Hasta La Gadget!

If you’re planning a trip to Universal Studios Hollywood in late September, and happen to be a fan of zombies, you will want to check out the awesome Halloween spook stuff that will be going on. Universal Studios Hollywood has announced its Halloween Horror Nights will start on Friday, September 21 and run through October 31. Among the attractions will be some featuring zombies from The Walking Dead.

If you’re a zombie fan, this will be much better than a normal haunted house. One of the attractions is called Terror Tram and will force people to face hordes of Walkers stalking the Universal Studios back lot. The back lot is a rural setting with a small town was devastated by a horrible plane wreck. This time around, Walkers will be moving around the city.

The scary fun will also include a maze filled with Walkers as well. The maze is called “The Walking Dead: Dead Inside” and will force visitors to stumble through Walkers as they try to find a way out of the maze. There will also be a maze called “Welcome to Silent Hill” based on the popular video game franchise.

You won’t see phone booths as creative or as colorful as the ones you’ll find in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Typically, phone booths are made to look plain so they’ll blend in with the surroundings, and only the people actually looking for them will be able to really “see” them.

Well, not anymore.

Brazilian telco Vivo decided it was time to cast these telephone booths into the spotlight once and for all. To do so, they launched the Call Parade public art project, where they paired off 100 phone booths with a hundred artists.

The result is crazy amazing, and the phone booths are literally transformed into public displays of art.

Personally, I like the one with the pencil the best. Check out the full gallery of phone booths here (along with maps of their locations,) and tell me, which one’s your favorite?

[via This is Colossal]

If you’re one of the gamers that still enjoys playing EverQuest II (there have to be a few of you out there) the game has received an interesting new feature this week. The new feature is called SOEmote and is designed to transmit the player’s facial expressions to their in game avatar. The technology uses software that runs on the computer and a normal webcam.

SOEmote takes the players facial expression that is grabbed using what Sony Online Entertainment calls the Live Driver. This is a proprietary piece of software from a company called Image Metrics that performs real-time facial analysis and expression tracking. Using a normal web cam the software is able to analyze thousands of expression measurements per second and transfer that data the online game character in real time.

That means if you raise your eyebrow quizzically, so does your game character. SOEmote also has technology to change the player’s voice into the voice that their character uses in the game world. The text can also use a different voice of the player’s choice.

So this won’t be the first time that you’ll see an interactive shirt (remember the fully playable electric guitar t-shirt and the drum machine shirt?), but this is the first shirt of its kind to actually be able to do all that it promises to do. The tshirtOS. A t-shirt with its own operating system. The name already sounds cool, but just wait until you see the actual thing.

The tshirtOS is the result of a joint venture between Ballantine’s and CuteCircuit. The shirt is described as a wearable (obviously), sharable, and programmable piece of clothing that you can use to display random stuff like tweets, animation, and photos, and even play music and videos.

The shirt features a large multi-color, flexible LED grid, connected to a controller circuit and battery pack. It’ll also have a camera, accelerometer, microphone and speakers for truly interactive displays. It’s controlled by an app that’s to be installed on your smartphone. Because of its programmable nature, the sky’s the limit with this baby.

Make a fashion statement, share your thoughts by displaying your tweets as you go along, and make a nyan cat run around your shirt to give everyone around you a dose of geeky randomness.

Want it? Head on over to tshirtOS.com to find out more.

[via Dvice]

Life moves in mysterious ways. (And yes, you caught me, I totally stole that line from a song.) One moment you might feel like you’re on top of the world, then something happens to bring you down to your very lowest.

Before you start thinking that your life sucks or that your world is about to end – take a second to look at the world and life through someone else’s eyes.

Why? Because it just might give you the perspective you need to push past whatever it is you’re going through right now. And also to show you that hey, the world’s still spinning around, and whatever problem you have – no matter how big or small – doesn’t spell the end of it.

You can do just that by checking out This is Now, a site that displays Instagram photos from five major cities of the world as they’re posted in real-time. The project was thought up by Marcio Puga, Mauricio Massaia and Per Thoresson and uses Instagram’s API to access and display them for the whole world to see. Here’s how they describe their project, in their own words:

The This is Now project is a visual composition which uses real-time updates from the ever popular Instagram application based on users’ geotag locations. The tool streams photos instantly as soon as they are uploaded on Instagram and captures a city’s movement, in a fluid story.

Get out of your shell and see the world in other’s people’s eyes on This is Now.

[via CNET]