Hasta La Gadget!

You are what you wear. Sometimes, you can send the loudest of messages without saying a single word. You can let your clothes do all the talking instead.

For example, take the Twitter Dress developed by creative agency Deportivo. This isn’t the first dress that displays tweets, although it’s the first one that’s political in nature.

The dress was created to help Sweden’s youth get their voices heard at Almedalen Week, which is an annual political summit where thousands of politicians, celebrities, and PR people will converge to attend seminars, discuss issues, and talk politics. Deportivo worked with youth organization Crossing Borders in the creation of the dress, which you can see in action in the Vine animation below:

Crossing Borders recruited 30 “ambassadors” to wear the dress before the summit began. Their goal was to get the organization’s concerns out there by catching the attention of people who can actually do something about it – in this case, the people in attendance at Almedalen.

After the summit, Deportivo’s Stefan Ronge reported: “The Twitter Dress got a pledge from the minister of equality, Maria Arnholm, on addressing the issue of mandatory education on gender equality for Swedish teachers.”

[via The Daily Dot via C|NET]

While Slave Leia has been the official sex symbol of the Star Wars franchise for three decades, she’s about to get a run for her money from her own mother, Padmé Amidala.

Yes, what you’re looking at is the Queen herself, devoid of ridiculous headgarb or facepaint – instead dressed in a skintight snowsuit, fringed with fur and slinky tall snow boots. Reow-reow. You’re looking good there, Mom.

The 10-1/2″ tall, hand-painted collectible figure was inspired by painting by Adam Hughes called Snowbunny Padme (sans Yoda) and is coming in a limited-edition from Gentle Giant. You can pre-order your own Snowbunny Padme statue over at Entertainment Earth for $248.99(USD) – though you’ll have to wait until June 2014 to enjoy her up close and personal.

Crowdsourcing is all the rage these days, so why not apply the concept to shooting a video? That’s exactly what Lexus did when it got together over 200 fans to each shoot frames for a promotional video. What makes the clip unique is that all of the images were captured and posted via Instagram.

The short film, called #LexusInstafilm captured a walk-around of the new 2014 Lexus IS, by instructing each of its Instagrammers to stand (or lie down) in a specific location to capture their still image. 3D mapping technology was used to identify the precise locations where each image needed to be snapped in order to stitch together the final stop-motion video.

Each individual captured their image, applied Instagram filters and posted them with a specific hashtag so they could be filtered and edited into the video sequence later the same day.

Here’s the final video, along with a little behind-the-scenes footage from the shoot:

Sure, it seems like a whole lot of labor to capture just a few seconds of video, but it’s still a creative way to let so many people could contribute to a single video.

WIRED, Stan Winston Studios, Legacy Effects, YouTube, and Conde Nast Entertainment all decided to get together and build something truly epic – a 9-foot, 9-inch-tall robot. Yeah, not my idea of a great idea that will benefit mankind, but it’s not like they asked me. Still, this thing is pretty awesome. Even if it could rip humans limb from limb.

And it has four arms to do the ripping. This was all for the opening day of the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con. They got Adam Savage to help unveil it. It’s pretty freakin’ epic, awesome, amazing, fantastic and scary. Check it out below…

Yeah, it’s actually a dude in a robot suit, but that doesn’t make it any less impressive. You try building a costume that looks this good.

I can easily believe that there were many casualties in the building process, just like the robot says.

[via YouTube]

Instructables member kevinmakes wanted to have a copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 on his wall. The problem? That’s the comic book that introduced Spider-Man to the world, making it an extremely rare and expensive comic. So kevinmakes decided to do something nearly as amazing: make a layered wood replica of the comic’s cover.

To make his awesome yet affordable piece, kevinmakes looked for a large image of the Amazing Fantasy #15 cover online, then converted it into black and white. Then he separated the parts of the image that he’ll cut into different parts or layers. He then used a laser cutter to cut and engrave the images on balsa wood and assorted veneers. Finally he sprayed it with a semi-gloss polyurethane finish.

Swing over to Instructables to get the full instructions. Hey kevinmakes, wanna know how you can buy your own laser cutter? Make more of these then open up an Etsy shop. Maybe you can even sell cheaper 3D printed copies in full color. Excelsior!