A new type of paper cup developed in Taiwan not only stands up to high temperatures, acids and alkaline solutions, it does so without releasing dangerous plasticizers into the liquids it holds. Your double half-caf venti low-fat mochaccino just got healthier!
I don’t know what you would do with a laser that you can control remotely using a smartphone, but I want one nonetheless. I own a few lasers from Wicked Lasers and typically I use them for stargazing with the kids to point out things I want them to see in the sky. I’ve also used them to torment more than a few kitties.
Wicked Lasers has unveiled a new laser called the Evo that is the world’s first open source smartphone controlled handheld laser. The device is designed to be fully hackable and is capable of operating wirelessly thanks to its available Bluetooth module. The $200 laser shoots a powerful 100mW green beam.
Power comes from a pair of AA batteries and it has four modes including momentary, constant, strobe, and bypass. The beam itself is continuously variable, and can light things on fire at its higher settings. Wicked Lasers guarantees that this is actually legal to own so the police won’t come beating on your door.
I have no idea what to do with this thing, and neither does Wicked Lasers yet. I am hoping some videos turn up on YouTube of people doing silly stuff with this laser.
A couple of months ago we saw a 3D printer that prints in full color by breaking a 3D model into very thin slices, printing each slice on separate sheets of paper then cutting the slices out of the paper and gluing them together. Haddock Inventions’ Looking Glass prints are made using a similar process, but the company chooses to keep the slices stuck to the surface they were printed on. The resulting product appears frozen in mid-air.
As with many 3D printed objects, a Looking Glass print starts its life as a 3D file, a model. But instead of being printed layer by layer, the model is printed slice per slice on 0.3mm thick lucite sheets using an inkjet printer. But simply stacking those sheets wouldn’t give you a Looking Glass print. Light will refract as it passes through the air between the sheets and as you stack more slices the image only becomes blurred. To counteract this, Haddock Inventions pump silicon oil to the stack of slices to reduce the refraction.
The main advantage of Looking Glass over 3D printing is that it takes less than an hour to make a print, whereas it would take considerably longer with a 3D printer. Another perk of Looking Glass that 3D printed objects don’t have is the one I mentioned earlier: regardless of the size and height of the object you’re printing, it will remain frozen and fixed. In contrast, certain objects – whether because they’re too large or have a high center of mass – need to be 3D printed as separate parts then assembled afterwards.
You can order a Looking Glass print right now for $100 (USD), but why would you want one? Speaking with Fast Co. Design, Shawn Frayne of Haddock Inventions claims that “Purely visually, I think Looking Glass sort of crushes–it will crush–3-D object printing.” That’s debatable, to say the least.
If they can make it so you can remove and replace slices at will, Looking Glass prints may be helpful to people who need its form factor. Perhaps then it can be used to make really useful things like a 3D CT scan, a tangible multilevel architectural blueprint, a 3D exploded diagram of the parts of an object and other things that people would want to zoom in and zoom out of. As it is, Looking Glass is an interesting medium of expression and preservation – a hybrid of a picture and a figurine.
[via Looking Glass Factory via Fast Co. Design]
U.S. Navy SEALs are some of the most feared individuals in the military world. But would you stand up against Navy Seals in the Russian Seas?
The geniuses at Disney Research are obsessed with touch-based input. One of their latest breakthroughs is an algorithm that can “simulate rich 3D geometric features (such as bumps, ridges, edges, protrusions, texture etc.) on touch screen surfaces.” In other words, it provides the feeling of touching a 3D object even though the user is only touching a flat surface. Someday we’ll know what an Angry Bird feels like.
To prove that their algorithm works, Seung-Chan Kim, Ali Israr and Ivan Poupyrev of Disney Research Pittsburgh used an “electro-vibration based friction display.” The display emits a voltage that simulates the friction that our hands would feel if we were actually touching the object shown in the image or video. The researchers say that they can get depth maps from 3D models or from a depth sensor such as Kinect.
Combine this with the Oculus Rift and adult films – er videogames will attain a higher level of realism.
[via Disney Research via Reddit]
Unmanned vehicles have long been powered by traditional energy sources, but now aviation manufacturers hope to harbor the potential from the cosmos to power a revolutionary new type of aircraft.
Revolutionary microalgae eco-friendly lamp could light streets, parking garages and homes with no electricity.
Invented around the 1950’s, hovercrafts are not exactly a novelty to our eyes. They are useful transportation vehicles due to the fact that they can move both in land and water. However, hovercrafts are not so well-known in Brazil, where a firm of bold entrepeneurs decided to build one from scratch in order to travel in the rivers of Amazonia.
You are looking at one of the most perishable foods we love to eat.
Raspberries are so delicious and full of anti-oxidants. But rasberries,
as well as other yummy and healthy berries, seem to get bad before you
can even get them home from the store. Well, a young designer, Kavita Shukla, has invented a green product to make all your fruits and greens last 2 to 4 times longer. It’s called FreshPaper and it’s produced by Shukla’s new company, Fenugreen.
The Human Brain Project, an ambitious undertaking to better understand the human brain, has officially kicked off. The goal of the project is to use a super computer to simulate a complete human brain, something that will not only aid in the treatment of a variety of ailments, but will also be used to help […]
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