This has been generating some online discussion – a video of a dude hijacking billboards in Times Square using an iPhone 4, a transmitter, a balloon and some tape, like a geeky MacGyver. The feeling at the moment is that this is a publicity stunt, but if so it’s an awesome-looking stunt.
I mean don’t get me wrong, I’d want a robot clone too, it’s just not totally clear why Henrik Scharfe, professor at Aalborg University, actually got one assembled by the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Japan. It’s ostensibly the first android with a beard, though, so yay science.
They can do that now. By ‘they’ I mean ‘those with money and de facto power,’ obviously, not specifically the heads of the PRC – but I mean government scrutiny of human movement is being implemented on a huge, huge scale. It’s called the Information Platform of Real-time Citizen Movement – which sounds like a good and reasonable platform.
Well, I’m pretty proud of that headline. Cornell University and the French Culinary Institute have developed a food printer that runs off puree and spits out sculptures – like rocketships made of gouda and scallions. And now we can have coconut sans awful coconut texture.
German research facility BrainDriver has put together a kit that lets people make rudimentary driving commands with their brains – you know, without using their hands. I have serious concerns about how this system deals with those brief suicidal thoughts that tend to pop up when knee-deep in traffic on the 9/5 commute.
I guess this is the future’s MacBook photobooth? Using a 3-D printer and a Microsoft Kinect, folks can get small, low-resolution 3-D sculptures of themselves printed, as displayed at the snappily titled Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction Conference last week.
The Clap-Off Bra from Randy Sarafan on Vimeo.
This is special. I mean, I would talk a little bit more about the basic premise of the thing, but it does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: you clap, bra comes off. It’s not quite the snip-snap process of seduction I’d hoped for as a tiny-man child, but it’s close.
I mean, yes, making dominos that trip each other without touching is probably a useless application of technology, but I figure this puts us one step closer to that weird hologram game from Star Wars, and I am for it.
I’m not sure if this beats prosthetic tentacles, but it’s close. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are building snake-like robots that can reach delicate organs that don’t generally respond well to getting cut open. Because the prospect of surgery wasn’t frightening enough before.
I tweeted about this the other day and people lost their minds. Especially when they saw the attached images I took, of the dashboard in the new MINI Countryman. It shows my Twitter stream coming through LIVE – and even shows each person’s Twitter icon, in full colour. And don’t get me started on the […]
Proverbial Wallets from John Kestner on Vimeo.
Paying things with cards is weird for me. I mean obviously the convenience of having a plastic card that gets me stuff is great – I got to take advantage of the Threadless sale, for instance – but without that tangible sense of loss at having to fork over a wad of cash, there is the risk of going overboard is substantial. Folks at MIT have some ideas about that.
Last week’s Antimov competition challenged amateur engineers to build robots that broke one of the Three Laws or Robotics – which you’d know if you’d read I, Robot (nerd) or saw that movie where Will Smith had the robot arm. No, the robot arm was not called Eva Mendez.