None of which is really my cup of tea. Apart possibly for the table, though it seems to be going to quite extreme lengths to solve a problem I don’t actually have… or at least don’t really understand.
Which is so cool, I can hardly stand it, even though it is from 2006. Was designed by an Australian apparently – there’s a PDF (which is the document format of the devil) of the construction etc on his site.
From Opera etc, who are one of my browsers of choice. They’re the Ferrari of browsers.
Face gestures are a variant on the WAAI (waving arms around interface) as popularised by Minority Report, with Tom Cruise in it, who is a bit of a ferret-face.
I wonder if you could use this for some sort of sex thing. I wonder what would happen if you sneezed. I expect it would have a conniption. So many things could go wrong. What if you yawned etc? Would your entire computer go into hibernation mode? Our faces are (on occasion) a bit ungovernable. I know mine is. I wonder what it would make of the cat.
And the notion, that no matter how crazy an idea is, someone, somewhere will have a perspective on it that makes it incredibly useful.
So. Spherical robots – and I must admit, there’s a bit of a fixation for them out there in the world-of-unreality-fighting-towards-the-surface… and I don’t know why, because there’s a major problem with robots that don’t have arms: they can’t solder. Hopeless. Still, there does seem to be this fixation – I think basically because we like the shape – there’s something about a sphere that just seems “right”, or complete, even though it’s not, because it can’t solder or tie shoelaces etc. Still never mind.
Spybots – Amphibious spybots – not disimilar in intent to Rover off The Prisoner – which was basically a massive floppy balloon that chased people and then caused them to black out.
Or those tiny exploding balls off Aeon Flux
But never mind about that – back to the inflatable ones (and anything inflatable is basically a good idea waiting to happen)… Balloon Windmills!
This one is coming from opposite directions – and is probably indicative of a wider pattern.
From one end we have high-tech solving problems we don’t actually have, but which looks cool and will probably lead on to the solution of problems we do have…
And from the other hand we have open-sourced low-tech solving problems we DO have, the technologies for which have been around for decades, but have been made unavailable to the people that need them the most – because under the aegis of “The Market”, poor people don’t matter.
Maybe one day these two will meet in the middle. I think they will – In fact I think the killer apps of the 21st century will be exactly that – high-tech that has become cheap and ubiquitous, combined with open-source ethics, solving real problems – as opposed to eye-candy for geeks.
So. That said, this is pretty cool:
Kindof like a giant reprap that grows plants. This pattern of a 2-axis thing hovering over a 3 dimensional space that it lowers in and out of to “do stuff”. This one is cool because it has multiple tools – and multiple tools is a key part of the evolution of reprappery. In fact really, there should be a standard 3D platform like this with tool “plugins” that can be developed by other people – not necessarily wanting to build an entire system from scratch. A bit like WordPress or Firefox – or any other plugin platform.
There’s more at Lady Ada’s site – Lady Ada being a tower of strength in the open-source hardware world. Top blog as well. Her site has a lot more photos and links and whatnot.
I don’t know if this answers a specific need though – maybe if you want to buy out at the bottom and can’t be arsed gardening… but there’s a lot of people out there who like gardening. I live on a hill covered in old people, and they seem to like gardening a lot – what they need is a way to do it without having to bend over all the time, not some robot to make them redundant.
I get a feeling a better solution to the problem that robot gardeners are ostensibly fixing, is some sort of social reorganisation so that people who like doing this stuff are valued a little more than they currently are. Do we need robots or do we need jobs? Who are “we” anyway?
Coming from the other direction is a new plugin for the Open-Source Tractor Project that allows two people to plant 200 hazelnut bushes in an hour. A post-hole driller. Ever tried doing this by hand? Ever tried using a petrol-powered hand-held driller? This is a massive, massive back-saver.
A low-tech solution to an actual problem. This tractor costs around 5,000 – about 1/10th of the price of a new proprietary tractor – and it may look clunky, but it’s rock solid. It’s lean and mean design rather than feature-rich bloatware. Again It could well turn into a plugin platform – but then I think everything should be a plugin platform.
