Hasta La Gadget!

When it gets cold, it’s not so easy to use your smartphone. Even though you can eventually get it to work after trying a couple of times, eventually you end up frustrated enough to simply pull off your gloves. While there are plenty of touchscreen-enabled gloves on the market these days, most of them are made out of synthetics – which aren’t the warmest or most stylish materials. These leather gloves will allow you to keep your hands toasty warm while using your touchscreen device – and look good doing it.

The Mujjo Leather Touchscreen Gloves are made from Ethiopian lambskin, which has been treated for wind and water resistance. They have “nanotechnology” integrated into the leather to make them touchscreen compatible, emulating the conductivity of human skin. There is also a leather strap on the heel to tighten them around your wrist.

The gloves sell for €129.95 (~$169 USD) from Mujjo.

[via Uncrate]

Looking for a totally unique piece of jewelry? Well it doesn’t get more special than a piece you designed yourself. And thanks to an awesome app from the guys over at Nervous System, you can create your own earrings, necklaces and other art objects in a snap.

Their Radiolaria website lets you design and preview your own jewelry and art pieces that you can construct simply by clicking a few buttons. By manipulating a grid of honeycomb-like cells, you can create a huge number of cool “bio-inspired” designs in seconds. Here are a few example designs I knocked out while writing this post:

And here’s a demo of Radiolaria in action:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Not only can you change designs and sizes, but choose from stainless steel or 24K gold-plated stainless for jewelry, and bamboo or black wool felt for trivets or other art objects. Metal items are photochemically etched out of metal, while wood and felt objects are laser-cut.

Once you’ve created your design, you can scale it, share it and purchase it if you so choose. Prices range from as little as $7 for a really small and simple form to hundreds of dollars, depending on the size, complexity and material selected. Head on over to the Radiolaria app right now if you’d like to play with it, while there’s still time to order custom pieces for Christmas delivery.

While you’re over there, you can always check out Nervous System’s original app, which lets you design custom 3D-printed jewelry.

If you’ve followed Technabob for a while, you know that we’ve always enjoyed the cool and offbeat modern watch designs coming out of Tokyoflash Japan. The latest digital model to find its way from the watchmaker is no exception.

The new Kisai Polygon features an unusual display which uses a series of triangles and other polygons to indicate the current time. The triangles around the outer edge point to the current hour, while the next ring of triangles indicates 10 minute intervals of time. Then the large, hexagonal digit in the middle of the watch indicates individual minutes. It takes a minute to understand the display, but once you get used to it, it’s actually pretty straightforward. Plus, it’s definitely unique.

If you’re still confused, check out the video demo below, and it’ll make perfect sense:

The display of the watch is an LCD, which comes in a black, mirror, blue or pink color schemes. It’s also got EL backlighting for easy reading in the dark.

You can order the Kisai Polygon now in black or silver stainless steel with your choice of display color over at Tokyoflash now. If you order by Thursday, 11/29 at 4pm Japan time (2AM Eastern time), you can get the watch for an introductory price of $99(USD) – after which point the price goes up to $129.

In the past, we’ve talked about the interesting and odd project from Google called Project Glass. The technology is basically a small wearable augmented reality system with a display embedded into a pair of glasses. A patent application has surfaced from Microsoft that shows the company is at least considering a competing product.

Artwork included with the patent application shows one example application as view of a baseball game offering factoids about players, including stats, hovering above them while you watch the game. They also showed another example where subtitles are displayed over an opera performance. Here’s the abstract from the patent application:

A system and method to present a user wearing a head mounted display with supplemental information when viewing a live event. A user wearing an at least partially see-through, head mounted display views the live event while simultaneously receiving information on objects, including people, within the user’s field of view, while wearing the head mounted display. The information is presented in a position in the head mounted display which does not interfere with the user’s enjoyment of the live event.

Microsoft’s offerings are also not meant to be worn at all times, while Google is hoping we’ll be wearing their glasses everywhere we go. It appears that Microsoft is tying their device to live events like sports and concerts. The Microsoft product would be able to the project text and audio overlays onto whatever the wearer is viewing.

The patent app was originally filed in May of 2011, but was updated this week. There is no indication of what the status of this project is at Microsoft right now; it could be significantly further along considering it’s been over a year since the application was filed, or it could just be a concept. Whereas Google already has usable prototypes of their system, it appears Microsoft’s is in the planning stages.

You can view Microsoft’s complete patent application here.

[via UnwiredView]

Anyone who’s experienced intercontinental jet lag will tell you that it really messes you up. My personal system involves doing an all-nighter the night before I get onto a plane, so that I crash when I land. These goggles might help me actually get more sleep and do away with this all-nighter foolishness.

The Re-Timer is designed to help reset your body’s internal biological clock so that jet lag effects can be minimized. The goggles emit a soft green light onto the eyes of the wearer, and this is supposed to improve your alertness level, and make getting out of bed easier. Its makers claim the reason why it works is because Re-Timer mimics the effects of sunlight, relying on light to stimulate a segment of the brain which is responsible for regulating our biological clocks.

With that in mind, wearing them could also help manage the effects of seasonal affective disorder (aka the “Winter Blues”), as well as to help those who work the night shift readjust their body clocks.

The Re-Timer was designed on the back of 25 years of research, so I would hope that they would be effective. A pair of Re-Timer goggles costs AUD$249 (~$258 USD).

[via Ubergizmo]