Hasta La Gadget!

Flickr member, LEGO enthusiast and Bionicle pilot Nick Brick made life-size scale models of some of the weapons in the hit FPS Titanfall. Nick made the EVA-8 Shotgun, the Smart Pistol MK5 and the R-101C Carbine.

Nick’s replicas may not be exactly the same as their virtual counterparts – Nick made the pistol and the rifle months before Titanfall came out – but they still look awesome and even have a few moving or detachable parts.

Have a closer look at Nick’s arsenal in these videos:

Call in a browser and head to Nick’s Flickr page for more shots of the weapons.

[via Slash Gear]

Just because virtual reality displays let us interact with 3D interfaces doesn’t mean there isn’t room for the ol’ two-dimensional view inside of them. Oliver Kreylos, a developer who’s been working with 3D software for nearly 30 years, recently demonstrated a Virtual Network Computing (VNC) client that sends a 2D feed of a desktop computer to a 3D virtual reality environment.

Oliver’s VNC client allows him to open and interact with any number of 2D desktops on a virtual reality environment. Why would you want to do this? Well for one, you can reverse telecommute: imagine working in an island paradise environment while you’re actually in the office. Because you can (theoretically) open multiple desktops at once, the setup also supercharges multitasking and group meetings. You can watch a video walkthrough while playing a 3D game, look at a hundred fullscreen documents at once, have multiple large video chat screens like they do in science fiction flicks and more.

As you’ll see in Oliver’s demo video, developers can also make 2D applications that interact with the 3D environment. In his demo he measured a table that was in his virtual space and then used a Razer Hydra to send those measurements to Microsoft Excel on his 2D desktop.

We really don’t know how far the rabbit hole goes with this one. Note that the video below may cause dizziness because of the constant change in perspective. It almost made me throw up to be honest. I’m ill-equipped for the future.

Head to Oliver’s blog for more on his custom program. I wonder if you can emulate this feature on the same computer that’s running the VR environment. That would be more useful, although it would probably take a beefy computer to pull it off. Also, watching Oliver’s demo, I can almost – almost! – visualize a four-dimensional space, where you can fit infinite 3D environments. Now I’m really dizzy.

[via Fast Co. Design]

Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.

Airplanes are major CO2 emitters, but it doesn’t need to be that way. For the past several years, two…

Doxie is a company that has made a name for itself in the world of portable scanners, and here I am with one of the latest Doxie scanners – the Doxie Flip. The Doxie Flip happens to be a flatbed scanner that will run on batteries for extreme portability, allowing you to scan just about anything you like on the move in a convenient manner, such as business cards, receipts and the like. Of course, if you are thinking about scanning an entire huge poster, then the Doxie Flip would also be more than willing to be up to the task, as you will find out in the review later.

What makes the Doxie Flip different from all of the other small mobile scanners that we have seen in the past, this particular model does not require you to slide the scanner across the document which you would like to send over to the digital realm for good. The Doxie Flip has been specially designe in such a way, that it looks a whole lot like a miniaturized flatbed scanner.

First of all, what do we get with each purchase of the Doxie Flip? You get the Doxie Flip scanner of course, a 4GB SD memory card, batteries to help you get started right out of the box, a USB SD memory card reader, and an instruction booklet. There is also the Doxie Flip Case that can be purchased separately for $19 a pop. The Doxie Flip has a foot print of 10.23” x 6.46” x 1.34”, where it tips the scales at a mere 570 grams, making it extremely portable for road warriors.

With the Doxie Flip, you can opt to flip up the lid in order to reveal the 4×6″ (A6) glass scanning surface that will boast of orientation indicators so that everything can be scanned in the right manner. On the right of the scanner, you will be able to check out the power switch, scan button and an SD memory card slot. On top, there is a tiny color LCD display as well as 5 navigation buttons. The LCD display will feature a status bar at the top, where you will have an accurate idea on just how many more scans can this bad boy take, as well as its battery level. Apart from that, each time you scan something, the LCD display will show off a live view.

Those who grew up in the Generation Z (born in the mid-1990s to 2010) range will not have an issue whatsoever when using the interface of this scanner, thanks to the 5 navigation buttons which are essential in performing settings such as adjusting the time, date, DPI setting from 300 to 600 and the auto shutdown time. Scanning something requires you to place the item that you want to scan on the scanning surface, before you give the big green button on the side a press.

The Doxie Flip is ideal to scan the likes of postcards, index cards, coins, stamps, and photos, but if you need to scan something a whole lot larger, remove the lid and flip the scanner over (hence its name). This allows you to see through the scanner in order to capture the exact thing that you need. The $149 Doxie Flip would be the ideal purchase if you have no portable scanner so far, but do consider other Doxie models too if you want a wand-style model.

Product Page
[ Doxie Flip flatbed scanner review copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

This article was written on March 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

A new release of Opera is inching closer, and right now early adopters can get their hands on the official Opera 9.2 Beta. This version actually contains a compilation of features that I have mentioned as they were in development:

• Opera Speed Dial (pictured below) that makes it easy to keep track of your favorite sites.
• New developer tools.
• Anonymous usage of the browser is now being collected, but it can be turned off.
• By default the Start Bar is disabled. This was the toolbar that would pop down when you would click in the Address Bar, and typically contained a shortcut to your homepage as well as your bookmarks.
• …and even more

I like when Opera throws nice new features into minor releases like this. Speed Dial is something no other browser has, and with it you can keep tabs (no pun intended) on websites you frequently visit. I can’t wait to hear what Opera 10 is going to bring!

Download Opera 9.2 Beta
Source: Opera Watch

Here is what Opera’s Speed Dial looks like:

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