Hasta La Gadget!

The "Fourth Wall’ is a theatrical term for the imaginary wall that
exists between actors and their audiences. Originating from Ancient
Greek theater, while the open-box arena of a theater stage makes up
three walls, theater-goers are seen as the fourth wall. "Breaking the
fourth wall" is considered a technique of metafiction, as it penetrates the boundaries normally set up by works of fiction by reaching out to the audience.

That problem where you’re meeting someone for the first time, maybe to pick up something you bought through Craigslist? Google Glass can help with that. A new app designed for Google’s upcoming smart-mounted computer will be able to identify people based on what they’re wearing. The so-called InSight project (via 9to5Google) is funded in part by Google and developed by University of South Caroline and Duke University researchers, and uses a smartphone app to develop a clothing-based digital fingerprint to help identify strangers.

The app would let users like sellers on Craigslist, or members of online dating sites, or anyone meeting someone for the first time create a profile of themselves using their smartphone camera, and shots from various angles. InSight would then piece together a virtual profile of that person based on what they’re wearing, which could then be used by Google Glass to make a positive ID when that person comes within range of its visual sensors. It’s very sci-fi, it’s very cool, and best of all, it’s very accurate: in tests so far the researchers behind the project have been able to get a positive match 93 percent of the time.

The system uses clothes because it provides more visual signals at a distance to help with identification, and also because it keeps a user’s identity more or less private, since all they have to do is change clothes in order to not be identified by the same person’s Google Glass application in the future. But it could be refined to help with prosopagnosia, otherwise known as face blindness, and that’s where Google Glass’s therapeutic potential really starts to become apparent.

Prosopagnosia may affect up to 2.5 percent of the world’s population to varying degrees, according to a recent study, so while rare a system that corrects it could still have a significant impact. InSight, or technology like it, could help by identifying people based on their facial characteristics and keeping a stored database of people know to the Google Glass wearer, so that they can ‘recognize’ faces thanks to information provided through their heads up display.

The same kind of tech could also help with visual agnosia, a disorder resulting from strokes that can render a patient incapable of identifying everyday objects. And for more quotidian uses, it could work in tandem with language learning software to help learners identify the world around them in their target tongue.

Google Glass may not be something consumers can buy quite yet, but it’s already showing that it could have plenty of applications beyond just acting as an extension of your smartphone.

I can’t tell you how many times I wished my virtual pottery collection in Let’s Create! Pottery, a fun game on iOS and Android that lets you sculpt and paint little pottery pieces, could be brought to real life.

Now through the magic of 3D printing, I can do just that.

Inside the game, you can sculpt and paint your pottery piece just as you would in previous versions of the game.

Once you put the finishing touches on your pot, you’ll see that there’s a new option to “print”. This takes you to a page where you choose the size of your pot and put in an order to Sculpteo, a 3D printing firm based in France.

A small pot, around 2 inches tall, can be ordered for around $14 (including $6 shipping). Larger sizes are a little more expensive. A medium pot (4 inches) will cost $30 while a large (6 inches) will cost around $100.

Let’s Create! Pottery shipped a review unit to our offices, where the 3D printed pottery piece in question arrived in a quaint wooden box. Inside, I found the pot nestled in a bundle of hay, which was a nice touch.

While the future of 3D printing looks towards producing entire houses and automobiles, this is a reminder that it’s still immensely useful for the little stuff.

Google has yet to release the Mirror API that will open Google Glass as a platform, but developers of some of the more popular mobile apps today are gearing up for when wearable computing products, like Glass, will. Today, speaking at a keynote at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Dennis Crowley, CEO of social location app Foursquare, highlighted Google’s new headgear as an example of how mobile screens are evolving, and later he told TechCrunch that Foursquare is looking at how it can evolve along with that.

“Anywhere there’s a screen, we want to put our stuff on it, whether that’s on a phone, or a watch, or whatever,” he said. He also added that Foursquare hasn’t yet worked with Google Glass itself.

This week at MWC, Google did not have a formal presence at the main exhibition, but it’s been here nevertheless. Apart from the many Android device makers here — with the biggest of all, Samsung, taking stand space in multiple halls and even the train station nearby — Google had its usual Android party and there have been Google Glass sightings both at the official event and elsewhere.

Wearable computing devices like Google Glass, which make interacting with services ever more seamless, dovetail with how Foursquare is trying to make its services more automatic and easy to use, requiring less proactive input from consumers in order to function.

Crowley said that Foursquare would like to launch a new feature that builds on this concept, enhancing the “contextual awareness” (his words) introduced by like Radar. (Introduced in 2011, Radar alerts users to when they are near places that they have flagged in their app.)

“The best version of Foursquare is the one you don’t think about using,” he told TechCrunch on the sidelines of today’s keynote. “The relaunch of Radar is inevitable: it’s very important to us.”

And while for Foursquare part of reaching that goal is to be on as many platforms as possible, it’s also about integrating with other applications, furthering its own position as a platform for location services. The company already works with 40,000 developers to power location services, including Path, Instagram and Evernote. “We’re slowly starting to become the location layer for the Internet,” Crowley said.

In January, Google started to run its first hackathons, in San Francisco and New York, for developers interested in Google Glass and getting an early look at the Mirror API.

More from TechCrunch’s longer conversation with Crowley coming soon.

After we covered Hotel 626, an online haunted house full of multimedia-rich material that went viral, we found our readers love to have their socks knocked off in horror. Unfortunately, Hotel 626 is no longer online, so we went to work to see where fans of horror games can go next. Check out these other scary online games that will cause your cursor to shake uncontrollably.