I mean, really I am a plugin platform… but nothing plugs in at the moment, so all these enhancements like clothes or laptops or cameras or phones or knives or chainsaws with flame-throwers attached are all separate entities – there’s no direct brain-to-device interface… but there will be, oh yes, there will be.
“With Jonas Samson’s high-tech light-emitting wallpaper it’s possible to use a two-dimentional flat surface as light source instead of a 3D object. As long as the wallpaper is turned ‘off’, it is indistinguishable as a source of light. Instead, it is just what it appears to be: wallpaper.”
Not sure how long it would take to get fed up with it – but there may be uses other than decoration.
Also via – although I’ve had my eye on this one for a while. Like those 70s mood-rings but you can do your whole bathroom in them. There are quite a lot of colour-shifting things here – everything from cars to coffee-cups. This includes a service for permanently changing your eye-colour with implants, which seems like an amazingly bad idea to me, but there you go.
There’s no way this isn’t going to be used for pornography. In New Zealand in the 70s there was a bit of a furore because someone started selling “Wack-Packs” – which was basically an inflatable water-wing and a tub of vaseline. This shower thing may be art etc… but it does look a hell of a lot like a full-body Wack-Pack
I mean if there’s an entire genre of pornography devoted entirely to delivering Pizzas with… holes in them, then someone’s definitely going to dream up something slightly dodgy to do with this.
Combining two of my favourite mis-directed-technology preoccupations : Segways: Solutions in desperate search for problems, and the fastidious compulsion that electric vehicle designers have for making their cars look like teapots, thus fucking themselves in the eyes of the motoring-otaku, upon who they depend for mainstream acceptance.
Looks as though they’ve cottoned onto the idea of getting them to talk to each other so they can form little trains etc… and they’re also fondly imagining that they’ll have their own little roads… we’ve tried that with bikes. It will never ever ever happen.
Still, kudos for trying.
Although this one also looks a bit like a military-issue wheelchair from some parallel universe where the Nazis won. Like a cross between a wheel-chair and the nose-cone of a Heinkel 111… and before you go all scoffy and indignant… recall that Heinkel went from making warplanes to these things in the 50s:
Words turned into jewellery, that looks like ectoplasm and has no level of artistic or poetic resonance with the meaning being communicated whatsoever:
But you never know. Someone else might (actually, doubtless will) see something that I don’t. The unbelievable guff that the voice-over talks has got to be worth something on it’s own… I wonder if the voice over could be turned into a great big one… or one with really small links. Recursive then see? Art. Art’s always recursive. Just when you’ve got it all figured out, it turns into a mirror that bites you on the arse.
Exhibit 2:
Using swarm-bots to make one step forward, and one step back:
For virtual reality apparently… so you can walk forever on the spot. VR is another “are-we-there-yet” technology. It still isn’t as good as Lawnmower Man said it would be back in the 80s – where it was like being GOD, but with a jetpack
Finally, Exhibit 3:
Which is an entire computer put into a wall plug.
This is cool (it runs linux)… but there’s something nagging in the back of my mind that doesn’t quite ring true… it seems like a half-way house between a central computer controlling everything and computers IN everything. It seems slightly weird to achieve such a miracle of portability, then design it so that it can’t be moved without unplugging it. I mean fair enough – a lot of computers don’t ever get shifted about… but still…
For the last 15 years or so, I’ve been going round telling people that in Sweden, it’s illegal to advertise to children under the age of 12. I’m not sure if it’s true, but it should be true.
This is a useful idea waiting to happen though I think. A web-enabled “thing” analyser/recogniser. The first possible uses that spring to mind are medical (and no, I wasn’t thinking that you’d never have to visit a VD clinic ever again. What is it with you people?)
Another possibility is a home scanner like this, which could automatically upload a scanned object to a print-shop’s 3d fabber, which could then be delivered back to you as a physcial object the next day. Ok – that’s kindof a long-shot, but you get the idea. It’s got to be useful for something. Well, something else.
