Hasta La Gadget!

Whether you’re a frequent flier, an avid outdoorsman or a kid who was a prime target for bullies back in grade school, when you were so thin you might as well have been two-dimensional, your packed lunch a bait for your physically endowed peers – wait where was I? Right. We’ve all lost a bag at some point in our lives. So it’s fun to see a concept for a suitcase that hates being lost as much as you hate losing it.

Conceptualized by Rodrigo Garcia, the Hop! suitcase has three Bluetooth sensors and a microcontroller. The sensors are meant to be paired with a Bluetooth-enabled phone. A pair of treads running on compressed air help the Hop! follow its owner – or whoever has his phone. If the Hop! loses track of the phone that it’s paired to, it will lock itself down and make the phone vibrate.  It will try its best not to cry, because it’s a big boy.

Head to Garcia’s website to see more details and pictures of the Hop! Forget about following me, what I want is a suitcase that can carry me around.

[via Slash Gear]

To be honest, I’m never satisfied with my workstation. Most of the time, I say to myself that it will do for now, but there’s always room for improvement. Check out the BendDesk, which merges a desk with a computer workstation in a most efficient manner.

The BendDesk is a working prototype that was designed and created as part of a research project by by Malte Weiss, Simon Voelker, Jan Borchers from the Media Computing Group, and Christine Sutter from the Department of Work and Cognitive Psychology of the RWTH Aachen University in Germany. The whole setup is multi-touch, and allows users to interact with the entire surface. It  merges two separate vertical and horizontal work surfaces, enabling continuous interaction between both of them.

This is still a concept, and if you’ve got the money, you can get yourself a Microsoft Surface (PixelSense) Table, but honestly I’d rather like to have a functional touchscreen on a desk than on a coffee or dining table.

[via GadgetOse]

Mathematics geeks will often use the number of digits of Pi they can remember as a measure of pride. While I might be able to get as far as 3.141592653589793, that’s about where I lose it. But with these special drinking glasses, I bet I’d be able to recite 100 digits in no time.

TheUncommonGreen’s Pi series is printed several hundred digits of the mathematical constant – which for those of you who flunked math class is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Duh.

There’s a Pi pint glass ($36/pair), a Pi rocks glass ($36/pair) and a Pi shot glass ($20/each), so you can even memorize digits while you get drunk. I’m not sure how much those Pi coasters go for, though. And if you want to keep working on your math while you cook dinner, there’s a matching Pi kitchen towel.

And when your guests arrive, you can help them learn Pi too, while they cut the cheese on this Pi plate ($55).

But my favorite of the Pi series won’t help me memorize its digits at all – but it will help me drink more beer – and that’s the Pi bottle opener ($45).

[via bltd]

Microsoft’s Kinect sensor has proven to be quite versatile and accurate, but in the end’s it’s only one motion sensor. A company called Yost Engineering Inc. or YEI recently showed off how multiple motion sensors can be used in videogames, enabling real-time motion capture and virtual reality.

YEI makes what it calls the 3-Space Sensor, a wireless motion sensor with a gyroscope, accelerometer and compass as well as advanced processing and algorithms to process the motion data it captures. Using 17 3-Space Sensors and 3 dongles, the company was able to demo a real-time motion capture session using the Unreal Development Kit, as well as a virtual reality demo that shows how motion capture can increase immersion.

Dance Dance Revolution 2050 is going to be hilarious. Seriously though this could work well with the Oculus Rift.

[YEI via Reddit]

Many of the 3D printed products we’ve seen are for commercial purposes, prototypes or toys. But as the technology matures and becomes more affordable, we’ll start seeing more products that us ordinary folks can appreciate and more importantly use in our daily life. Objects like this 3D printed pair of headphones.

The headphones were made by John Mabry of Teague Labs, who wanted to see if he can create a functional object that can be 3D printed and then assembled without any tools. He called the headphones 13:30 because it took 13 hours and 30 minutes to print its components. That’s a hell of a print job, but I wouldn’t be able to make a pair of headphones even if I had 13 months and 30 days.

Mabry posted the files and instructions on Thingiverse. The components are meant to be printed on a Makerbot Replicator, which is certainly not a mainstream product, but is also a long way from an entire factory filled with machines and craftsmen.

[Teague Labs via Engadget]