Hasta La Gadget!

Say it with us now: “Phew!” When Nintendo announced that its Wii MotionPlus dongle would be hitting US shelves on June 8th, we all wondered why Wii Sports Resort (Nintendo’s first MotionPlus-enabled title) was set to ship over a month later. Now, EA Sports has relieved worries that early adopters would have no software to use with their new toy by announcing that Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 10 will hit North America on June 15th. Better still, the Wii version will be available with a MotionPlus add-on bundled in for just $10 more than the standalone title (which will run $49.99). As great as all this is, Europeans still come out better, as they’ll also see Grand Slam Tennis ship in June with a MotionPlus packed in. Ah well — it’s just a peccadillo, we’ll let it slide this time.

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 10 lands in June, comes with MotionPlus originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Need to boost morale in the office? Forget punching bags, ping-pong tables and Beer Fridays. Consider building a shooting range with $35 worth of materials.

Mana Energy Potion shows you how to do just that with a step-by-step tutorial including photos. To make a long story short, the process involves screwing carpet onto a board, which is hung from a clothesline zip-tied to the office ceiling.

From thereon you can pin up paper targets — maybe even printouts of your wonderful CEO — and take aim with your airsoft (compressed air) pellet guns.

Check out a video of the shooting range in action below the jump.

(Thanks, Jon!)

Photo: Mana Energy Potion

Anyone walking into the new $1.3 billion stadium for the New York Yankees this spring is bound to be amazed by the size of the center field LED scoreboard, as the first photos of the screen reveal.

Taken by a local CBS affiliate in New York, the pics show early tests of the 103-by-58-foot, 1080p HD Mitsubishi Diamond Vision LED display, which is six times larger than the screen at old Yankee Stadium. According to Mitsubishi, the display is embedded with 8,601,600 LED lamps (covering a total of 5,925 square feet), and can put up to four simultaneous images, with picture-in-picture capabilities.

Some fans are worried that the screen will overshadow the game itself. Since it’s located at the same height as the stadium’s second deck and seems to occupy a quarter of the whole outfield façade, this seems quite possible. That is prime viewing position for nearly everyone inside (including the players), and it’s only natural to continually glance over at a giant flickering thing rather than the serene pastoral slowness of the game.

So you’d think that with that enormous screen, umpires will be using it with the new replay system, right? Alas, no.

According to Major League Baseball, teams are forbidden from showing "a replay of any play that could incite either team or the fans." Judgment calls will continue being made by the umps, as they always have. It’s possible that once a play has been decided, the scoreboard will show versions of disputed plays, but with a screen that size, any possible mistake by the umps could be compounded.

The giant screen is part of a big display tech development for the new Stadium, which also includes about 1,400 other video screens of all sizes, and about 550 of them are flat-panel Sony Bravias.

All displays will be managed by an IP-based network from Cisco Systems. Every one of those TVs will have a singular IP address that can be manipulated for specific MPEG-4 compressed video.

Expect the system to be used to sell ads within the stadium and to show awkward baseball-themed marriage proposals.

Last but not least, big-screen specialist Daktronics also built a video/scoring system that manages a 1,280-foot long color LED ribbon board mounted to the facade of the second deck and will be one of the longest continuous displays in sports. Just like the giant Times Square screen we featured months ago, the LED ribbon board is made out of hundreds of smaller LED ‘cubes.’ This one will show lineups and other team info and will occasionally show psychedelic light shows during the night (see pic above).

We’ll see if the Yankees break from old-school baseball tradition and use all of those displays to put on the first legitimate pre-game light-show-in-the-dark introductions, just like the NBA does in most of its arenas.

The screen at the old Yankee Stadium. Photo: Broadway National Sign and Lighting

All other photos courtesy of WCBS 880. 

See also:

• Mine is Bigger: JVC Launches Giant 720p Screen in Times Square But Walgreens Beats it
• 180-inch 3D LED TV Announced But Resolution Quality is in Question

Hothead Technologies and Kennesaw State University are currently testing an RFID-enabled helmet that tracks the body temperature of a player and promises to lessen dangerous instances of over heating.

In the last decade, companies have looked into developing systems to better measure player temperatures to catch those in danger of heat strokes, as they’ve led to unfortunate deaths.

The most high-profile player to die from over-heating in the NFL is Korey Stringer, an offensive tackle for the Minnesota Vikings. He died in 2001, a day after collapsing from heatstroke during an especially hot and humid day practicing at his team’s training camp facility.

Younger players at the high school level have also died, and they all had the same symptoms: dizziness, body weakness, and heavy breathing. But the culture of football sometimes makes it hard to distinguish between tiredness and illness – players often practice for hours without a proper on-field check-up.

The HOT (heat observation technology) system from Hothead is betting that a real-time observation plan for players will make a difference. A tiny RFID transponder (with a thermal heat sensor) is placed inside the forehead area of the helmet and measures temperature. It’s supposed to handle intense collisions, which is key because the crown of the helmet is often used as a directional ‘spear’ to blast opponents.

The transponder (Range: 500 meters) sends the temperature of every player on the field to a secure PDA gadget on the sidelines, and seems to be packed with WinMo(see pic above). A green dot shows normal temperature, yellow shows a loss of connection, and red places the temperature of a player in danger at the top of the screen, setting off a loud signal as an alert.

The system also comes with a software database that helps coaches determine the trend for each player over time. This is expected to be especially helpful because some players have different heat threshold levels than others.

Athletes and their coaches have long been aware of the problems caused by over-heating. Recently, the American College of Sports Medicine said that players suffer heat strokes because they’re often not acclimated to the intense heat levels coaches subject them to, because of ‘the intensity/duration of practice,’ and even because of improperly ventilated uniforms.

The group has also called for better hydration of players, proper treatment (such as fluid replacement), and better knowledge of environmental conditions.

Hothead Technologies is looking into pushing this technology into other areas where heatstroke is a concern, like firefighting and the military. They company tested the equipment this past fall with a couple of high school teams, and we’re waiting for comment from the team Head Coach to hear about how accurately he was able to manage his players’ temperatures.

There’s no current price available for the system.

Check out a helmet with the RFID tag inside of it (on the side) after the jump:

Follow Jose Fermoso on Twitter at twitter.com/fermoso, and Wired’s Gadget Lab at twitter.com/gadgetlab

Korey Stringer photo: Sports Illustrated

See also:

• Creepy: The RFID Urn Retrieval System
• Eat an RFID-tagged Pill Before a Run, Prevent Over Heating
• Problems at The Gates? RFID-enabled Tix to Olympics’ Opening Ceremonies to Include Passport Data
• European Retailer Using RFID to Improve Customer Service

“Picture the wheel of your skate following a long, infinite wave.”

So say the instructions for riding the Orbitwheel, a mash-up between inline skates and a skateboard or, more correctly, between those dangerous strap-on roller skates and a snakeboard.

The Orbitwheel actually looks pretty easy to ride, but then I said that about the skateboard when I first saw one and quickly proved myself wrong with a comedy, tooth-cracking faceplant. The hub-less wheels mean you have the bump-soaking abilities of a large wheel combined with a low sense of gravity and, as the instructional video (below) tells us, you can pump your way along in a skateboard tic-tac motion.

It looks like a lot of fun, and any video can only benefit from a Star Wars like opening sequence of scrolling text, in this case seeking to exempt the company from any kind of liability. We interpret it as meaning that the Orbitwheel is awesomely dangerous.

Product page [Inventist via Oh Gizmo!]