The Mindstorms line already makes it possible to create robots, machines and other moving and highly interactive toys out of LEGO. But the company isn’t resting on its laurels. Recently LEGO teamed up with Sony to make what they’re calling Toy Alive – prototype LEGO bricks that have motors, LEDs and even cameras.
Toy Alive was one of the prototypes shown off by Sony Computer Science Laboratories Tokyo at its 25th Anniversary open house. As you’ll see in the video below, the embedded gadgets can be controlled wirelessly. There are motors that let you race LEGO, actuators that can be used to destroy LEGO structures on cue and a LEGO toy with a built-in camera that sends footage to an iPad app.
Sony researcher Alexis Andre explained that the collaboration aims to look at ways to combine the strengths of videogames and LEGO. The Toy Alive prototypes provide kids with a wider array of interactivity compared to normal LEGO toys without restricting their imaginations, as most videogames do. You can listen to Andre talk about Toy Alive at around 0:58 in the video below:
At this years’ Google I/O developers conference, a Fireside Chat with several members of the core Google Glass team proved to reveal much on not just the future of the device, but its origins as well. While earlier in the day a single slide had been shown depicting a set of six original prototypes of what was then called Project Glass, here lead industrial designer Isabelle Olsson had one key prototype on hand to show SlashGear in the plastic, as it were.
As Olsson made clear, this device was created as one of the very first iterations of what’s been reduced to a simple skeleton frame and single, removable computer element. What you’re seeing here is a set of development boards attached to two full-eye glass lenses, white plastic, tape, exposed cords and all.
Isabelle Olsson: When the team started working on this, it was very clear that we’re not taking something that already existed and making incremental improvements to it. The team wanted to create something that’s much more intuitive, immediate, and intimate. But to create a new kind of wearable technology, that’s so ambitious, and very messy at points.
In addition to showing how this pair of glasses worked with folding sides and a real, working set of innards (if you can call them innards, of course), Olsson showed one of the prototype pairs of prescription Glass glasses as well. These are seen in the box below, and their design was seen on Google employees here and there during the week as well, live and active.
Olsson: I will never forget the first day on the team and when I walked into a room wearing these CRAZY things on their heads. I brought the prototype so you could see what I walked in to. It comes in a fancy bag…
Olsson: I think like the colors of the board, maybe, fits my hair color, but I don’t know. It’s kind of heavy, though. I think I’m going to take it off now. So – but – how do you go from something like this to what we’re all wearing today?
Olsson: We took a reductionist approach. We removed everything that wasn’t absolutely essential. And then in addition to that, I formed three principals to guide the team through this ambitious, messy process. Those are:
• Lightness • Simplicity • Scalability
You’ll find this particular chat split up across three different features, each surrounding Olsson’s fireside chat contributions. The one you’re in now of course stays within the bounds of the prototype you’re seeing above and below. There are also posts on color choices for Glass, a bit about Modular Fashion, and another expanding on the design of the final product.
Olsson: When I joined the project, we thought we needed 50 different adjustment mechanisms, but that wouldn’t make a good user experience. So we scaled it down to this one adjustment mechanism.
This prototype works with the Glass projection unit nearly the same as what we see in the Explorer Edition of Glass. It’s attached to one of two computer boards, the one on the right temple – here also working with a camera, even in this early state.
This first development board is also connected to the second board, the second presumably reserved for storage space connections and a battery. While tape holds this unit together along with soldered bits and pieces along the board as well as glue, here and there, they do work.
There’s a single button above the camera lens that activates the camera – there’s a similar button (a hidden button) in this area on the Explorer Edition of Glass as well. This original prototype works with essentially every element available in the final release – here it’s just a bit larger, and not really made to look too fashionable for the uninitiated.
Google I/O 2013 also played host to a chat we had with Sergey Brin – co-founder of Google and currently Director of Special Projects for the company. He also gave some insight into the way Glass was first tested, noting that while there were some non-functional bricks used to test form for Glass, it certainly all started with function:
Sergey Brin: We did have some non-functional models, but mostly we had functional, uglier, heavier models. Very early on we realized that comfort was so important, and that [led to] the decision to make them monocular.
