Hasta La Gadget!

If you have a fear or intense dislike for hospitals, then chances are you won’t appreciate the quirkiness behind the concept of the Hospitalis Restaurant, which is a hospital-themed restaurant.

From the decor to the actual food, the entire place just screams “creepy hospital!”

The inside of the restaurant is decorated in red and white, characteristic of most hospitals. The tables look like surgical tables you’ll find in the operating room, while the utensils resemble surgical instruments. The food itself looks like a bunch of chopped up and disjointed body parts (eww!) and the drinks are served in IV bags and flasks.

The most outrageous thing about the restaurant, though, is the option of allowing their diners to eat in a straitjacket. Since they won’t have use of their limbs anymore, waitresses in nurses’ outfits are more than happy to feed them their meal by the spoonful.

The Hospitalis Restaurant is located in Latvia, so if you ever find yourself there, maybe you can check it out and share your experience – assuming you can escape the straitjacket.

[via Foodbeast]

All water is created equal. So how come some bottles are way more expensive than others? It’s all in the packaging and marketing, my friends, and there are only too many people who are willing to part with tens of dollars for a substance that they can get for a couple of cents from their tap.

If, however, you’re extremely particular about the water that you drink (and can afford it!), then you might want to check out the 44-page water menu (PDF) that Los Angeles-based eatery Ray’s & Stark Bar has unveiled.

When we say “water menu”, we mean exactly just that. It will be a menu listing down a “variety” of water, including some that have been imported from countries all over the globe. Among the pricier ones is Berg, which is harvested from the glaciers in Western Greenland and costs $20 per bottle.

In all fairness, each bottle of H2O gets a spacious two-page spread, so the menu really lists only 20 individual bottles. Decisions, decisions.

[via Foodbeast]

Keyboards and synthesizers are some of the most complex electronic musical instruments. Even the basic ones are loaded with a variety of tweaks that help you achieve a variety of sounds. But unlike a guitar where you can bend, pluck or hammer the strings to modify the sound on the fly, keyboards and synths require you to make your adjustments using separate sliders or knobs. This is where TouchKeys come in.

Andrew McPherson and his colleagues at the Queen Mary University of London’s Augmented Instruments Laboratory came up with TouchKeys. These multitouch sensors stick to standard-size keys via an adhesive backing. They’ll work on keyboards and synthesizers that can output in MIDI or OSC. The sensors can detect up to three simultaneous touch points per key and can even distinguish whether it’s being touch by the fingertip or the pad of the finger (presumably by the area covered by the touch). This not only gives you a more convenient way to tweak your sound, it lets you adjust your instrument to your needs instead of the other way around.

Pledge at least £195 (~$305 USD) on Kickstarter to get a set of TouchKeys as a reward. You can also pledge to get a full TouchKey instrument if you have the cash.

I’ve seen some unusual user interfaces and input devices over the years, but one that I’ve never thought of before now is a pinwheel. Sure, there are games on the Nintendo handhelds which require that you blow on its microphone to create virtual wind, but this is definitely much a more tangible interface.

This pinwheel-based interface was designed by Adi Marom and the LAB at Rockwell Group as a mechanism for users to control videos of convertible Ultrabooks in Intel’s booth at CES 2013. A user simply blows onto the pinwheel, and it moves the frames in the video accordingly. The harder you blow, the faster the video advances. Here, check it out:

Pretty neat, eh? Sure, I can’t think of too many applications for a pinwheel interface, but it’s still kind of fun to watch.

A year ago, pod-shaped recycling bins were installed all over the UK by Renew London. The so-called “smart bins” definitely look better than your average trash can. Now, you might be wondering, why would trash cans have Wi-Fi capabilities and an LCD installed on front?

The answer, my friends, is advertising. Targeted advertising.

The bin looks for smartphones nearby that have their Wi-Fi turned on. It then logs their MAC address and calculates the “proximity, speed, duration and manufacturer” of each device. It tracks the phone owner’s actions to then display targeted adverts on the screen, which will play as they walk past the bin.

Sounds smart, right? Yeah, definitely, but it’s rubbing a lot of people the wrong way because of privacy issues. To be honest, I’d be pretty irked, too, if this phone was tracking what I was doing just so it could show me an ad or two when I walk past the bin.

So it was only a matter of time before the bins had their Wi-Fi and tracking capabilities pulled. The City of London has called on Renew to stop recording people’s movements, so Londoners can breathe a sigh of relief now.

The City of London released the following statement:

We have already asked the firm concerned to stop this data collection immediately. We have also taken the issue to the Information Commissioner’s Office. Irrespective of what’s technically possible, anything that happens like this on the streets needs to be done carefully, with the backing of an informed public.

[via C|NET]