The end of the year is here and hopefully you did something awesome in 2013. And if you didn’t, that’s okay because you have one more day to get crazy. Actually, you have a brand new year ahead of you to do something memorable. Luc Bergeron compiled 253 YouTube videos that popped up in 2013 and made this incredible mashup video showing humans doing awesome things.
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At the 2013 Chaos Communication Congress, a group of hackers called Mema Haxx showed off a neat trick: streaming and controlling applications from a PC to a Wii U GamePad. They even played a bit of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker from a Gamecube emulator. Hacker humor folks.
I’m not even going to pretend that I understand what Mema Haxx did to pull this off, especially since you can watch the presentation in its entirety in the video below. Lesser mortals such as I should proceed to around 47:30 in the video to check out the demo.
You can also read Mema Haxx’ presentation on Google Docs. Although the group thinks that the hack is very promising, it’s still in alpha and won’t be of any use to anyone except coders. For now you’d be better off commissioning a Cross Plane. But keep that Wii U GamePad healthy.
[via Engadget]
Welcome to Mr. J’s carnival. You must be 1.5″ tall to ride. That’s because this is a LEGO diorama featuring the Clown Prince of Crime’s headquarters of sorts. Made by Paul “Brickbaron” Etherington, it contains lots of moving parts and depicts Batman and other characters in dire straits against Joker and other villains.
Paul built the diorama over a two-month period using a number of video game levels as his inspiration. Its moving parts are powered by LEGO Power Functions motors. There’s a lot going on here and lots of villains are present, including Joker’s zealot Harley Quinn, the Riddler and Two-Face. Batman is actually in three different scenes at once. He’s being harassed by goons at the entrance of the fun house, battling with Joker on a carnival ride and is also about to be caught by a huge jack-in-the-box. Best to watch it all in the video below:
The Joker’s Fun House won the Best in Show, Evil Genius and Honorable Mention in the People’s Choice awards at the 2013 Brickcon. You can see more of it on Paul’s Flickr page.
[via Geeks Are Sexy]
There are thousands of sites that makers can use to sell their costumes, including major ones such as eBay, Etsy and deviantART. But if you want a site that’s focused solely on costumes, check out CosTrader. It’s a new website for people looking to buy or sell costumes, whether brand new or used.
CosTrader allows sellers to put up any number of items to sell at no charge. The site then takes a 3% cut when an item is sold. You need to create an account to buy or sell from the site. It’s a minor inconvenience but I guess it’s to ensure that both buyers and sellers can easily contact and identify each other.
Put on your browser and head to CosTrader to see what’s on display, which is admittedly not much because the site is still young. A market lives and dies by its offerings, so hopefully it attracts quality costume makers.
[via Bleeding Cool]
If you’re a health buff or if you have food allergies, you probably have a mental list of edibles to avoid. But how can you be sure that the food that’s in front of you is up to your standards? That’s the idea behind TellSpec. It’s a small scanner that can supposedly tell you what’s in your food.
TellSpec has two primary parts: a low-power laser and a spectrometer. Simply put, substances in food reflect light from the laser in distinct ways. The spectrometer analyzes and records the reflections, then TellSpec sends this data online using your mobile device. The results are displayed on your device as well via an app. TellSpec can identify the amount of calories and sugar on the scanned item, as well as the presence of preservatives and allergens such as nuts and gluten. It can scan through plastic and glass so you can use it while buying or browsing food.
TellSpec’s app can do more than just identify ingredients. It can also keep track of your calorie intake and even help you self-diagnose if you’re allergic to a particular substance. Here’s a demo of a very early prototype of the TellSpec:
Looks like they’ve got a long to go to get the device down to size. But if you’re willing to take the gamble, you can pre-order TellSpec online for $320 (USD). There are also pre-order bundles for family use and for developers. Because it uses a cloud service, TellSpec will also require a subscription. When you buy the device, you get one year of free service but after that you need to pay either $7 a month or $70 a year for it to keep working. Check out TellSpec’s website or their Indiegogo campaign page for more info.
[via The Red Ferret Journal]
We’ve seen Pokémon drawn with pencils, food, thread, aluminum powder, sculpey, clay, marble, LEGO and digital ink. Jacob Carter chose a simple but challenging way to depict the famous monsters: leaves.
Jacob calls his series Natural Pokémon. Aside from leaves, he also uses pebbles, and cheats a bit with cardboard and ink for the eyes and feet of Pokémon.
