Hasta La Gadget!

If 13th Lab has its way, you could soon be playing first-person games using your surroundings as a battlefield. Or a space station, a temple and anything else you can imagine. The computer vision company is working on Rescape, an FPS platform for mobile devices that can scan and digitize your environment, turning it into a video game map.

13th Lab uses a robotics technique called Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). With the help of cameras and sensors, SLAM allows a device to make a map of its environment and place itself – i.e. know its location – within the map that it just made. The end result is shown in the image above. If you look closely you can see that the iPhone is showing a virtual equivalent of the player’s environment – everything from the structures, objects and even other players. 13th Lab calls this mix of augmented and virtual reality Reality Gaming.

As of now, a Rescape package includes a 180º fisheye lens and an adjustable gun controller with a trigger and a d-pad. To drive costs down and make it easier for app developers to port their FPS games, Rescape will make use of your mobile device to map and digitize your environment, as well as track your position.

The Rescape software development kit (SDK) handles the mapping feature, as well as the ability to digitally paint over a map and turn it into your battle ground of choice. I don’t know if the SDK will be simple enough for normal folks to understand and use though.  As I mentioned, mobile game developers can port existing FPS games into the Rescape platform, but that’s not as fun as turning your house or university into a game map.

Pledge at least $39 (USD) on Kickstarter to get the Rescape controller and Office Defender, the game shown in the video. Pledge at least $129 and you get the controller, the game and the Rescape SDK. When it launches Rescape will only support the iPhone 5, 5C and 5S, with “experimental support” for the iPhone 4S. 13th Lab promises that it will provide support for Android devices within a few months after the launch.

[via InStash]

An interesting new product is on Kickstarter that those who often lose things and are too lazy to lock their computer each time they walk away from it will appreciate. The product is called GateKeeper and it is a combination of a Bluetooth locating device and a proximity lock.

The proximity feature will automatically lock and unlock your PC or Mac when you walk away from it. That will keep your machine from sitting unprotected until your screen saver password protection kicks in.

The Bluetooth locator feature is just what it sounds like. It is a feature that will set off an alarm on your smartphone if you walk away from something you have tagged like a smartphone or bag. A pledge of $35(USD) or more will get you one GateKeeper this July. Fundraising ends at 11am CDT tomorrow, so you’ll want to move quickly if you want one.

Dustin Evans’ Tesseract case replica may not have the power to destroy worlds or foretell the future, but it can open portals to other realms. Aside from a glowing cube, the case also has a 7″ LCD monitor and a Raspberry Pi running the popular media player XBMC through Raspbian.

Dustin also wrote an Android app to control the LEDs on the case. He also uses his Android phone to send video to the case with the help of AllCast. Dustin also added audio and video outputs to the replica. You’ll see him connect it to a projector in the video below.

Assemble a browser and head to Dustin’s blog for more on his project.

[via Hack A Day]

Back in 2011 we featured a couple of humanoid robots designed to play table tennis. Industrial mechanic Ulf Hoffman recently unveiled a similar robot that he and his friends have been working on for the past couple of years. He calls it the Ulf Hoffman Tischtennis Roboter (Ulf Hoffman Table Tennis Robot) or UHTTR-1 for short.

As you can see the robot’s arm is on a rail mounted at one of the ends of a ping pong table. It’s made of aluminum, making it light enough for its servos to rapidly ferry it across the length of the table. It may only have one arm, but the robot has two things we don’t have: a second pair of eyes. Four cameras mounted at the top corners of the room track the ball’s position and send that data to the UHTTR-1′s software.

Ulf hasn’t said much about the robot’s program, but as you can see it has a variety of settings that help define its play style, including speed and spin. It even seems to have difficulty levels. I’m a bit worried about that “Evolve” setting.

We didn’t see it put to the test in the video, but I think you can beat the robot with a well-placed drop shot. Then again when you’re dealing with a robot that can evolve, all bets are off. Grip your browser and head to Ulf’s blog for more on his robot.

[via Laughing Squid]

My alarm clock has a first name, it’s O-S-C-A-R… my alarm clock has a second name, it’s M-A-Y-E-R. You will surely recognize the name Oscar Mayer as the company that makes more lunch and breakfast meats than you can shake a stick at. The company also makes bacon, which is the best food in the history of food.

Oscar Mayer has a new hardware and app combo for the iPhone that will wake you to the sounds and smell of frying bacon.

It’s not going to make you bacon like the Bacon Alarm Clock we talked about before. Instead, the Oscar Mayer app uses a cartridge that attaches to the bottom of the iPhone and produces the scent of bacon to wake you up. I’m not sure how I feel about that tease. The other issue is that you can’t just buy this thing. A limited number of them are being given away to people who take a quiz on the Oscan Mayer website. Those who win the dongle and app combo will get an extra vial of bacon scent. I guess once you run out of scent, you can’t get refills short of squeezing your own bacon juice.

We really love bacon around my house. I have spread that love for bacon to my kids too. My daughter even used crispy crunchy bacon to illustrate her food chain quiz recently in school. She is a genius.

[via Mashable]