Emojis look cute in your inbox and chat windows, but they reveal nothing about the true nature of the person on the other end. Of course, you can probably vouch for people you actually know.
But what about strangers who chat you up because they find your avatar pretty or because they find your username clever? You might know better than to fall for such lines and assume that you’re chatting with a nice person because of the plethora of smiling and winking emojis he’s sending your way – but kids don’t. That can easily make them susceptible to online predators who prey on the young and innocent.
With this in mind, international non-profit Innocence en Danger commissioned ad agency Rosapark to create a series of images using creepy, real-life emoticons to raise awareness on these dangers kid can encounter online.
The posters and gargantuan emoji-fied faces are beyond creepy. Hopefully, the campaign will encourage more parents to pay attention to what their kids are doing online.
You can’t make this stuff up. Back in 1988, two diehard Star Trek: The Next Generation fans broke into the Paramount lot in the middle of the night and proceeded to film their own awkward and incompetent “documentary” as they explored the Enterprise sets.
Captain Stone of the Stage 9 Interlopers shows up on camera here and there dressed in his Starfleet uniform. At one point he even accidentally breaks a prop. The whole incident is strangely mesmerizing to watch. It begins with this guy posing next to a headless Starfleet officer from the episode “Conspiracy” as they argue about filming styles, and progresses through shot after shot of awkward instructions from actor to cameraman.
I just wish we had more footage. It seems like a great comedy.
Thank God we don’t see too many glitches in our technology these days. Visual glitches can be annoying, frustrating and often brightly blinding. Which is how I would describe these coats.
These coats are born from an unholy alliance between Japanese designers Nukeme and Ucnv. They’re available with either a black or white coat and an all-over glitch pattern that might make you lose your lunch if you stare at it too long.
On the upside, each is handmade and ships to you from beautiful Toyko. It will cost you about $295(USD) to look like a walking glitch. Too bad these coats don’t come with recordings of audio distortion to go along with them.
You can get up close and personal with a 3D scan of the outfits here.
But if we think about it it’s actually kind of surprising that we don’t see more of these. Video games are ripe with death after all, from the ones we don’t even think about…
…to the ones whose deaths are given and thus inconsequential.
There are also deaths that jump start a game…
…including ones that turned out to be the start of an alternate reality and an entire series of games.
And as in real life, there are deaths in games that we’ll never forget, the ones that will leave you reeling in shock and despair. Like, The Transformers animated movie level of shock and despair.
The tombstones cost $10 (USD) each plus a variable amount of sadness. Check out Chinook Crafts for more designs. You creep.
If you’ve ever found yourself in a room where you discover that the acoustic properties create a great echo, you’ve probably tried to see how long you can make the echo last. I’ve certainly found myself clapping my hands or yelling “Helooooooo” when I find a space like that. But I’ve never heard an echo that lasted more than a couple of seconds. Recently, a scientist managed to capture an echo which was an astounding 112 seconds long.
After finding out about a maze of abandoned WWII oil tanks under Scotland, Professor Trevor Cox decided to see just how long an echo could last in one of these massive 25.5 million liter tanks. Incredibly, after firing a gun in the chamber, he realized just how much reverberation was in the space, and captured this astounding sound clip. Keep in mind you’ll need to wear headphones and crank up the volume to hear much beyond about the 40 second mark.
The sound was captured by firing a pistol inside the solid rock chamber, and it seems to go on forever. The broadband spectrum sound lasts for 75 seconds, while the lowest frequencies lasted all the way out to 112 seconds.
But it wasn’t exactly easy for Professor Cox to make it happen. He first had to squeeze through a narrow 18-inch diameter oil pipe to get inside of the tank – not something that I’d be likely to try.
Guinness World Records has certified the 75 second record, which blew away the prior one – which stood at just 15 seconds.
It’s gotten ridiculously frigid here in Chicago, what with the recent Polar Vortex and colder than normal winter. But I’ve never seen anything like this scene, recently captured in Norway:
Image: Ingolf Kristiansen
Apparently, when harsh winds caused temperatures over a Norwegian bay to drop to sub-freezing temperatures, the fish swimming close to the surface were flash frozen. While the air temperature of -7.8°C (~18°F) seems balmy by Chicago standards, it was enough to put the instant deep-freeze on the fish.
