Hasta La Gadget!

The more functionality you can squeeze out of a piece of furniture, the better it is for your cramped bachelor pad. So if your home life is a constant struggle with space, check out Agnieszka Mazur’s Takka stool set which serves as seating, side tables, a coffee table, and a cozy place for two to dine. More »

For those of us with modern, stainless steel fridges, we can only stick our refrigerator magnets to the ugly sides – and if yours happens to be recessed into the wall like ours is, you’re pretty much screwed. But if you whip out a can of Magnet Paint, you can make any wall or flat surface into a magnet-friendly place.

Developed by Japan’s Colorworks[JP], Magnet Paint goes on in two coats, a basecoat that contains the metal particles, followed by a topcoat that contains the color. Just pick any wall, and you’ll be able to slap magnets up on it like it was an old metal fridge. The idea is perfect for kid’s rooms as well as office walls. It even looks like they offer a version that combines chalkboard paint with Magnet Paint.

At this point, I’m not sure where you can find Colorworks’ Magnet Paint outside of Japan, but it looks like there are a couple of similar products already available here in the U.S.

[via Good Design Awards]

3D and cards. Now those are two things you normally wouldn’t associate with each other, much less use in the same sentence. But that’s what Rocca managed to do with their card game which recently won at the 2012 Good Design Awards.

These tiny hexagonal decks were created by a game designer and a graphic designer after they met board game designer Alex Randolph. The name ‘Rocca’ came from the Japanese word rokkaku, which translates to ‘hexagon’ in Japanese.

You can play typical card games like poker and gin rummy with these cards or play a couple of rounds of the new card game that the Rocca designers came up with. Full instructions come with each deck, so no need to worry about getting lost while at play. They’re also great for making paper robots, as shown above.

The Rocca 3D card decks are available from ahalife for $28 (USD).

[via Spoon & Tamago]

Life’s tough. Sometimes, it feels good to hash things out with friends or family to get rid of the negativity. But when you feel like keeping things to yourself but want to express your emotions, then you’ve got the Corezone to turn to.

The Corezone is a ‘closed ceramic space’ which you can use as a piggy bank of sorts for your emotions. Write them down, roll them up, and slip them inside one of the veins or arteries, and let it go.

There is comfort in knowing that you’ve ‘told’ someone – even though you just did it on paper. And the Corezone helps you keep whatever it was a secret.

And when you’re ready, just break the Corezone open to reflect on the hurts of your past. Or you can just throw those strips of paper away and let it all go.

The Corezone is available on Etsy for $65(USD).

[via Ian Brooks via Neatorama]

As head-mounted displays and motion controllers improve, the possibility of truly-immersive virtual reality in our living rooms continues to get closer and closer to our reach. However one of the big challenges is that you’ll still be standing still or walking in place in any game that involves moving around. While there are omni-directional treadmills that solve this problem, you won’t be able to afford one (or fit one in your living room) any time soon. Now, there’s an odd little gadget in development that aims to solve this problem without any moving parts at all.

Created by Julian Williams, the WizDish is a disc that you stand on, while wearing special shoes (called, of course, WizShoes), which enables you to move around in any direction, while standing in one place. The action isn’t exactly what I’d call walking, though – it’s more like shuffling. The 14 pound device relies on a small amount of friction between the bottom of the shoes and its platform to allow you to move around – without falling like you might do wearing socks on a slippery floor.

According to its maker, “The WizDish exploits the fact that you have 29 bones in each foot to balance with. You slide your feet over a slick concave surface in a simulation of walking that gives surprisingly similar proprioceptive cues to real walking. Once you can see where you are going [using an HMD] you take more confident strides and quickly forget it’s a simulated walk. The key advantages of the WizDish are that you can start, stop and turn with absolute ease…”

Personally, I’m not yet convinced, but then again I think that the cumbersome headgear and eye-strain inducing optics of HMDs still have some big hurdles to overcome before I’ll be strapping one to my head for a 3-hour gaming session.

(I have high hopes for the Oculus Rift HMD though. Please let it be as good as it sounds.)

[via Road to Virtual Reality]