Now who would have thought that we’d see Tetris make its big comeback on a pumpkin? With Halloween upon us, I suppose that this themed ‘console’ is totally appropriate.
It’s definitely a step up from all the usual jack’o’lanterns that people usually put out this time of the year. Nathan from HaHa Bird got the idea to grow Tetris-shaped pumpkins last year, but never got around to doing it.
So instead of growing pumpkins shaped like Tetris pieces, he decided to install an actual Tetris game into a hollowed out pumpkin. Hence, the Pumpktris.
The stem of the pumpkin acts as the controller, with about 128 LEDs illuminating the game ‘screen’ with puzzle pieces. Happy Halloween, Tetris style!
This isn’t the only robot that can kick your butt at ping pong. But unlike other ping pong playing ‘botsot, this one wasn’t programmed with its abilities. It has learned through experience. Robotics experts at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany created this robot arm that learns to adapt its game as it plays.
Much like the Borg, it assimilates knowledge and adapts. But there is no cube ship or sexy Seven of Nine model. This is just an arm. The team attached the robot arm to the ceiling and attached a camera to watch and analyze the game. They taught the arm to play ping pong by feeding it more and more difficult shots. The arm was soon generating its own shots thanks to it’s amassed knowledge.
That’s right. It learned. It wasn’t trained in advance… and it is armed with ping pong balls. We are all so dead. I can already see the little plastic bits sticking out of open wounds in human foreheads.
A couple of years back, a cool device came out called the Holocube. This unique display creates the illusion of a 3-dimensional moving image with a tremendous sense of depth. Now, an updated version of the Holocube has been released with improves brightness and a new trick up its sleeve.
The 2012 Holocube is illuminated by a bright 1600 cd/m² LED backlight, which allows the display to be used in just about any lighting conditions. It’s also been redesigned in a way that renders the bottom projection source invisible when you walk by the display, improving the holographic illusion greatly when compared to the original.
Photos and video don’t really do the illusion justice though, and you need to see the display in person to really appreciate it. Expect to see these turn up in retail and trade show exhibits in the near future. You can find more information on the 2012 Holocube over on their website.
Light painting can be a pretty awesome technique, which involves the capture of a moving light source, using long-exposure photography. Photographers have created some prettyamazingimages using the medium, but it can be complicated to pull off unless you know exactly what you’re doing, and have a camera with full manual exposure controls. Now the fine folks at Japan’s Takara Tomy Arts have released a little gadget and app combo which makes it easy for anyone with an iPhone or iPad to make their own light paintings.
This little penlight gadget, thats name roughly translates to “Oekaki: The Night Sky” provides a bright, point source of light, and works with a companion iOS app to let you record long-exposure images. Simply start up the app, place your phone in the included base (or stand up your iPad), and start drawing in space. The penlight itself lets you choose from combinations of cyan, magenta or yellow light in 8 levels each, providing for a total of 27 colors for your images, and you can shoot either stills or time-lapse video with the app.
You can check out the app and pen in action in this clip (though it is in Japanese, it’s pretty easy to follow), or you can download the app itself for free here – though you’ll really want to have the light pen or a good point light source to make it work. I tried it out with a laser pointer aimed at the wall and it worked pretty well.
The app and light pen combo makes it shockingly easy to create light paintings. While the gadget was designed for Japanese markets, you can pre-order one for worldwide shipment over at Gizmine now for $69.99 (USD) with an estimated ship date of November 20th.
The interesting thing about research into video games is that depending on which side you listen to, video games either turn players into insanely violent criminals or video games can make you a better person. One of the latest bits of research performed using a video game comes from Boston Children’s Hospital.
In the study, researchers used traditional treatments with children ranging from age 9 to 17 that had anger control issues. The traditional treatment involved cognitive-behavioral therapy, relaxation techniques, and social skills. One group of 19 children only received the standard treatments.
A second group of 18 children received the same standard treatments and played a video game called Rage Control for the last 15 minutes of their session. The video game, which sounds rather like Space Invaders, required the children to keep their heart rate under a preset limit or lose the ability to destroy enemy spaceships. The researchers found that the group who played the video game were significantly better at keeping their heart rates down and showed clinically-significant decreases in anger scores on standardized tests.
