Hasta La Gadget!

It may not look like much, but Dentaku’s tiny board lets you follow in the footsteps of Leo Fender, Antonio Stradivari, Ikutaro Kakehashi and other musical instrument makers. It’s called the Ototo, and it’s a small synthesizer that can be activated by any conductive material and tweaked by a variety of inputs.

The Ototo is a lot like the MaKey MaKey, except it specializes in making music. It has 12 capacitive touch keys that you can activate with your fingers or any other conductive material. It also has four inputs for its sensors. One input modifies the volume, one changes the pitch and the other two sensors tweak the “texture” of the synth. At launch, Dentaku will offer seven types of sensors. There’s a knob, a slider, a joystick, a force-sensitive button, a touch-sensitive strip, a light sensor and a breath sensor.

Augmenting the synth with one or more sensors lets you make a variety of instruments, from a cardboard saxophone to a drum made of human heads. I mean live human heads. I mean living human drums. With their heads still attached – you know what I mean. Don’t kill people.

Ototo is powered by two AA batteries or via micro-USB. Speaking of which, you can also use the synthesizer as a MIDI controller over USB.

Jam with your browser and head to Kickstarter for more info on Ototo. A pledge of at least £45 (~$73 USD) gets you an Ototo board.

Sneaky isn’t your ordinary card game. While most will pit you against friends, family, and acquaintances, Sneaky will challenge you to interact with others outside of your usual circle instead.

It’s essentially a stack of dares that encourages you to be sneaky as you accomplish the objective printed on it. It’s described as a card game about “creating fun and creative social interactions, breaking up the tedium of everyday life.” From the looks of it, Sneaky can do just about that – and more.

The main goal of the game is to get rid of all your cards by following each cards own rule set. The game works best in common social environments. Places like malls, school campuses, offices, conferences, camps, youth groups, parties, and other public places. In most situations there is a player who is playing the game and a non-player who is not. With the player interacting in some way with the non-player.

Sneaky was created by 16-year-old Harry Lee back in 2009, with the help of hundreds of volunteers who helped create ideas for the deck.

The best part? You can just download Sneaky Cards and print them at home to begin the fun. You can also contribute your own ideas to the project over on Reddit.

[via Boing Boing via The Awesomer via Laughing Squid]

NameTag is a pretty cool-sounding app on paper, but it could quickly turn into the stuff of nightmares in reality. It’s essentially an app that can match people’s mugs to their social media profiles.

NameTag essentially uses facial recognition to match people with their accounts on social networks and even dating profiles. All users will have to do is take a picture of the person. The app will then send the image wirelessly to a server, which will compare the image to online records. When a match is found, that person’s name, photos, and links to social media accounts will be displayed.

The app is being developed by FacialNetwork, who is also working on a technology that will let users take things one step further by allowing them to scan the pics to determine the person’s dating history or find their profiles on dating sites. Just imagine what potential stalkers might be able to do with this app.

In addition to smartphone apps, the company is working on a version for Google Glass as well, though if the beta demo below is any indication, the database lookups aren’t exactly instantaneous at this point:

FacialNetwork’s Kevin Alan Tussy explained: “I believe that this will make online dating and offline social interactions much safer and give us a far better understanding of the people around us.”

On privacy, he adds: “People will soon be able to login to www.nameyag.ws and choose whether or not they want their name and information displayed to others… It’s not about invading anyone’s privacy; it’s about connecting people that want to be connected. We will even allow users to have one profile that is seen during business hours and another that is only seen in social situations.”

What do you think?

[via C|NET]

Disney’s Touché concept can turn many ordinary objects into touch sensors. But what if you could buy materials such as wood, foil or paper that were already touch-sensitive off the shelf? That’s one of the dreams of a group called Embodied Interaction. To prove that the idea is applicable, the group made sheets of flexible and cuttable multi-touch sensors.

According to researchers Simon Olberding, Nan-Wei Gong, John Tiab, Joseph A. Paradiso, and Dr. Jürgen Steimle, their multi-touch sensor works even when parts of it are cut because of two main factors: how the electrodes – the points that sense touch – are wired to their connectors and where the connectors are located.

As the group claimed in their research paper (pdf), in conventional touch sensors electrodes are arranged in a flat grid and are wired to the connectors and to each other, as seen above. This presents two problems. First, several electrodes are dependent on one wire. Also, because the connectors are located at the edges of the sensor, you can’t damage or cut out those edges or you’ll leave the whole sheet useless. That won’t cut it for a cuttable sensor. In addition, conventional touch sensors are not made of materials that are hard to cut using ordinary tools.

What the research team did is to come up used circuit printing technology to make flexible multi-touch sensor sheets, in which the connectors are at the center of each sheet and the wires connect to as few electrodes as possible. In what they call the star topology, each electrode has its own wire to the connector. A second arrangement called the tree topology there are a few central wires that branch out and handle their own batch of electrodes.

The end result is a multi-touch sensor that can be cut into a variety of shapes, although obviously they couldn’t cut a hole in the middle of the sheet.

Of course, the challenge of wiring these touch-sensing sheets to a microcomputer is another matter altogether. Still, it would be nice if you could build your own touch-sensitive furniture, gadget or tools. Haed to Embodied Interaction’s website for more information on the concept.

[via PSFK]

We’ve seen people use the Oculus Rift to simulate beheadings. BeAnotherLab used the virtual reality headset for something less morbid but no less interesting. The organization’s The Machine to be Another was an “artistic investigation” in which the Rift was used to give participants first person views from actual people.

In one experiment, participants were told to direct the movements of a performer – if they moved their hand, the performer would move their hand as well, if they walked, the performer walked etc. The participant wore an Oculus Rift, through which he or she saw real time footage from a camera mounted on the performer.

The participant could also make the performer pick up objects scattered throughout the experiment area, at which point the performer would say something about the object they picked up. It was like a first-person video game, except you’re controlling an actual person and exploring the real world.

In another experiment, two participants – one male and one female – became each other’s performer. The pair had to synchronize their movements, which is why you can see them being slow and tentative in the video below. The idea was to put the participant in the body of the opposite sex. Note that the video below contains nudity:

Amazing isn’t it? Perhaps studies and experiences like this will be a lot easier to pull off when computer graphics become more life-like. Imagine you’re a browser and head to The Machine to be Another website for more information.

[via The Verge]