive pads that are recognized by the iPad and interpreted by the app.

As you drive around the virtual environment of Radiator Springs, you’ll hear the character’s voice react to each bump or jostle. Mirrors inside the toy car will reflect light from the iPad through the toy’s headlights, and Mater’s siren as well.

Check out the video after the break

We like the UNIQLO Voices Website

Video content tends to play a standard role in most websites. The functionality is seldom messed with : Users click a play button to start (or get annoyed it played without your permission) and play only one video at a time. Normally video sits in a fixed position and will be of a set size. Indeed, screwing around with ‘standard video UI design’ can be a dangerous game but when it’s done right, it’s easy to start believing that video should be some much more in so many sites. Check out the Uniqlo website… it’s cool, fun, breaks some boring old rules and is our site of the day.

http://www.uniqlo.com/nyc/voices/

 

HT to @lyndonjhale

Real Life Outrun

We all remember the original 8bit Outrun Game from 1986. I remember playing it until my fingers were bleeding.

So what would it be like if you could have this in real life? That is what the people at the University of California Irvine ask themselves and they created a system that, with the help of cameras and some customized software, looks in front of the vehicle and reproduces a map of what lies ahead of you onto the screen in 8bit rendering just like Outrun.

All you have to do now is follow the route. Simply awesome.

check out the video

@maniac13

Viral Marketing puts girl in an iPad helmet

Promoting the launch of Cosmo For Guys, Viral marketing company Thinkmodo thought it would be a great idea to put a girls head in a 4 iPad contraption and turn heads. Some people will call it awesome, some will call it creepy, I am just wondering how she is seeing where she is going and if that guy touching her “face” is really annoying her.

Cosmo for Guys is a new digital magazine that is exclusive to the iPad.

check out the viral in actions

iPad girl turns heads

@maniac13

Dancing in the air

cWe have all heard of synchronized swimming and we have all seen people jump out of planes and do some synchronizing.

But when you take the whole thing inside a smallish tube with lots of wind it somehow becomes a beautiful indoor ballet in the air.

Check out the video, it is pretty cool

The mouse 2.0

The mouse (first one ever displayed below) has been around since the first PCs hit the market and it hasn’t really changed much.

Now 2 German students sat down and started to think about how to improve the mouse and they came up with this prototype.

The roll of your mouse slows down, giving files the feeling weight based on the size of their contents. Depending on how much a given file has been used the mouse starts to breathe.

Check out the video. An interesting thing I thought is that they brought back the mouse ball – remember those – always clogging up with dust?!?

DataBot Mouse from Jan Barth on Vimeo.

 

They also dreamed up a hard drive concept which expands and contracts based on the amount of space being used up.

DataBot Harddrive from Roman Grasy on Vimeo.

 

Pretty cool concepts, I am just not sure how useful they would be.

Let me know what you think.

@maniac13

Finally a great AR system – Sony SmartAR

Augmented reality has been around for a while now and we have been using it in the past as well, but we always found it to be sluggish, laggy and unreliable.

Now it seems that there is a light at the end of the tunnel a Sony is holding the torch. Sony announced their SmartAR everybody thought that it is just another technology that has the same issues.

But check out the video below and prepare to be blown away – fast response times, markerless object recognition and original anchors can be out of sight and your virtual object just keeps animating.

There was no availability date announced yet, but I am sure AR will get a lot more coverage once it is out.

@maniac13

the camera of the future

you might have seen this already, but I somehow missed it in my post here.

I was send the video at the bottom of this post and it blew my mind. Looks like there was a working version of it at CES this year.

This camera (concept) takes the connectivity and application platform capabilities of today’s smart phones and wirelessly connects them with interchangeable full SLR-quality optics.

