Hasta La Gadget!

Engineers have built an interactive display using a tabletop system and mounted personal screens made of fog. Projectors light the fog for each user and a camera system monitors movements, allowing each person at the table to manipulate and share three-dimensional data.

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The FretPen is a pen that doubles as a miniature guitar. Even if you can’t do much with one string and teensy frets, at least you can write and play a neat little tune with it.

The FretPen is also smartphone-connected. A small D-pad on the pen allows you to switch strings on the fly, which gives you the ability to play scale-like runs and rudimentary melodies.

The video below will show you some of what this pen can do.

A Kickstarter campaign will be launching on the 22nd, so if you are interested you can give them your email address to be notified when they’re ready to accept your pledges.

The pen is mightier than the sword, plus now it can play tunes.

[via Chip Chick via OhGizmo!]

A lot of folks say that 2014 will be the year of wearables, as in wearable technology. We’ve had wearable devices such as watches and cameras for decades, but the past couple of years we’ve seen devices like Google Glass, Pebble, fitness trackers and more. MbientLab is giving tinkerers and small entrepreneurs a chance to ride the wave with MetaWear.

MetaWear is a small, affordable and developer-friendly platform for creating your own wearable device, or at least a prototype. It’s powered by the ARM Cortex M0 SoC. It has Bluetooth LE connectivity and has a built-in accelerometer, temperature sensor, buzzer, coin motor and RGB LED. It also has two analog/digital I/O pins and an I2C bus. On the software side, it already has its own API, and MbientLab will be releasing open source Android and iOS apps for MetaWear as well.

In my brief chat with MbientLab’s Laura Kassovic, she said that the MetaWear can be used to build a fitness tracker that could compete with existing products like FitBit’s products or Nike’s FuelBand if you so choose, saving you a lot of resources in the process: “First off, you don’t have to spend 4 years at University to get your engineering degree just so you can write firmware. So that’s 4 years we are saving you! We are also saving you the time it takes to prototype, test, and certify hardware just so that you can put it on the store shelf. That’s another 4-6 months of reduced development time. We save developers 80 to 90% of their development time and cost with MetaWear (and I think that’s awesome).”

But Laura is also excited about the potential of MetaWear to enable tinkerers to create niche or even one-off wearable devices: “MetaWear will allow developers to create devices that large companies aren’t interested in building or devices that are very niche (and in my opinion, very cool). Perhaps you want to build a necklace that lights up when your Grandma calls. Perhaps you have an Oculus Rift and you want to add force feedback pods you wear on your body to create an even more realistic simulation. Maybe you have a pet iguana and you want to track its movement but you simply can’t outfit your iguana with a Fitbit Flex; so the natural solution is to build custom on MetaWear instead!” 

So put on your best fitting browser and pledge at least $30 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a MetaWear kit as a reward. Go and get that Facebook money. Or make a fatness tracker. The power is yours.

3D modeling software is often used to visualize and develop concepts – anything from a piece of furniture to a video game. Those programs make it easy to transition from idea to prototype and to refine or duplicate sketches, but they require a lot of practice and training to master. A new company called Gravity thinks it can make sketching in 3D almost as easy as doodling with pen and paper.

Gravity uses an infrared pen, a control pad with sensors and a pair of augmented reality glasses. You use the pen to sketch in midair, just above the control pad. You won’t need to be M.C. Escher to start creating 3D models though, because Gravity only allows for sketching in one plane at a time. A switch on the pad lets you switch planes, rotating your virtual object to the side where you want to draw. Your sketch will then be visible to anyone wearing the glasses – it could just be you, or a roomful of people.

The founders of Gravity believe that “CAD [computer-aided design] generates perfect shapes that don’t leave room for the imperfection of your early modeling to allow imagination to keep influencing the idea. CAD requires thinking in terms of functions and variables. This is where imagination is defeated. There is much lost in the process of moving from 2D to 3D.” I’m not sure I buy that. Sure, making complex technology user-friendly can help drive innovation and speed up the development of concepts. On the other hand, professionals need the precision and the shortcuts that CAD and other 3D modeling software provide. For example, will Gravity users be able to cut, copy and paste an exact part of a sketch, and will the commands for those features still be intuitive without being tedious?

Sketching in 3D looks cool, but I’m going to let the pros decide if this is just a high-tech whiteboard or a legitimate alternative to 3D modeling software.

[Gravity via Gizmodo]

Facebook is sitting on boatloads of money and the company isn’t afraid to use some of that cash to buy up companies that have interesting tech. Such is the case with a new purchase that sees Facebook buying up Oculus VR, the company behind the slick Oculus Rift VR headset. The purchase reportedly cost Facebook $2 billion (USD).

Many people think the buyout is a bad thing because Facebook is Facebook, and also because selling off the company goes against the independent spirit of the company’s initial funding via Kickstarter. I think the buyout could be a good thing. Facebook certainly has the capital to help Oculus develop low cost VR headsets and other gear, and the reach to bring them to market. Perhaps the purchase will mean that a production rollout will come faster.

Facebook is also a place that many people go to play casual games, and harass others with invites to play games. I could see Facebook working with developers to get casual games on the social network using the Oculus VR device.

[via Washington Post]