Hasta La Gadget!

If you’ve followed Technabob for any period of time, you know that we love our quirky Japanese gadgets around here. The latest weird and wacky gizmo to turn up from our friends to the East? Remote-controlled crabs.

Yep. The Kani Crab RC Toy simulates the movements of a real crab, skittering around the table with its legs bouncing about. Though the blinking LED eyeballs blow its cover a bit.

You can even choose from a “fresh” dark colored crab, or a bright red one that looks like it just spent some time in a boiling pot of water.

You can get your hands of the Kani Crab RC Toy over at the Japan Trend Shop for $35(USD) – or if you happen to live in Japan, you can get your crabs from JTT. I can only imagine the fun you could have with your friends the next time you go to a seafood restaurant.

A couple of years ago we saw an unusual camera. It looked like a ball and took 360° panoramic photos, like the ones on Google Street View but completely spherical. Jonas Pfeil and his co-inventors are now gearing up to mass produce the camera, which they’re now calling the Panono.

Panono works much like the prototype we saw back then. It has 36 cameras that together can make a 72mp 360° image.  Panono can be used in three ways. The fun way is to throw the ball up in the air. The camera will sense when it reaches its highest point, and will automatically activate all of its cameras. You can also prop it up on a stick and trigger it using the Panono mobile app or just hold it in your hand and press its button to shoot.

Whichever method you choose, you’ll need a mobile device and an Internet connection in order to get the final panoramic image. That’s because the camera will wirelessly send the images it took to your mobile device. From there you need to upload the images to a free cloud service that will stitch your images together. If you don’t have an Internet connection, you’ll be able to view the images you took via the app, but they’ll be separated. The camera itself can store up to 400 panoramas (that’s 14,400 “normal” images) so you can still use it without a mobile device.

Pledge at least $500 (USD) on Indiegogo to get a Panono as a reward. You can check out the shots taken with the latest prototype on Panono’s website. Now someone needs to come up with a spherical picture frame.

What’s the difference between a kid today and a kid from a couple of decades ago? Here’s a big one: When you tell a kid to play these days, most will run off to get their parent’s smartphone or their iPad. However, if you told a kid from the nineties or before the same thing, they’d probably grab a couple of friends and start playing tag outside.

Taking things to even more of an extreme, we’re now giving babies our mobile devices. Fisher-Price recently released the iPad Apptivity Seat, which is essentially a baby chair with an iPad dock that holds the tablet at less than an arm’s length away from the baby’s face. Whether they came up with it based on actual need (ie. having parents send in requests for such a chair) or because someone in the company thought it would be a good idea, no one knows.

While there are definitely numerous apps and games targeting young children, I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to slap a tablet in front of the face of babies instead of the human interaction they need and crave.

Kids these days are more tech savvy, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, I think they should go outdoors, run around, and play actual games once in a while. If you believe otherwise and actually need something like the Apptivity seat, then you can check it out here, where it’s priced at $75(USD).

[via Geekologie]

I’ve often wanted to know what my daughters dog was thinking when she spends an hour outside, comes inside and immediately drops a deuce on the rug. I’m convinced the dog is simply an asshole. Now, a company has a product that it is working on, that is apparently a serious product for them, called No More Woof.

The goal of the product is to translate animal thoughts to human language. If this product comes to be, maybe then I could figure out why the dog craps in the house, not the yard. The device looks like one of those thought-control gaming headsets that have been around for a while and uses EEG technology. The company stresses that product is not available to purchase and is only in working prototype stage now.

The project is on Indiegogo seeking to raise funds to bring No More Woof to market. A pledge of $65(USD) will get you a micro version of the device that can detect two to three thought patterns. The full size rig will be able to translate four or more thought patterns for $300. Delivery is expected in April 2014. Squirrel.

3D printed objects are usually rigid, or at least made of parts that were printed separately. This makes it time-consuming if not outright impossible to print large objects or ones that need to be flexible or adjustable. But what if you could break down an object into smaller, foldable parts? That’s the idea behind Kinematics.

Made by Nervous System in collaboration with Motorola’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, Kinematics is a proof-of-concept 3D modeling software that lets you design a complex 3D model made of interlocking triangles. In the same way that you can make 3D graphics using two-dimensional triangles, Kinematics can theoretically make any 3D object out of interlocking triangles.

The 3D models it makes can be printed without modifying existing 3D printers. They don’t need to be assembled because their hinges are printed in place. Kinematics can also make a scrunched version of the 3D model, allowing you to print objects that are larger than your printer’s capacity. You just unfold the printed object into its final shape.

For now, the Kinematics app can only be used to make a 3D model of a bracelet. Nervous System also set up a Kinematics shop where you can design and then order a bracelet, a necklace or earrings. But as pointed out by several commenters at The Verge, imagine if the app could be improved such that it prints very tiny triangles, the way 3D graphics eventually improved from being spiky and blocky into the smooth and realistic ones we see in games and movies. It’d be like turning a 3D printer into a loom.

[Nervous System via The Verge]