Hasta La Gadget!

Pay & Sit is yet another device to drive the poor from shared public spaces and let them instead be monopolized by apple-munching, mineral-water-sipping yuppies. Pay & Sit is a park bench dreamed up by designer Designer Fabian Brunsing. When at rest, it becomes the porcupine of the street-furniture world, deploying vicious metal spikes to keep soft rear-ends away. Only when a 50-cent coin is dropped in the slot do the spikes lower mechanically and offer up a smooth, comfortable surface.

Even the office-goers aren’t welcome to linger or dilly-dally in their relaxing: After a short interval, an alarm sounds, closely followed by the spikes popping back out. The message is clear: You sit, you pay.

If the Pay & Sit were ever to make it into the real world (unlikely, as this design is already a couple years old), then bums would have yet another sob-story designed to separate us from yet another few quarters: “Spare some change, guv’nor. I haven’t sat down for a week.” And then of course, there are bound to be people who find this new arrangement very comfortable indeed.

PAY & SIT: the private bench [Vimeo via Neatorama]

See Also:

• Solar Bench Powers Wi-Fi, Lights Hobo Parties
• The Pencil Bench: An Eraser Tipped Bed of Nails
• Kickit: Brush-Lined Furniture Catches Flying Footwear

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If you’ve ever had a bike stolen from somewhere you thought was safe, or had your lock cut so someone could make off with your bike, you know that feeling of helplessness you get when you come back and find your lock in pieces on the ground. Even though it’s still a design and may never make its way to store shelves, the Halo bicycle lock, from designer Steve Hunt, is on to something. The Halo combines good looks and smart design with wireless notification to your smartphone if the lock has been tampered with, so if you’re nearby you might be able to catch the culprit.

The Halo lock is designed to have a flexible body and a connector cable, so it’s easy to put on and take off of your bike without having to bend and twist around the lock or the object you have your bike locked to, and if Hunt has his way, the lock will come with an embedded wireless card that will send alerts to your phone the instant someone tries to break the lock or cut the cable. So if you’re sitting in a coffee shop a few feet away from your bike, you might get out in time to yell at the thief and get them to drop the bike–or at least report their identity to the police.
 
[via Dvice]

The iPad clearly needs a camera. Maybe not the fancy 5-megapixel, hi-def-shooting camera in the iPhone 4 – after all, who wants to hold a big slab up to snap photos? – but something for grabbing basic images would make Apple’s tablet way more useful.

Unless you want to wait for v2.0 next year, a case would be the only way to add a camera, and that’s just how Chet Rosales has managed it with his iPad Cam-Case. The concept case has an ugly fat strip up the side which has a camera at its top. This camera flips in its mount to fire forward or back, depending on whether you are videoconferencing or just snapping pictures.

Just think for a moment how useful this would be. Apart from Skype (sometime the only time I still wake my MacBook at weekends is to chat to my parents) and the usual quick snapshots, the big-screen iPad is perfect for augmented-reality applications, scanning and organizing business receipts (I still didn’t do my expenses from this year’s CES. Maybe with this I would have) and general photocopy duties: Being able to snap pictures of, say, your mom’s best brownie recipe and read it back full sized would be great (and fattening).

Chet’s cam-case is a concept, but we see no reason why such a thing couldn’t work: Apple lets add-on GPS units talk to apps as if they were built-in, so why not this? Clean up that design and I’d buy one right away.

iPad Cam-Case Product Design & 3-D Renders [Coroflot via Yanko and Laorosa]

See Also:

• IPad to Get Two-Megapixel Camera This Year
• Ten Things Missing From the iPad
• iPad Camera Connector Clones Five-Year-Old iPod Version
• IPad Camera Connection Kit Supports External Hard Drives

You know all those precious lenses you’ve been stockpiling for your SLR since the 90s? They’re still safe for another couple of decades, but in round about 2030, you’re gonna be trashing all that glassware and buying yourself a Wonder Camera. Why would that be? Canon is pretty confident that by then it’ll have figured out how to do a single lens capable of going from macro shots all the way out to a 5000mm focal length. And yes, apparently it’s small enough to fit in a young girl’s hands. This non-interchangeable lens is backed by an all-touch interface (say sayonara to your knobs and dials), an extremely high-resolution sensor, and image stabilization so advanced as to make shooting at that unspeakably high zoom range a viable option. Finally, the whole lurid dream is topped off with video-only capture. Canon argues you won’t need to shoot stills when its video is capable of keeping everything in focus all the time — you’ll just pick out your favorite scene from the movie reel. Go past the break to see the highfaultin video demo.

Continue reading Canon Wonder Camera Concept promises single-lens perfection (video)

Canon Wonder Camera Concept promises single-lens perfection (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Jul 2010 02:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re sometimes a little sad that the joy of gathering with family and friends ’round the photo album has been reduced to the shallow act of pasting a link into a text field, so we’re always intrigued when some gadget designer finds an interesting way to bring us back to something physical. The Stamp.y from designer Jinhee Kim certainly does that in an interesting way — but perhaps not an entirely practical one. It’s a digital camera with a very unusual shape and design allowing it to act as a rubber stamp. Take your picture through the proboscis-shaped lens, pop off the back, dab it on the handy ink pad, and then stamp that picture onto whatever you like. We think this would be huge in schools as a great way for kids to decorate their book covers, but physical textbooks will surely be a thing of the past before this becomes a reality.

Stamp.y Digital Camera concept doesn’t look particularly pocket-friendly originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Jun 2010 10:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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