Shenzhen and Hong Kong are two major economic powerhouses just twenty miles apart. Thousands of cars and people cross their borders every day. But their close relationship belies inequalities that still exist between the city of Shenzhen and the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong.
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What happens if you take 500,000 pieces of Lego and 256 pistons, then hand them over to Steve Sammartino and Raul Oaida? This fully functioning, life-size, air-powered Lego car is what.
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So there’s Windex, but if that’s feeling too cleaning product-y for you, be aware that you can also clean glass with pure oxygen plasma. Sure.
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I’ve seen Earth compared to all its water
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The new gold iPhone 5S seems to be harder to get than any other iPhone, but if you love that color, you’ll enjoy these golden iPads. For those of you who absolutely need to match everything, Gold Genie’s iPads will get you into the right hue.
Gold Genie’s iPads are custom plated in 24KT gold. Admittedly, your iPad Mini Retina or iPad Air will shine a bit brighter than anything else around. You’ll have to be careful because you won’t want anyone stealing yours either.
The golden iPads start at £1231 (~$1,979 USD) and go up to £1405 (~$2259 USD).
[via Sourcewire]
On Tuesday Apple announced the release of its fifth generation iPad mini, named the iPad Air as an offshoot naming of the Macboook line of products, confirming rumors of the anticipated release earlier in the month. The new iPad Air primarily features a new lighter, thinner design weighing in at just one pound and 7.5 mm thick (that’s less than a third of an inch to you metrically challenged folks).
Apple has also added in a faster A7, 64-bit chipset, where Apple states it doubles the processor speed with the same battery drain as its predecessor. They’ve also added dual WiFi antenna’s with MIMO, the high resolution (2048×1536) Retina display on a 9.7-inch screen and kept up to 10 hours of battery life.
Apple is releasing the iPad Air November 1st with prices starting at $499 for a 16GB WiFi model up to $929 for a 128GB Wi-Fi plus cellular model, all available in either silver or space gray.
Deep water and the unprotected human body don’t play well together—like, at all. But what if there were a way to get around the body’s chemical limitations, a means of deep diving without the bends or lengthy decompression? Actually, there is. And we’ve almost figured out how to do it without killing ourselves in the process.
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The technical magicians at Disney Research are at it once more. This time, they’re working on a technology which allows users to feel sensations without actually having to touch a surface.
AIREAL is a combination of hardware and software which can create tiny air vortexes in 3D space. It was developed by researchers Rajinder Sodhi, Ivan Poupyrev, Matthew Glisson, and Ali Israr. A set of these small haptic-feedback devices can be used in combination with gesture-based control devices to let users feel sensations and virtual textures while interacting with their computers and video game systems. This is truly some science fiction stuff made real.
Check out some examples of AIREAL in action in the clip below:
Pretty amazing concept, no? Wouldn’t it be cool to combine this with a head-mounted display like the Oculus Rift? The wind could blow in your hair as you run through a virtual world, or you could feel bullets whizzing by when you’re being shot at. Crazy stuff. Or it might just turn up in a next generation of Disney’s Haunted Mansion – where you can actually feel the ghosts surrounding you. Hopefully the Disney Research guys talk to the Imagineers.
You can read the entire research paper on AIREAL here. [PDF]
I once had a friend who tried to inflate an inflatable raft by blowing into it. It was a dare and it was pretty silly for him to even attempt doing it, but it made all of us laugh anyways.
But if he had something with a built-in Windcatcher at the time, then he probably would’ve won the bet easily.
The Windcatcher is an ingenious piece of technology developed by designer Ryan Frayne. Basically, it allows people to inflate objects like air mattresses by blowing into them without the need for an air pump.
So how does it work? The secret to the Windcatcher is the special valve that “amplifies” the volume of air moved into the inflatable object with every breath. So far, it has been incorporated into a prototype air bag and a sleeping mat, which will be made available within the next few months.
You can check out the Windcatcher site for more information and to pre-order the initial Windcatcher sleeping pad for $99(USD).
[via Laughing Squid]
Smog, haze, smoke, exhaust… The atmosphere is full of pollutants these days. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do about it. You could go out and face the world wearing a mask, or you could just slip the Hand Tree around your wrist the next time you take a stroll – assuming it existed.
The Hand Tree is a concept design by Alexandr Kostin that marries wearable technology with a relatively common appliance, the air purifier. The bracelet is essentially a wearable air purifier that filters air on the go, surrounding its wearer with fresh air that’s minus all the unpleasant smells and particulates normally found in city air.
It’s a neat concept but I think the task of shrinking a normally bulky air purifier down to wrist size would be very, very challenging.
The Hand Tree is a semi-finalist in the Electrolux Design Lab 2013.
[via Yanko Design]
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
