Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve featured awesome papercraft Iron Man and War Machine figurines before, but Kai-Xiang Xhong’s creation easily eclipses those two. The 20-year-old papercraft enthusiast made a life-size, wearable and wonderfully made Iron Man suit using nothing but cardboard.

After seeing his work through its Facebook community, the famed visual effects and props academy Stan Winston School interviewed Kai-Xiang Xhong and let him share some of his creations on the school’s blog.

Here are clips from Stan Winston School’s video chat with Kai-Xiang. It’s well worth a watch, as he shows off many of his incredible creations in it.

Craft a cardboard browser and head to Stan Winston School’s blog see Kai-Xiang’s other pieces. Keep it up kid, and someday you may attain godhood.

[via Archie McPhee]

High quality microscopes cost thousands of dollars and can be hard to operate and maintain. A group of researchers from Stanford University are close to changing that with a microscope that’s made mostly out of paper and costs less than a dollar to make.

The Foldscope was conceptualized by Jim Cybulski, James Clements and Asst. Prof. Manu Prakash. They were moved to develop the revolutionary microscope because they wanted to speed up the diagnosis and treatment of various diseases in developing countries. In his recent TED presentation, Asst. Prof. Prakash said that right now it can take months for patients in developing countries to get diagnosed and treated partly because microscopes are bulky, hard to maintain and expensive to acquire . So they set out to design a microscope that’s portable, easy to operate and can be mass produced at low costs. It looks like they succeeded.

In their paper, Jim, James and Asst. Prof. Prakash. said that the Foldscope can provide a magnification of up to 2,000X depending on the lens used. All of its components can be packed on a single sheet of card stock, which can also serve as an instruction manual.  Foldscope is also resistant to impact and water. It’s so small that you can carry multiple Foldscopes in your pocket. The only part of the microscope that needs electricity is an LED, which can last over 50 hours on a button cell battery. Best of all, it only costs between $0.58 to $0.97 to make. Below is Asst. Prof. Prakash’ TED presentation about the Foldscope:

How amazing is that? A copy of Jim, James and Asst. Prof. Prakash’s paper is available from the Cornell University Library archive. If you want to get your hands on one, head to the Foldscope team’s website and apply to become one of the their 10,000 beta testers.

[via Wired via Reddit]

CGI may be the wave of the future, capable of crossing the uncanny valley and generating photo-real imagery, but it’s a cold visual medium. For as closely as digital drawing tablets dutifully replicate the action of drawing, it cannot match the effect of physically crafting—it’s an inherent technological disconnect between the artist and the art, like asking Michelangelo to re-carve David using a DaVinci-bot.

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We’ve seen several different Star Wars inspired paper snowflakes surface over the years. Some of them were laser cut and others were apparently done freehand. That meant unless you had a fancy laser cutting set up or were crafty in your own right, you probably weren’t going to make these cool snowflakes yourself. Some new Star Wars snowflakes have surfaced that are made from paper that you can make yourself.

The designs include Boba Fett, Emporer Palpatine, Nien Nunb, and Rancor as well as the AT-AT snowflake, which is my favorite. The good news here is that the designer of the snowflakes, Anthony Herrera, has offered up some patterns that you can print out and cut yourself. Of course, the prospect of all the precision cutting work makes my wrists hurt just thinking about it.

Still, if you have a sharp knife and some time on your hands, you can create your own Star Wars snowflakes with these patterns. Check out the gallery to see several of the available snowflake patterns to choose from.

[via Nerd Approved]

A Lamborghini Aventador will cost you a whole lot of paper money, but this one just costs paper. And cardboard. It looks just as awesome. You just can’t drive it.

This 8-foot-long Lamborghini Aventador A-E2 police interceptor is all paper. It was made by designer Taras Lesko for a cost of about $1000 and weighs about 25lbs – which means he can carry and park it just about anywhere. Taras is no stranger to paper projects, having built lots of other cars, Gundams, wall art, and 3D busts before.

He was dared by his wife to take on this ambitious project and it is his biggest and heaviest papercraft model yet. Also the most expensive. But well worth it. It looks amazing.

If you’d like to build your own papercraft Lambo, you can download the templates for smaller versions of the car over on Lesko’s website.