Hasta La Gadget!

Nowadays it’s quite possible to create and play music live using a computer. You can also use MIDI controllers to make it easier for you to interact with music software and audio files. However, pushing keys and fiddling with knobs isn’t intuitive or fun to watch. Computer Orchestra manages to be both by letting you be a conductor of computers.

Computer Orchestra was made by three students from the art and design university ECAL. Simon de Diesbach, Jonas Lacôte and Laura Perrenoud designed it to be a crowdsourcing interface for uploading samples and then triggering them on different computers using simple hand gestures.

The idea is that you’ll upload samples to or download samples from a website, then you’ll assign those samples to your “musicians” – in this case, the members of the orchestra are all laptops. Using a Wi-Fi connection, a Kinect sensor, a programming language called Processing and the software library called SimpleOpenNI, you can then trigger those computers to play by waving your hands towards them. There also seems to be other gestures that vary the way the computers play the samples.

I know it’s very impractical, but it also seems like a lot of fun. Perhaps it’s possible to make a simpler version of this with a Leap controller and an array of color or light sensors. Using one laptop per sample seems like overkill, although it’s a sight to behold.

[via Designboom]

PEZ has always been a bit of a mixed blessing for me. The dispensers were so much better than the candy inside. It’s like the guys who made the candy said “our candy kind of sucks, what can we do to sell it to kids?” The answer? Stick it in a container with a flip-top character head, and you’ll sell billions. And that they did.

And while there are tons of really cool collectible Pez dispensers out there, this Alien PEZ dispenser had to be made by a fan, since the candy company never released one of their own.

It was made a few years back by Peter “Rat D” Davidson, and there’s not much to be said about this thing other than the fact that it’s a) awesome and b) PEZ needs to get on the phone with H.R. Giger and Ridley Scott today and see if they can work out a licensing deal.

The only thing better would be if it actually spit out another little Alien head inside before the candy came out. And acid.

[via Dangerous Minds]

Replicate the opening credits of HBO’s Game of Thrones with this multilayered puzzle map of Westeros. Aside from the flat map of the war-torn continent, the kit also includes tiny replicas of cities and castles, plus a few other figurines. Make sure to hum the opening theme while you’re putting it together.

The map was made by 4D Cityscape, a company known for two things: building puzzle maps of cities and misunderstanding the concept of the 4th dimension. This definitively 3-dimensional continent puzzle is made of 1,200 pieces. Then there’s a smaller 200-piece puzzle that sits on top of the continent puzzle that outlines the “current landscape” of Westeros. I assume that refers to the layout of the land based on the TV series so far. The final layer consists of the aforementioned figurines of cities and castles. There are also “over 45 flags to mark famous landmarks, 10 sigils to mark the Houses, and 5 battle markers to learn the locations of five major battles.”

You can pre-order the puzzle map from ThinkGeek for $60 (USD), and you’ll have it in plenty of time as a gift for that Game of Thrones fan on your holiday shopping list.

[via This is Why I’m Broke]

Growing up I settled more than a few arguments with a quick game of thumb wrestling. Those matches always started with the chant “one, two, three, four, I declare thumb war,” which is clearly how all civilized people do it. If you ever wondered when thumb wrestling might get the inevitable upgrade, it looks like that time is now.

A new spiral-bound book has been published called simply enough Star Wars Lightsaber Thumb Wrestling. The book has seven thick pages each printed with a different dueling location. You and your foe stick your phalanges through the holes with tiny super-cool lightsaber models strapped to them with Velcro straps.

You then duke it out with little thumb sized lightsabers. This may be the perfect way to settle arguments in a more civilized time. The book is available for $12.99(USD) over at ThinkGeek, Imperial credits are not accepted.

[via Nerd Approved]

Of all the movies I watched this summer one of the most surprising was Pacific Rim. I went to see this movie mostly because my son wanted to go check it out, and it turned out to be a fantastic movie. The first creature we see the giant robots in the movie fighting is something called a Knifehead.

It looks like a cross between a swordfish and shark with four arms and legs to me. Now, an enterprising geek has taken a bunch of LEGO bricks to construct his own LEGO Kaiju – and the result is quite impressive. I’m always amazed by the high-quality LEGO recreations that builders are able to make without any sort of instructions.

The builder of this awesome creature is OliveSeon, who unfortunately gives no details on exactly how this massive work of geek art was created. It’s hard to tell exactly how large this LEGO beast is, but I’m betting some glue was used to hold the finished creation together. How else could it stand up to a beatdown by a Jaeger?

[via Brothers-Brick]