I’m not much for animation outside of Archer, so I am not too familiar with Vocaloid and its animated star Hatsune Miku. I am a fan of LEGO construction though, and the thought of building a life-sized recreation of an animated character is interesting.
That is exactly what LEGOmaniac Chaos Brick has done with the construction of a life-size Hatsune Miku. There is no indication of exactly how tall the LEGO build is, or how many bricks were used, but the character is supposed to be 5’2″ and presumably “life-sized” matches those dimensions.
The builder made everything from the characters green hair to her thigh high socks. The detail in the face is impressive and it looks like everything was made from LEGO. Check out the pictures to see the construction process.
The tower of Pringles cans you’re looking at here isn’t the remnants of a week-long gaming marathon (though it could be). Instead, it’s a fully-functional musical instrument – assuming that you like slightly off-key, strange sounding tunes.
The functional sculpture was made by Brooklyn music production company Fall on Your Sword. It’s made of almost 250 green, red and yellow Pringles cans – and was rigged to play sounds when the containers are pressed on. It’s not clear how it works, but it sounds like it uses recorded sound samples, not steam. Here, check it out:
Okay, it’s not exactly the most ear-pleasing sound, but imagine what it would have sounded like if the cans still had potato chips in them.
There are already portable battery packs that have solar panels for recharging. The Trinity is a new kind of portable charger that uses a different renewable source of energy: the wind. It recharges its 15,000 mAh battery through its built-in wind turbine. Although it’s quite promising, I don’t think you should support it just yet.
Trinity weighs just 4lb. and when collapsed it’s just 12″ long, so it’s fairly portable. It has three aluminum legs that can either stay in a tripod arrangement or lie flat. Inside Trinity is a 15W generator and its battery. The current prototype has a 5V/1A USB charging port, although inventor Skajaquoda is considering adding an additional 5v/2A USB port for more power hungry devices like tablets. Here’s where it starts to get iffy. Skajaquoda also added a miniUSB port that’s meant to charge Trinity’s battery… via an outlet.
Why would they add a way to charge the battery that doesn’t use the built-in wind turbine? If you’re going to plug it in to charge it you might as well get a conventional battery pack that’s much smaller. The only reason I can think of for the addition of the mini-USB charging option is that Skajaquoda isn’t confident about Trinity’s charging speed through the wind turbine. Commenters on the fundraising site are asking the same question: How fast does it charge through wind power? Sadly, Skajaquoda didn’t include that vital data on their Kickstarter page and on their pitch video.
Breeze on over to Kickstarter to find out more about Trinity. The device can be yours for a pledge of at least $249 (USD), but again I don’t think you should back the project yet. I’m not saying this is vaporware or a scam. It’s an interesting and promising invention, but at the same time there are important details about it that need to come to light before you plunk down your hard-earned cash.
After preparing the deceased crow’s body through procedures that would make Saw look like Teletubbies had the bird been alive, Allis cut a hole on the bird’s head, set a third crow eye on the exposed skull with clay and then made an eye ring using Apoxie Sculpt. As a final touch, she had the crow perch on a copy of A Feast for Crows.
Warg this way to Imgur to see Allis’ grisly photos of her process. If you don’t want to see the icky parts, work your way down the gallery slowly. You’ll know when to stop, because you’ll hear yourself screaming.
Check out this paper airplane folding and launching machine that a group of engineers built. Great. Yet another machine taking our jobs. This time they are putting kids and bored office workers out of business.
Sure, they aren’t the best planes ever and they aren’t folded that sharply, but they do manage to fly a few feet. A machine did that. I bet the T-800 can’t make a paper plane this good.
We already have a machine that will twiddle your thumbs for you. What’s next? A machine that throws pencils up to stick into the ceiling? It will probably be a human’s job to get them down so the machine can do it again. Damn paper pushers. And folders. Do not let this in your office.
Ah, the Mazda Miata. It’s the scourge of autocross and road racing tracks around the world. It has little power, epic handling, and is dirt cheap to repair, making these little convertible sports cars a mainstay for motorsports around the world. Few things in life are more rewarding than shaming a person in a high-powered muscle car in a Miata with only 100hp to the wheels on a road racing course.
