Hasta La Gadget!

If you’re looking for a heart rate monitor, stop going through chest straps and watches. Instead grab a headset. Grab an iriverOn. This wireless headset has a built in biometric sensor that gives real time heart rate measurements. Just connect to your smartphone and get exercise data while you listen to music.

Traditional sprinklers simply spread water over an area, which leads to lots of water wasted and uneven watering. Droplet wants to change all that with its eponymous robot. Instead of blindly spraying water around like Bill & Lance with a Spread gun, Droplet knows where your plants are and aims at them like Mr. Mundy in Doublecross.

When you get a Droplet, you’ll go to a web app to specify the type and location of your plants. I don’t know how exactly the web app works, just that you can go through it on a computer or a mobile device and in just a few minutes. In addition to that data, Droplet will also supposedly tap into the United States’ weather station and soil sample data to gauge when and how much water to spray. One Droplet should be able to tend to a 2700sq.ft. area.

Grow a browser and head to Amazon, where you can pre-order Droplet for $300 (USD). That’s a lot of money for a sprinkler, but when you consider its resulting water savings and positive impact on the environment I think it’s worth it.

[via Digital Trends]

It seems that Apple might be seriously mulling over backtracking on its anti-stylus stance, at least in theory. But the Cupertino-based tech company isn’t just going for a run of … Continue reading

If 13th Lab has its way, you could soon be playing first-person games using your surroundings as a battlefield. Or a space station, a temple and anything else you can imagine. The computer vision company is working on Rescape, an FPS platform for mobile devices that can scan and digitize your environment, turning it into a video game map.

13th Lab uses a robotics technique called Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). With the help of cameras and sensors, SLAM allows a device to make a map of its environment and place itself – i.e. know its location – within the map that it just made. The end result is shown in the image above. If you look closely you can see that the iPhone is showing a virtual equivalent of the player’s environment – everything from the structures, objects and even other players. 13th Lab calls this mix of augmented and virtual reality Reality Gaming.

As of now, a Rescape package includes a 180º fisheye lens and an adjustable gun controller with a trigger and a d-pad. To drive costs down and make it easier for app developers to port their FPS games, Rescape will make use of your mobile device to map and digitize your environment, as well as track your position.

The Rescape software development kit (SDK) handles the mapping feature, as well as the ability to digitally paint over a map and turn it into your battle ground of choice. I don’t know if the SDK will be simple enough for normal folks to understand and use though.  As I mentioned, mobile game developers can port existing FPS games into the Rescape platform, but that’s not as fun as turning your house or university into a game map.

Pledge at least $39 (USD) on Kickstarter to get the Rescape controller and Office Defender, the game shown in the video. Pledge at least $129 and you get the controller, the game and the Rescape SDK. When it launches Rescape will only support the iPhone 5, 5C and 5S, with “experimental support” for the iPhone 4S. 13th Lab promises that it will provide support for Android devices within a few months after the launch.

[via InStash]

The very talented musician Imogen Heap and her colleagues at Mi.Mu are working on a glove that will allow you to make music by moving your fingers and hands. Think Minority Report, but instead of flipping screens around your movements create sounds. Air drumming is about to be legit.

Mi.Mu has an input and output board called x-OSC that connects the glove to a computer or multiple computers over Wi-Fi. It also has an accelerometer, a gyroscope and a magnetometer. Along with the flex sensors on the glove itself, the system can detect “the orientation of your hand, the “flex” of your fingers, your current hand posture (e.g. fist, open hand, one finger point), the direction (up, down, left, right, forwards, backwards) of your hand [and] sharp movements such as drum hits.”

You can map one or more of these movements to control music software with the help of Mi.Mu’s own application, which converts your movements to OSC or MIDI. This means you can use the glove with any software that can handle those two files. The video below shows Imogen performing (!) a song using only two Mi.Mu gloves to control the music:

As you may have noticed, the glove allows the wearer to activate multiple tweaks or sounds at once. You can also use gestures to switch between your saved mappings, which should reduce the number of movements you have to memorize for a given performance.

Pledge at least £1,200 (~$2,000 USD) on Kickstarter to receive a Mi.Mu glove as a reward. Hopefully in a few years the glove will be affordable enough, so we can wash away all the hate and society can start advancing.

[via Gadgetify]