Jacob probably won’t be able to depict all Pokémon using just the leaves he finds on his own. Maybe he can ask people to send him preserved leaves of different colors and textures.
[via Imgur via Incredible Things]
Here’s a program that could be one of the big hits of 2014. Currently in development by Holotech Studios, FaceRig lets anyone with a webcam project their head movements and facial expressions onto a virtual character, all in real time. It’s Dance Central for your face.
According to Holotech Studios, FaceRig is based on “real time image based tracking technology” made by Swedish company Visage Technologies. Aside from tracking and mapping your head and face, voice alteration will also be included in FaceRig. So you can become a voice actor, a motion capture actor and an animator all at once.
So what can you do with the FaceRig? For starters you can stream a show online using your avatar as your visage. You can be the next Hatsune Miku! Or rather, Half-sune Miku. You can make a simple animated film without spending a single second or cent in 3D modeling software. Or you can just make funny faces all day.
Holotech Studios plans to release several versions of FaceRig for different devices and use cases, such as a full featured desktop program for professional use and a mobile app for funny face use. For now a pledge of at least $5 (USD) on Indiegogo will be enough to score you both a beta and a full license to the basic version of FaceRig.
[via Incredible Things]
When I first saw OpenEmu, it was already able to play games from different previous gen systems, but it had this experimental streak to it. Four years later, it has put its wild days behind. The new OpenEmu is a suave and streamlined application that looks and behaves like a native OS X program.
OpenEmu uses open source emulators for the Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Game Gear, NeoGeo Pocket, Nintendo DS, NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Sega 32X, Sega Master System, TurboGrafx-16 and the Virtual Boy. The beauty of it is that you don’t have to switch between emulators to play digital copies of games that you legally own (henceforth known as DCOGTYLO). Simply load DCOGTYLO into OpenEmu and it will figure out what emulator each one runs on, similar to how your computer automatically opens your other files in their respective programs (well, most of the time anyway).
Another great feature of OpenEmu is that it downloads game covers for your DCOGTYLO over the Internet, then presents it in interfaces that OS X users will be familiar with, such as Cover Flow. Those two features combine to give you an elegant way to organize and view your DCOGTYLO collection.
But OpenEmu really shines if you take the time to get to know its more technical features. For starters, it supports a wide variety of gamepads, from generic USB controllers to the DualShock 4. It also has a variety of video filters that can make you fell like you’re back in third grade, looking up at a 15″ CRT TV, when you’re actually playing a DCOGTYLO on your MacBook Air. At work. Here’s a great preview of OpenEmu by Lon Seidman:
You can download OpenEmu for free. The emulator’s developers also bundled a pack of homebrew games for those that don’t have a DCOGTYLO to play.
[via OS X Daily]
One of the hassles of playing tabletop games is that pieces are often moved out of their place or sometimes even off the table. It’s a minor inconvenience at best and a game-stalling dilemma at worst, as you try to figure out which piece should be at which position. That’s the problem that BFR Games wants to solve with GripMat.
As its name implies, GripMat is made of a material designed to create a enough friction to prevent pieces from accidentally sliding about. It’s waterproof and retains its form even after you roll it up or crumple it. It’s also great to roll dice on. It muffles the sound that dice make and quickly stops them in their tracks. What I don’t know is if GripMat makes it easier or harder to pick up paper-thin items like cards.
As shown in the video, GripMat comes in a variety of designs; the ones in the gallery below are just a few of them. You can also customize your order further with tile or hex grid overlays.
Pledge at least $25 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a GripMat as a reward. It also comes in different sizes; naturally the larger ones are available at higher pledge tiers.
So you think you have a huge backlog of games? Video game historian Michael Thomasson has to play two full games each day for the next 15 years if he hopes to get through all of his. That was back in September, when the Guinness World Book of Records recognized that the New Yorker had the world’s largest collection of video games at 10,607 distinct games.
That’s the record holder in the badass Intellivision t-shirt. As of November 28, when he uploaded the video below, Michael already had almost 12,000 different games. He also owns more than a hundred game consoles, systems and whatever you call the Virtual Boy is. The thing is, he would probably have more games, but he sold his previous major collection to pay for his wedding. Awww.
Check out the Associated Press’ feature on Michael and his own writeup on YouTube for more on his collection.
[via GoNintendo & IGN]
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