Tofu Drift Van recently bought what appears to be your typically clapped out Miata for $1000 with the goal of making it into a drift car. He decided to make it a bit different though, and somehow rigged up an ignition that will only start the car when you put quarters in the arcade style coin slot.
That is awesome and should be mandatory equipment on any ChumpCar or LeMons racing Miata. The owner of the car says he plans to add a Player 1 pushbutton for starting the car next.
NASA has announced that it is set to send the OPALS – or Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science – device to the ISS. What that means is that NASA is sending a laser up to the ISS that can be used to send messages including HD video back to the Earth with more bandwidth and speed than conventional methods. This is a big deal since the amount of data being sent back to Earth is growing constantly.
The OPALS device will be able to send data, including video, to Earth in the form of laser transmissions and is likened to upgrading from dial-up to cable at your home. The conventional method used to send data back from the ISS has about 200 to 400 Kbps of bandwidth. The lasercom device will be able to provide up to 50 Mbps of speed.
NASA says that in the future a similar deep space laser device will be able to support transmissions from Mars at up to 1 Gbps. The laser will head to the ISS this week aboard the SpaceX Dragon resupply cargo ship – assuming that the rocket overcomes its current launch delay.
Modern stealth action video games like the Metal Gear Solid series and the new Deus Ex often have a radar feature that lets you see enemies and cameras, among other things. New media artist Sander Veenhof made a similar app for Google Glass. He calls it Watch Your Privacy, and it uses open data to locate nearby surveillance cameras. That includes the mobile kind, i.e. other Glass users.
Watch Your Privacy uses a database of surveillance cameras called OSMcamera. Sander didn’t elaborate how his app spots other Glass users, just that it maps “the latitute/longitude coordinates of each Google Glass user.”
The app marks both cameras and users with a triangular warning sign along with a number, their distance from you and their coordinates. In addition, it marks the approximate coverage area of surveillance cameras. You can either have the area appear mark them as non-safe (red) or safe zones (green). If you want to stay hidden like Solid Snake, you’ll want to mark those areas red. If you feel more comfortable in a place with security cameras then you’ll mark their coverage areas green.
Glass users, crawl to your browser and head to Sander’s website to download his app.
Just because virtual reality displays let us interact with 3D interfaces doesn’t mean there isn’t room for the ol’ two-dimensional view inside of them. Oliver Kreylos, a developer who’s been working with 3D software for nearly 30 years, recently demonstrated a Virtual Network Computing (VNC) client that sends a 2D feed of a desktop computer to a 3D virtual reality environment.
Oliver’s VNC client allows him to open and interact with any number of 2D desktops on a virtual reality environment. Why would you want to do this? Well for one, you can reverse telecommute: imagine working in an island paradise environment while you’re actually in the office. Because you can (theoretically) open multiple desktops at once, the setup also supercharges multitasking and group meetings. You can watch a video walkthrough while playing a 3D game, look at a hundred fullscreen documents at once, have multiple large video chat screens like they do in science fiction flicks and more.
As you’ll see in Oliver’s demo video, developers can also make 2D applications that interact with the 3D environment. In his demo he measured a table that was in his virtual space and then used a Razer Hydra to send those measurements to Microsoft Excel on his 2D desktop.
We really don’t know how far the rabbit hole goes with this one. Note that the video below may cause dizziness because of the constant change in perspective. It almost made me throw up to be honest. I’m ill-equipped for the future.
Head to Oliver’s blog for more on his custom program. I wonder if you can emulate this feature on the same computer that’s running the VR environment. That would be more useful, although it would probably take a beefy computer to pull it off. Also, watching Oliver’s demo, I can almost – almost! – visualize a four-dimensional space, where you can fit infinite 3D environments. Now I’m really dizzy.
We can’t enter the digital world like the Flynns did just yet, but thanks to the Oculus Rift, you may be able to experience what it’s like to duke it out in a light cycle. Custom video game machine maker Luis Sobral aka The Arcade Man made an arcade game featuring Tron’s famous vehicles based on the virtual reality headset.
Luis calls his project RiftCycles, a game where players take part in an “immersive virtual reality light cycle battle, fighting in an arena with their bikes until “deresolution”.” To make the experience more authentic, Luis also built two light cycle models out of cardboard and metal for players to ride on.
Watch out for CLU and head to Luis’ website for more on RiftCycles.
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.