Check out the video:

their site promises some awesome specs:

BODY

Aluminum and magnesium alloy
Docked display and frame unit Display unit: 127 x 69 x 7.5mm
Frame unit: 164.5 x 76.5 x 28.2 mm

DISPLAY UNIT

5.0" AMOLED display
Viewing area: 110 x 61.9 mm
1920x 1080 pixels
(2,073,600 dots, 16:9)
Cortex-A15 ARM Multi-Core CPU
16GB embedded + microSDHC

ANTENNAS

802.11n
GPS
Bluetooth 2.0
WirelessHD

CONTINUOUS SHOOTING
BUFFER

Approximately 10 fps
20 images (lens detached)
180 images (lens attached)
5 RAW (lens detached)
40 RAW (lens attached)

I am hoping they are going to build this thing and ship it really fast, because I want one.

@maniac13

Do you like to invent stuff?

then maybe you should try and get hired at Inventionland – no I am not kidding, this place really exists.

I have seen some cool workplaces in the past, just think about Google Headquarter or the old Amnesia office next to the brothel , but George Davison really put some effort into this place.

He created multiple different environments for his employees to get the creative juices flowing – e.g. work on a Pirate Ship

 

It seems to be working too as they are pumping out over 2000 inventions per year.

Here are some more of their workplaces

the concept kitchen

 

the race track

 

or the tree house

 

You Can check it out here, but be warned they have some weird theme song on their site

or check out their flickr stream here

 

pretty awesome

@maniac13

Green Lantern–the movie

Hollywood is known to stuff up when they make movies from books or in this case a comic, but i have to say the 4 minutes of the upcoming Green Lantern movie actually looks pretty good.

According to the io9 article here, it even won over the sceptical crowd at Wondercon, so what could go wrong, right?!?

Let me know what you think in the comments.

@maniac13

Proper 3D without glasses just got a bit closer

3D is cool, but I do not want to put on glasses every time I watch something in 3D.

There are plenty of glasses free TVs out there, but let’s face it I do not want to be confined to 3-5 spots in my living room and if I move a little bit the picture will look sh*t.

However, Japanese researchers have devised a new type of hologram technology. They work with normal light and can produce full-coloured 3D images.

This new technology works by hitting a thin metal film with three beams of white light, each from a different angle. Each beam excites a different colour of light, which then passes through an RGB hologram, combining to form a full-colour 3D image.

These holograms wouldn’t require glasses or viewing angles and how awesome would it be to have real life holograms acting out movies in your living room.

I can’t wait for it.

@maniac13

Multi-touch to real time sales

 

Swedish telecom company 3 Sweden together with Swedish company B-Reel have bridged the gap between Internet commerce and brick and mortar with 3LiveShop.

The new site features employees interacting with customers, live, over video screens. It was made possible with custom-built touchscreens that look like they’re right out of The Minority Report. Using the screens, the online salespeople are able to bring up images of phones the company sells and field questions about them.

I personally think it is a pretty cool thing, but I usually go shopping online so I don’t have to deal with a sales person.

Check out the video for a cool demonstration.

@maniac13

Microsoft Research shows off the life after touch

By now we all experienced kinect one way or another and I personally really enjoy my kinect at home.

Kinect has been talked and hacked a lot and most people can see much more in it than just a game controller.

Looks like MS Research is thinking the same thing and in the video below they are showing off some cool things, like head tracking, glasses free 3D, gesture based interfaces and more.

As we all know from past experiences, these may or may not happen, but right now they are pretty cool.

thanks engadget

@maniac13

The Future of Translating

From now on if you are in a (spanish for now) restaurant and you don’t know what it says on the menu or you are in Spain and you can’t read those street signs, all you have to do is take your iPhone out and point Word Lens at it.

It will translate on the fly and looking at the video below it is pretty amazing tech – check it out.

It tries to find out what the letters are and then looks in the dictionary. Then it draws the words back on the screen in translation.

From what I have read it doesn’t work as smooth as it does in the video and it only works on iPhone 3GS, 4 and the latest iPod, but it is still impressive. I’d love to try it, but it isn’t available on Android (hint hint).

It is available on the App store, so check it out. If you do let me know in the comments what you think

maniac13