Hasta La Gadget!

These electrical plugs look like noses, just in case you want some great big nostrils on your wall. These Hanaga Tap Nose Outlets from design firm ekoD Works will make your home look pretty damn weird.

They will turn any horizontal U.S. or Japanese wall outlet into a nose-shaped vertical outlet that you can plug into, making it look even weirder.

These come in black, white and pink and sell for $35(USD) a piece. That’s pretty expensive for a nose-shaped outlet. Never mind the fact that it’ll block two outlets due to its height. ‘Snot cool man.

I suppose you could draw a face around the outlet area and really complete the package if you have to have a nose on your wall. Humans are weird. Am I the only one creeped out by this? Just a little?

[via Coolest Gadgets via Geekologie]

One of Google’s April Fools’ Day pranks was the launch of Google Nose, a search engine that would supposedly push your olfactory senses into hyperdrive. While you won’t be able to smell stuff on your computer display yet, you might soon be able to on your television screen.

This is all thanks to researchers from Japan’s Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology[JP]. They’ve developed a ‘smelling screen’ that makes smells waft from certain areas on the screen where the object that you’re supposed to smelling is located. So how are the smells produced? The secret lies with the four fans installed on each corner of the screen. Odors from gel pellets are bed into the streams in each corner, and they are then blown by the fans across the surface of the display.

The screen was demonstrated at the IEEE Virtual Reality conference last month, where the researchers explained: “The smelling screen is a new olfactory display that can generate a localized odor distribution on a two-dimensional display screen. The generated odor distribution is as if an odor source had been placed on the screen, and leads the user to perceive the odor as emanating from a specific region of the screen.”

They also added: “The user can freely move his/her head to sniff at various locations on the screen, and can experience realistic changes in the odour intensity with respect to the sniffing location.”

It might take more time before they’ll be made commercially, but the future of television is here – and it smells.

[via Daily Mail via C|NET]