Hasta La Gadget!

Need some classy geek art to decorate your place with? Try this awesome Darth Vader riding a Tauntaun painting. It’s like the Dark Lord is in the Imperial cavalry, mounted on his noble Tauntaun steed. In the desert. With a red cape. Makes perfect sense to me.

Actually, this image is a reinterpretation of Jacques Luis David’s classic Napoleon Crossing the Alps. This original piece of acrylic art on canvas was created by Etsy seller SteGentileNerdArt – who has lots of other amazing geek art to help geek up your walls.

This original painting measures 60cm x 80cm (~24″ x 31.5″) and will cost you $659(USD). Sure, that’s expensive, but it’s totally worth it to have Vader riding a Tauntaun on your wall.

It looks like brushstrokes – it could almost be a Turner – but this is actually nature at its most dramatic. This snapshot from the European Space Agency’s MERIS satellite shows the Tibesti mountains that straddle northern Chad and southern Libya – though a picture like this makes it easy to forget that borders exist. More »

Sure, you could paint your ceiling with the same tools as Michelangelo uses. But doesn’t that seem a little primitive? It may be time to upgrade your painter’s tape and angled sash brush to Black & Decker’s EasyEdge Powered Paint Edger. More »

Light painting can be a pretty awesome technique, which involves the capture of a moving light source, using long-exposure photography. Photographers have created some pretty amazing images using the medium, but it can be complicated to pull off unless you know exactly what you’re doing, and have a camera with full manual exposure controls. Now the fine folks at Japan’s Takara Tomy Arts have released a little gadget and app combo which makes it easy for anyone with an iPhone or iPad to make their own light paintings.

This little penlight gadget, thats name roughly translates to “Oekaki: The Night Sky” provides a bright, point source of light, and works with a companion iOS app to let you record long-exposure images. Simply start up the app, place your phone in the included base (or stand up your iPad), and start drawing in space. The penlight itself lets you choose from combinations of cyan, magenta or yellow light in 8 levels each, providing for a total of 27 colors for your images, and you can shoot either stills or time-lapse video with the app.

You can check out the app and pen in action in this clip (though it is in Japanese, it’s pretty easy to follow), or you can download the app itself for free here – though you’ll really want to have the light pen or a good point light source to make it work. I tried it out with a laser pointer aimed at the wall and it worked pretty well.

The app and light pen combo makes it shockingly easy to create light paintings. While the gadget was designed for Japanese markets, you can pre-order one for worldwide shipment over at Gizmine now for $69.99 (USD) with an estimated ship date of November 20th.

First they invaded our factories, and now it’s our hotel rooms. Is nowhere safe from the robots? In truth, Ibis’ upcoming Sleep Art project is very slick, even if it smacks of robot voyeurism. Ibis hotels in Berlin, London and Paris will let 40 successful applicants sleep on beds that each have 80 sensors translating movements, sound and temperature into truly unique acrylic paintings by robotic arms connected through WiFi. You don’t have to worry that the machines are literally watching you sleep — there’s no cameras or other visual records of the night’s tossing and turning, apart from the abstract lines on the canvas. All the same, if you succeed in landing a stay in one of the Sleep Art hotel rooms between October 13th and November 23rd, you’re a brave person. We all know how this ends.

Continue reading Ibis hotels to have robots paint art while they track your sleep: no, that’s not creepy at all (video)

Filed under: Robots, Alt

Ibis hotels to have robots paint art while they track your sleep: no, that’s not creepy at all (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Sep 2012 04:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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