We also made the decision not to have it occlude your vision, because we tried. We tried different configurations, because [it’s] something you’re going [need] to be comfortable. Hopefully you’re comfortable wearing it all day? [That’s] something that’s hard to make. You’re going to have to make a lot of other trade-offs.
Have a peek at the photos in a larger sense in the gallery below and let us know if you see anything you recognize – it’s all there, piece by piece.
Samsung’s got no shortage of alternate control methods up its sleeve. You’ve got your eye scroll and your air gestures, but how about full on mind-control? Samsung’s messing with it, but it probably won’t be coming to consumer devices very soon. Probably. More »
You know the Nike FuelBand as a sleek black band that’s a half-step removed from a Livestrong bracelet. That wasn’t always the case, though. Some looked totally different from the finished product, like this early mockup that basically got the FuelBand off the ground. More »
Adobe Photoshop CS 5 and CS 6 have a set of features called Content Aware. They automatically fill in gaps or selected areas in images as if those gaps or parts were never there. It’s not perfect, but it can be a time saver for many operations. This prototype software is like Content Aware for videos – it can edit moving subjects out of a video while the background remains more or less untouched.
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science and University College London’s Computer Science department developed the wonder software. From what I can understand, the program works by marking the subject(s) to be removed and the one(s) to be retained. Then, for each affected frame, the program will look at a source frame elsewhere in the video where the background is not blocked by the object to be edited out, and use this source material to “inpaint” the section back into the image.
I think the software works best when the moving object to be edited out is over a static background, i.e. it won’t be as effective when there are like a hundred people moving and you want to remove someone from the foreground.Watch the video for a demo (and a way better explanation):
How awesome is that? I don’t know how much of the process is automated though. Head to MPII’s website for more information on the program.
Many people have no idea what was cooking up in Apple’s labs when the company was working on the iPhone, but a prototype from 2005 has appeared, and it features a roughly 8.6-inch display with a separate motherboard consisting of USB ports, ethernet, and even a serial port. It was the basis of what iOS devices came to be a couple years later.
Ars Technica ended up getting an exclusive look at the old prototype, and it essentially looks like a miniature table. Of course, the late Steve Jobs actually thought of the iPad first before the iPhone, so this actually could be an iPad prototype that was used to eventually make the iPhone that released two years later.
The photos come from a former Apple employee who says that “at that early date no one knew what [the final device] would be.” The prototype is roughly two-inches thick, so you definitely wouldn’t be able to slide it in your pocket or bag with ease, but the former Apple employee says that it was “really impressive seeing basically a version of OS X running on it,” during that time.
It should be noted that the chip that the prototype is running is the Samsung S3C2410, which is “a distant relative of the chip the first iPhone ended up using, just older and slower.” The prototype chip was clocked at around 200-233MHz, while the first iPhone used a 620MHz chip underclocked to 412Mhz. We’ve certainly come a long way since then.
We’re just a weekend and a couple days away from Sony’s big PlayStation event on February 20, and we have a guess at what the company might unveil. Yes, a PlayStation 4 could be in the cards, and we’ve already seen a leaked photo of the prototype controller, complete with a touchpad. However, there’s now a second photo that provides a bit more detail.
A member on the GameTrailers forum posted up a high-resolution image of the controller, where he claims he was the one that snapped the photo, although that has yet to be proven, so we remain skeptical as far as the goes. However, the controller looks to be the same one (or at least the same model) as the one we saw yesterday.
Thanks to the photo, we can see that there’s apparently a 3.5mm audio jack situated on the side of the controller, right below the “PS” logo/button. We’re guessing this for headsets, similar to how the Xbox 360 controller has its proprietary connector in the same location as well. The grips also appear to be longer as well.
The controller looks like it has concave analog sticks, and the same kind of buttons on previous PlayStation controllers. There’s also the small touchpad towards the top that may even be a small LCD touchscreen, but that is yet to be discovered. We’re keeping the salt nearby, and since this is simply just a prototype, it may not be the final version, so don’t get your hopes up if you like the look of this controller.
