Most parents don’t consider that their teenagers are at risk for
osteoporosis; teens certainly don’t think about it. But with teens
spending more time with their screens – computer, notepad, TV, and smart
phone – than in athletic activities, researchers are starting to look
into how these sedentary habits are affecting teen development –
particularly their bone development.
Carolina Ferrari, Ilaria Vitali and Mengdi Xu designed Diffuse, a lamp designed to make laptop screens easy on the eyes in two ways. Diffuse can provide complementary ambient light or it can compensate for a dark environment with a soft white light. It’s Ambilight and F.lux in one.
Diffuse consists of a felt diffuser and a wooden box containing its electronics, which are mainly an Arduino Uno, two RGB LED strips and a light sensor. The box also houses a 12v rechargeable battery and a switch between the “Eye Pleasure” and “Eye Relief” modes. The felt diffuser attaches to the box via two magnets.
To use Diffuse, you just connect it to your laptop via its USB cable, turn it on and select which mode you want to use. In Eye Relief mode, Diffuse’s light sensor will analyze the brightness of the area immediately behind your screen. The lamp’s LEDs will then emit a white light to balance the brightness of your screen and your surroundings. To use Eye Pleasure mode you also need to install an application on your laptop. The application will read the average color of your screen in real time and relay it to Diffuse, which will then match the given color.
Sit back, relax and check out the Diffuse Team’s website for more on the lamp.
Doormats get a bad rap. They take all the dirt we can wipe off on them,
withstand tremendous weight, let our dogs urinate on them. And when
doormats get very dirty or very old, their owners don’t even bother to
clean them; they throw them away and lay new ones out. But a South
Carolinian inventor, Andrew Clark, has created a doormat you won’t want
to throw away… because it’s very very smart.
It’s one thing to allow a professional tattoo artist to ink your arm. It’s another thing altogether to allow a 3D printer to do it. But that’s exactly what a team of designers in Paris recently did.
By hacking together a custom tattoo gun attachment for a MakerBot 3D printer, they were able to draw a computer-generated tattoo on a man’s arm. As you can see in the video below, the tattoo is very rudimentary (a simple circle), but I’m assuming that’s because it would be pretty difficult to compensate for small movements in the recipient’s arm like a human tattoo artist can do.
What do you guys think? Will there be shopping mall kiosks in the future where you can stick your arm inside and have the art of your choice drawn on by a robot?
Me? I’m sticking with temporary tattoos.
[via Instructables]
Digital audio software lets you emulate the sounds of instruments that you don’t own or know how to play in real life. But these programs don’t eliminate the learning curve. They’re still not intuitive. Imitone can change that. It’s an Windows and OS X application that helps your computer convert your voice into a signal that music creating software can understand. With Imitone, you can sing a piano track. Whistle a guitar hook. Fart a string section. I hope.
Imitone is a software MIDI controller. In simple terms, a MIDI controller turns your input into MIDI, a format that many music and sound creation programs can understand. Common examples of a MIDI controller include keyboards and drum machines. Obviously, with those MIDI controllers you still have to know how to play drums, piano, etc. in order to create a melody. But with Imitone, the only thing you need to know how to use is your voice.
Here’s Imitone inventor Evan Balster imitating a violin in real time with the help of Imitone and Ableton Live:
Imitone reminds me of the Beardytron 5000, but way more user friendly. Speaking of which, Imitone will have two versions. Imitone will be for casual and amateur users, while Imitone Prime will pack advanced capabilities such as multi-channel control, noise cancellation, adjustable tuning and more. Pledge at least $25 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a copy of Imitone as a reward; pledge at least $60 if you want a copy of Imitone Prime.
Crashes happen, and sometimes can leave a person incapacated, unable to reach help. That’s where the ICEdot Crash Sensor comes in. This sensor can detect impact and contact help in cases on emergency. In short, it can save your life.
Risky surgical operations in space could soon become a routine activity – although they won’t be carried out by human hands. NASA is currently exploring the possibility of sending medical droids up with astronauts. Working with robotics firm Virtual Incision, they’ve already developed a prototype.
There will be a new type of USB plug that will hopefully solve most of the annoyances related to the ubiquitous data and power transfer cable. Taking a cue from … Continue reading
We often imagine humanity’s future in space, but what about in the unexplored depths of our own planet’s oceans? These incredible concept designs offer visions of what our future water world might actually look like.
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A lot of folks say that 2014 will be the year of wearables, as in wearable technology. We’ve had wearable devices such as watches and cameras for decades, but the past couple of years we’ve seen devices like Google Glass, Pebble, fitness trackers and more. MbientLab is giving tinkerers and small entrepreneurs a chance to ride the wave with MetaWear.
MetaWear is a small, affordable and developer-friendly platform for creating your own wearable device, or at least a prototype. It’s powered by the ARM Cortex M0 SoC. It has Bluetooth LE connectivity and has a built-in accelerometer, temperature sensor, buzzer, coin motor and RGB LED. It also has two analog/digital I/O pins and an I2C bus. On the software side, it already has its own API, and MbientLab will be releasing open source Android and iOS apps for MetaWear as well.
In my brief chat with MbientLab’s Laura Kassovic, she said that the MetaWear can be used to build a fitness tracker that could compete with existing products like FitBit’s products or Nike’s FuelBand if you so choose, saving you a lot of resources in the process: “First off, you don’t have to spend 4 years at University to get your engineering degree just so you can write firmware. So that’s 4 years we are saving you! We are also saving you the time it takes to prototype, test, and certify hardware just so that you can put it on the store shelf. That’s another 4-6 months of reduced development time. We save developers 80 to 90% of their development time and cost with MetaWear (and I think that’s awesome).”
But Laura is also excited about the potential of MetaWear to enable tinkerers to create niche or even one-off wearable devices: “MetaWear will allow developers to create devices that large companies aren’t interested in building or devices that are very niche (and in my opinion, very cool). Perhaps you want to build a necklace that lights up when your Grandma calls. Perhaps you have an Oculus Rift and you want to add force feedback pods you wear on your body to create an even more realistic simulation. Maybe you have a pet iguana and you want to track its movement but you simply can’t outfit your iguana with a Fitbit Flex; so the natural solution is to build custom on MetaWear instead!”
So put on your best fitting browser and pledge at least $30 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a MetaWear kit as a reward. Go and get that Facebook money. Or make a fatness tracker. The power is yours.
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.
