Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve seen a couple of prototypes that enable or at least emulate touch-sensitivity on everyday objects. But as wearable technology continues to flourish, we’re going to need a simple and portable solution. Augmented reality company Metaio thinks they may have an answer with Thermal Touch, a technology that emulates touch-sensitivity using “the heat signature left by a person’s finger when touching a surface.”

Right now the hardware needed to pull off the feat is quite bulky. In the demo video below, Metaio used a tablet, a standard camera and a rather large infrared camera. The company hopes that in the future, all of the necessary hardware can be included in a wearable device similar to Google Glass, like so:

Here’s the demo video:

Sorry zombies, I guess you’ll be stuck with voice commands. Good luck with that.

[Metaio via TechCrunch]

Subterranean captains’ chairs, rounded counters for flight monitoring, perfect pastels in the crew’s uniforms: Midcentury Herman Miller and Eames furnishings look awesome on the Starship Enterprise. Take a minute to check out these throwback posters and you’ll be daydreaming of Captain Kirk shaking you an out-of-this-world gin martini. [MattWileyArt via Retroist]

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New Yorkers have said plenty of negative things about the super-expensive supertalls going up in Manhattan. They tower over their neighbors. They cast shadows over Central Park. But no one has yet equated them with anorexic women—until the May 2014 issue of Vanity Fair.

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Today, the Japanese tech giant Hitachi announced a contract to build two of the fastest elevator in the world for a forthcoming skyscraper in China. Seems innocuous enough, right? But buried within the press release are a few fascinating details that illustrate how China’s skyscraper boom is affecting the global economy—including the fact that it bought a whopping 60 percent of all elevators sold in 2013.

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Cats love climbing through cozy spaces. That’s why the CATable, a beautifully functional work surface with built in tunnels for burrowing, is so appealing to them. In the words of designer Ruan Hao, "It is a table for us, and a paradise for cats."

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