Hasta La Gadget!

There are tons of gaming keyboards on the market today, and many of them share the same basic feature set. Acessory maker SteelSeries has unveiled a new gaming keyboard called the Apex that has an impressively customizable backlighting system to set it apart from the masses. The keyboard is capable of displaying 16.8 million different backlight colors.

The backlight also has eight levels of dimming control, and you can select which areas of the keyboard you want to be a specific color. That means you could make keys that go with macros for your favorite game one color, while leaving the remainder of the keyboard another color. Though unlike the completely customizeable Luxeed LED keyboard, this one only supports 5 predefined color zones. It would be nice if you could individually address each key.

Other than the fancy LED lighting system, the keyboard also has 22 macro keys. Each of those keys has four functions states – for a total of 88 possible macros. The keyboard also features anti-ghosting technology supporting up to 20 concurrent key presses. One of the more unusual features of the keyboard is two extra arrow keys that point up/left and up/right for quickly moving on the diagonal.

The SteelSeries Apex keyboard is available now for $99(USD).

[via EverythingUSB]

It almost goes without saying Tokyoflash watches aren’t always very scrutable. The company’s newly launched Kisai Adjust, however, is thankfully one of the more legible examples — as the name suggests, it even goes out of its way to accommodate the wearer. The fan-designed timepiece uses LED-lit triangles to offer the time and date in any one of six colors, including a slightly mesmerizing “candy,” with the option to display digits horizontally in those moments it’s not on a wrist. It’s USB-rechargeable, too, for those averse to wall outlets; expect about a month of dazzling (or confusing) friends between battery top-ups. Tokyoflash is selling the Kisai Adjust today, although you’ll want to buy the watch within the first 48 hours to pay $149 instead of the regular $179. Head past the break for a video that helps explain the Adjust’s changeable ways.

Filed under: Wearables

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Source: Tokyoflash

Are you the kind of person that’s worried about Big Brother and those CCTV cameras all over the place? So you don’t want your face on camera feeds? Then these specs might be for you.

These glasses fitted with LEDs were created by Isao Echizen and Seiichi Goshi at the National Institute of Informatics and Kogakuin University in Tokyo, Japan. The glasses emit near IR light, which prevents current facial recognition cameras and software from figuring out who you are. The lights are powered by a small battery pack that needs to be transported in your pocket.

Granted, unless you’re going for some sort of Blade Runner look, they’re not particularly chic, but they get the job done. They’re also not exactly what you’d call inconspicuous, so security might still hunt you down, even though they don’t know who you are.

The researchers are working on making these specs a bit more fashionable. They predict that the final model will cost around $1(USD) to manufacture.

[via Slate via DVice]

Think back to your days in elementary or middle school when you had to go to PE in a gym that was used for multiple sports. Odds are your gym had more than the normal lines for basketball court running across it, making things very confusing if you are new to the sport or just really bad at it. Most of the school gyms have lines for traditional full-size basketball court, and lines running across the middle for basketball courts on each side of the normal court.

A high-tech gym installed by a German company called ABS Systembau GMBH ditches those painted lines on traditional wooden gym floors and replaces them with glowing strips of LED light that remind me a lot of Tron. This fancy gym floor is installed in a school gym in Germany. The fancy lighting system allows the gym to be used for basketball, tennis, badminton, or other activities that are played in your average school gym.

The system is called the ABS Glassfloor. The glass flooring material uses a ceramic treatment to reach a level of elasticity and friction is very similar to that the wood floor offers. The company that produces the system also promises that it performs a “bounce test” to be sure that the basketball bounces at the same height on their fancy flooring as it would on a wood floor.

The glass material used in the floor is also dulled to reduce reflection suppliers are distracted. The company says that its glass flooring is about as reflective as a typical marble surface. The treatment also helps to hide scratches that are caused during play and the floor is available in any color. Another interesting aspect the flooring is that the color can be changed after installation. The glass floor is supported by a lightweight aluminum frame that also houses the LED lighting. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this floor is that it can be combined with sensors that will illuminate precisely where the ball landed or where a player’s foot was to determine if they went out of bounds.

[via Digital Trends]

High-tech gym floor has LED lights rather painted stripes is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
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While 4K TVs are excellent, for the next couple of years most of us will still be selecting a 1080p model when we’re out shopping, and now we’ve got a little more detail about some of the new ones Sony announced last week. After letting its “Triluminos” RGB LED lighting technology fall by the wayside after 2009 because of its high cost, Sony has brought the brand back in this year’s HDTVs. Noted in the press release and highlighted today in the MIT Technology Review, this iteration uses QD Vision’s quantum dot technology to enhance the red/green/blue LED backlighting the series is known for. According to the CTO of QD Vision, the TVs start with a blue backlight — instead of the standard white LED — which stimulates quantum dots that emit “pure green and pure red.” Sony was very proud of its Triluminos tech at the show and our experience at demonstrations seemed to validate the quality of the approach. While we’ve been hearing about quantum dots for years, this is reportedly their first appearance in a mass produced consumer product, once it hits homes we’ll be able to tell if the wait was truly worth it.

Filed under: Displays, Home Entertainment, HD, Sony

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Source: MIT Technology Review