I’ve been a gamer all my life going all the way back to the original Atari console when I was a kid. I go through spurts where I play mostly driving games, but recently I’ve been walking around the game sections of my local stores looking for a decent shooter. Sadly, I haven’t been able find a decent one but I may go back now and pick up Medal of Honor: Warfighter because it’s now available.
The gritty FPS uses the awesome-looking Frostbite 2 Game Engine and has both multiplayer and a single player campaign mode. The game allows players to choose from 12 different Tier 1 units that hail from 10 different nations. The multiple player aspect of the game allows players to represent their nation of choice head-to-head an online competition.
The game also has a new feature called Fireteams, the game’s new, tight-knit online co-op mode. Fireteams are supported on eight real-world maps around the globe. The game is available in North America right now and will be available in Europe on October 26. You can pick the game up now for the Xbox 360, PS3, or PC.
Do you know what it feels like to have an elevator fall apart while you’re in it? Nah, me neither. But these people did – and they lived to tell the stories of their harrowing experience.
Not that their lives were really at risk, because it was all part of an elaborate prank of sorts that LG pulled to show off the ultra-realistic images on their IPS flat-panel monitors.
I would think that some people got pretty pissed after realizing the stunt that LG had pulled. What LG did was added a layer to the floor of the elevator, with nine embedded monitors that looked like floor tiles. Once the elevator began moving, the video tiles would fall away to reveal an image of the elevator shaft.
And that’s when all the fun begins.
The effect looks so real, it’s scary. But for those of us who weren’t in that elevator, it’s freakin’ hilarious.
I love getting mail. Not the electronic kind, but the old-fashioned postal and physical kind of mail. Sure, it might take longer to arrive, but compare the feeling you get when you receive an actual postcard in the mail versus an e-card in your inbox.
Go up one more level and you’ve got the Cardtorial. Instead of plain cardboard, you can now send messages of love, friendship, and encouragement with laser-cut designs on certified American wood. Aside from saying how you feel through the adorable designs on the cards, you can add your own message using a marker to make it even more special.
Its creator Yvonne Leung recently completed a successful campaign on Kickstarter to launch the cards and to fund crafting more Cardtorials for her Fall 2012 line. The campaign is closed (and all funded!) but you can still get the cards directly from her website for $10(USD) per card. For an extra $5 per card, you can also personalize them, but you’ll need to allow at least 10 extra business days for that service.
How do you get over an addiction? Some people check into rehab, others go cold turkey, while others resort to hiring people off Craigslist to slap themselves out of it. The first two seem like typical things to do. The last one was done by blogger Sethi.
Sethi runs a blog called Hack the System. He also happens to be addicted to social media. One day, he tracked how he was spending his time and discovered that he was spending way too much time chatting on Facebook and checking out Reddit. So he did what no normal person would do and posted an ad on Craigslist for a slapper:
I’m looking for someone who can work next to me at a defined location (my house or a mission cafe) and will make sure to watch what is happening on my screen. When I am wasting time, you’ll have to yell at me or if need be, slap me.
Strange thing to do, I know. But people actually signed on to do the gig and Sethi got a fair amount of slaps in the process. What’s stranger is that it actually worked for Sethi, since he reported that his productivity was quadrupled because of it.
I guess you could say Sethi managed to slap away his habit.
I’ve always had a fascination with bridges ever since I was a kid, all thanks to the rhyme that went ‘London bridge is falling down…’ Now that I think of it, it’s a sad rhyme and what does it have to do with the fair lady?
Anyway, that fascination wore off when I realized that bridges were just, you know, bridges. But I think this concept for a trampoline bridge in Paris (called ‘A Bridge in Paris’ – stating the obvious, I know) might have just brought the joy back to bridges!
Basically, the picture says it all. To let everyone experience the ‘joyful release from gravity’, the AZC Architecture Studio designed the bridge using three gigantic trampolines that would be connected with massive inflatable tubes.
Now that’s one bridge that I’d like to keep crossing all day long.
Of course, they don’t quite explain how they’d keep people from flying off the thing and landing in the River Seine.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