In a world where facial recognition is becoming more and more prevalent, more and more citizens are concerned about their privacy, and with good reason. However, National Institute of Informatics professor Isao Echizen has created what’s called the “Privacy Visor”, which are essentially a pair of glasses that fool most facial recognition scanners.
The glasses emit a near-infrared set of LEDs that block facial recognition cameras from identifying wearers. According to Echizen, the glasses are the answer to what he refers to as the “invasion of privacy caused by photographs taken in secret.” Facial recognition software collects a lot of data about patrons. Not only can it identify you, but it can also figure out your body type and age.
These prototype glasses aren’t the most appealing, and they likely won’t be adopted by the masses, but if the idea takes off, we may see versions that are much smaller and more stylish than the ones we’re seeing today. Plus, in order to keep the LED lights on and working for this prototype privacy visor, you have to carry around a small power supply in your pocket.
Echizen says that he’s already received offers from companies that want to work toward mass-producing the visors in the future. Echizen says that he and his development team are working on “an improved version of the privacy visor without power supply consisting of transparent materials that reflect or absorb specific wavelength.”
The designer known as Hartmut Esslinger has revealed an amazing treasure trove of never before seen designs from the Apple archives this week in a book by the name of “Design Forward.” This book was launched this week at the opening event of an exhibition by the name of “German Design Standards – from Bauhaus to Globalization” and was delivered first to the folks at Design Boom where they’ve been allowed to display many of the images within. What we’re being shown here is a set of Apple products designed – at least in part – by Hartmut Esslinger himself during his time with what would become one of the most iconic hardware companies in history.
The man himself, Esslinger, worked with Sony in the mid 1970s with their trinitron and wega ranges, moving up to Apple in the early 1980s. If you’ll remember from earlier this year when many early Apple designs were revealed during their legendary court case with Samsung, the idea that they’d replicate Sony designs was spoken of more than once. As it appears here, Esslinger had a problem with these requests for a Sony look for desktop computers, too. Esslinger stayed with Apple until 1990, where soon after Steve Jobs was cut from Apple, he broke his own contract and followed Jobs to NeXT.
Above you’ll see an early “Apple Snow White 2 macbook” from 1982 – not that every single image in this post comes courtesy of Esslinger and is via Designboom. The first image in this post goes by the name “Apple Snow White 1 Lisa Workstation” and is from 1982 as well – not the converting angle of the display and the lovely integration of the Apple logo rainbow colors in the side of the machine. Below this paragraph you’ll see the Apple “Baby Mac” from 1985 – rather sleek, isn’t it?
Above you’ll see a rather drab (by today’s standards) looking machine tagged with the name “Apple Snow White 1 Sony Style” from 1982. Of this design Esslinger writes, “Concept 1 was defined by ‘what sony would do if it built computers’. I didn’t like this idea, as it could create conflicts with Sony, but Steve insisted. He felt that sony’s simple cool design language should be a good benchmark, and Sony was the current pacesetter in making high-tech consumer products smarter, smaller and more portable.”
Below you’ll find two early masterpieces – one of them a tablet, the other a phone. Imagine that, the earliest iPad and the earliest iPhone, together under one roof. The first goes by the name “Apple Snow White 1 Tablet Mac” and is from 1982, the second is the “Apple Snow White 3 Macphone” from 1984. This was the same year that Apple burst forth with Macintosh and changed their destiny forever – imagine if they’d simply released a phone with a massive display instead?
The book Design Forward is available for sale in physical form right this minute all the way over in certain parts of Europe right this minute for right around 30 Euros. We’re crossing our fingers for the digital edition to make its way to the USA sooner than later – can’t wait! Hit the gallery below to see the cover of the book as well as larger versions of the photos you’re seeing above – hot stuff!
When you’re obsessed with finding the most awesome gadgets and devices, there’s nothing more heartbreaking than the word “concept.” Not only does it mean you’re not going to find a given device in stores—it usually means you’re never going to find it anywhere. More »
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