According to locals, the water and fish remain frozen, and the birds and whales will have a field day when the thaw eventually comes.
So a Predator has been spotted proposing to his human girlfriend. He was backed up by his friends: a Stormtrooper, Starcraft medic and Bumblebee. Yeah this kind of stuff happens everyday. But wait, he’s doing it all wrong.
I thought Predators proposed by ripping the spines from their prey so that they can’t get away. That’s also why no one ever says no to a Predator proposal. I don’t know. I know that Predators love their trophies, I’ve just never seen one get down on his knee before to get one.
Zhao Ming is the lucky guy who did the proposing. This almost makes me want a new superhero team with Predator, Bumblebee and that Starcraft medic. Oh yeah. Vader is there too, wearing some sort of Imperial diaper tech thing. Check out more pics of the craziness at the link.
One of inventor Steve Hoefer’s favorite creations is his knock-activated lock: a lock that only opens if you enter the correct knock sequence. Steve says he’s built the lock a dozen times. Instead of becoming increasingly complex, his latest build is actually easier to put together compared to its predecessors, thanks to a couple of Adafruit products.
This build uses Adafruit’s piezoelectric sensor, solenoid lock and mini microcontroller. You can install the lock on any wooden drawer or door that’s at least 2 1/4″ deep. Once installed, you simply record your secret knock, and the device now knows to only unlock if the same knock is repeated.
Knock twice on your browser and head to the Adafruit blog for Steve’s instructions, parts list and Arduino code.
If modern art is more important to you than the ability to tell time, then have I got a timepiece for you. Inspired by Salvador Dali’s classic The Persistence of Memory, this surreal watch is sure to turn heads when you go to check the time.
Despite its distorted looks, the Melting Watch does actually tell time accurately thanks to a precision quartz movement. It’s available for just $29.95(USD) from our friends over at Gadgets & Gear. Though for that price you don’t get a melted face or a pile of ants with it. I suppose that’s a good thing.
For some reason I’m thinking that this is what the T-1000′s watch looked like when he melted into a pile of molten metal in Terminator 2.
At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), The Verge noted that TV companies had largely given up on 3D displays. A small company called Voxon is not about to give up on the idea, especially because their device actually projects light in three dimensions. They call it the Voxiebox.
In simple terms, Voxiebox displays a 3D image by aiming a laser projector at a screen that’s rapidly moving up and down. The 3D image is a bit like the light trails produced through long exposure photography, except this one’s happening in real-time. Your view of the image or video being displayed changes appropriately as you move around the Voxiebox, as if you were looking at a physical object.
The video below shows Voxon co-founders Will Tamblyn and Gavin Smith talking about how Voxiebox came about. Sadly the sound is worse than the video’s quality, which is a shame because their presentation is informative and inspiring.
As you can see the current prototype of the Voxiebox has a very low resolution, a death sentence in an industry stuck in PPI cold wars and currently under attack from the 4K marketingblitzkrieg. Another challenge facing Voxon is that content has to be made specifically for the display. You can’t just hook it up to your PC, media player or console and expect to see Call of Duty or Game of Thrones in volumetric 3D. Which is why it’s perfectly understandable that Voxon is aiming its first Voxiebox units not to home users but to arcades. On the other hand… arcades? Like, who-goes-to-arcades-anymore-arcades? Good luck.
Still, Voxon believes that their device will carve its own niche. Last year Polygon came up with an interesting story about Joseph White, an eccentric game developer who’s working on a game and game platform called Voxatron. Voxatron’s world is made out of voxels – volumetric pixels – and Polygon said White made his game imagining that Voxiebox would one day exist. Voxiebox, meet Voxatron:
That’s cool and all, but I don’t think that Voxatron or 3D chess (Voxchess?) is Voxiebox’s killer app. Aside from having a more respectable resolution, I think the device would capture the public’s attention and support more effectively if it worked closely with motion sensors. The strength of 3D objects is that they’re tangible – I think Voxon needs to seize that strength.
Take CastAR for example. Industry reputation and connections aside, Technical Illusions is getting the support they need with its augmented reality device because they’re taking cues from the tangible world. The great news here is that display-wise Voxiebox is much better than CastAR’s complicated setup. Voxon just needs to find the right artwork to paint on its canvas.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
