What does an AT-AT do when it’s not advancing over the icy wastes of Hoth or crushing trees and blasting stupid teddy-bears on the forest moon of Endor? Why, it chases dogs, sniffs fire-hydrants and drops dog-eggs on the sidewalk, just like any other four-legged pet, of course.
This fantastic video by Patrick Boivin, entitled AT-AT Day Afternoon, shows a day in the life of a pet AT-AT. It’s a little too full of schoolboy humor, but the Jabba gag is priceless. Best of all, it’s only a minute long, so you have no excuse not to quickly brighten your day. I wish my brother’s toy AT-AT had been this much fun, instead of just collecting dust and filling up the toy-box.
The one thing we didn’t know (officially at least) about Microsoft’s controller-free Kinect sensor was the price. Now it has been added to the official Microsoft Store, coming in at the expected $150.
The Kinect is a bar that plugs into an Xbox 360 and sits atop your TV, just like the Wii’s bar, and allows you to interact with games using your own movement. The difference is that the Kinect has a pair of cameras – one for depth and one for motion – that figure out where you and your body parts are at all time. There are also four microphones to listen to your voice, but no controller to hold in your hand.
The accuracy is, according to those who have tested it, startling. The Kinect can see where your hands, feet and face are, and is even fine-grained enough to recognize when you’re not achieving the right pose in yoga, for example, and offers instructions to correct it, just like a real teacher.
Technically, it seems rather sparse: the two contained in the bar run at just 640 x 480 resolution at 30fps, and microphones in this case are likely just basic. The magic would appear to be in the software which so impressed us with the force-controlling, Light Saber-wielding Star Wars game demoed at E3.
The Kinect is only available for pre-order. You’ll still have to wait until November 4th to get one.
Oh man! It turns out that Star Wars Kid was doing nothing less than predicting the future. The awesome future. Microsoft has demonstrated its Project Natal, which has been renamed Kinect and transformed into a motion-controller for the Xbox 360.
Kinect, which will be available in November, uses a camera and a microphone to turn a player’s movements into in-game movements. In a demonstration at the E3 show in Los Angeles last night, Microsoft showed of the peripheral with a huge performance by Cirque du Soleil, which was, according to Twitter, impressive.
Even better was the demo of a new LucasArts Star Wars game, which lets the player control his on-screen avatar by acting as a Jedi, just like Star Wars Kid. The above clip, which managed to sneak out onto YouTube ahead of official video, shows the Kinect in action. It looks fantastic: to pull out your light-saber you just, well, pull out your light-saber. To throw a huge spaceship across the room you simply wave your hand as if you were controlling the Force.
The giant screen probably helps to feeling of power, but which of us haven’t made precisely these gestures, only to have nothing happen? My brother and I would hang upside down and desperately try to get the light-saber to jump into our hands before the Wampa attacked. It never worked. Maybe now it will.
What if video-game consoles were bigger? Not just retro-70s-technology bigger, but make-Godilla-stop-and-take-notice bigger? Building-sized bigger, in fact?
Then they’d look like these fantastic fantasy concoctions from photographer Joseph Ford and 3D artist Antoine Mairot. Made for the French-language Amusement magazine, these giant consoles rise up in monolithic communist concrete and capitalist glass-and-steel.
They’re wonderful. While the PS3 (surely not far off the real size) rearing up in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz fits right into the high-rise district around it, my favorite has to be the tank-like NES pictured above. Its squat, menacing form stares out over an empty wasteland. I can’t tell if it, too, is in Berlin, but it could almost be a genuine piece of East German architecture from the time before the Wall fell.
The third image, of the Nintendo DS, is wonderfully constructed but a little too Doctor Who for me: it’s fun, and looks good to begin with, but if you give it a second’s thought the illusion evaporates and the impossible reality is revealed. I love that the D-Pad looks like a helicopter landing-pad, though.
For $15, you can turn your notebook computer into what looks like a box of Lego. Those keys are in fact stickers which sit atop your MacBook keycaps and turn the keyboard into a sea of dimpled plastic bricks.
The stickers, made from easily-removed vinyl, come from Etsy-seller openandclose. They’re kind of neat, but the toy-nerd in me can’t help spot the non-Lego elements in these “Lego-style” bricks. First, the colors are way off. Whoever heard of pink Lego?
Second, the circular nubbins are too small on the function keys and too big on the letters. Only on the spacebar do you see anything approaching Lego-like proportions. Going by the shadows, though, it looks like openandclose at least made the stickers in real 3D, and didn’t just shade the tops to look as if they are raised.
Available now, for you to buy and use for five minutes before ripping them off in a fit of annoyance.
Matthew Clark’s Aerial Capture sits (or rather, floats) somewhere between a kite, a party balloon and a novelty toy camera kit. It is in exactly the kind of fun photographic niche that Polaroid should be in, instead of trying to persuade kids to pay $1 a pop for crappy, small paper photographs.
The Aerial Capture concept kit combines a cheap and light digicam with a helium balloon and a kite-like reel of string, only in this case the string is a cable connected to the camera and the reel acts as both a spool and as a remote shutter release. You pay out the line up to 20 meters (66-feet) and snap pictures from up on high.
This is what digital does so much better than film. No moving parts means a cheap and light it is almost indestructible, and you don’t have to pull the camera out of the sky every 36 shots to change the roll. The only downside is the requirement for helium. It was bad enough when I got a chemistry set for Christmas and had no methylated spirits around for the burner. I don’t think anyone’s parents are going to have a cylinder of helium handy.
It looks like a lot of fun. Combine this with an Eye-Fi card and an iPad from yesterday’s ShutterSnitch application for instant review of your aerial shots.
PadRacer is like Scalextric for the iPad, a top-down car-racing game for up to four players. The awesome twist is that those players use their iPhones to control the tiny on-screen cars.
The first game we know of to use this multimachine approach for the iPad is Scrabble, which lets players keep their tile-rack secreted on their iPhone screen and then flick the tiles onto the main board, over on the iPad, when it’s time to play.
PadRacer instead turns the iPhone (or iPod Touch) into a wireless controller, connected via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. You steer the cars by tilting the iPhone left or right.
The only caveat is that you can’t play the game without an iPhone or iPod, so the audience is slightly self-limiting (and we wonder how many complaints there will be from people who don’t read the warning first and buy the game without the right gear).
And we already know what you’re thinking: The minimum price for the hardware to play a two-player game is $900 — one $500 iPad and two $200 iPod Touches. On the other hand, the game is just $5, and if you already have the hardware, then this could be a lot of fun.
Who knows where this stuff will lead? A first-person shooter with a sniper-rifle view on the iPhone screen? IPad Poker, with your cards hidden in the palm of your hand? Or even a Keynote remote on the iPhone, complete with preview of the next slide? One thing’s for sure: The iPad is looking like a kick-ass gaming machine.
You know a sport is going mainstream when a market springs up to sell you gear that you don’t need. It happened with the skateboard (invented in 1955 by Marty McFly when he ripped the handlebar off a home-made scooter) and now it is happening with Hard Court Bike Polo.
The gear in question is this mallet-head from Milwaukee-based bike peddlers Eighth-Inch. Bike polo mallets are made from old ski-poles joined onto heads made from water or gas pipes found in the street. Add a single bolt, wrap the top with an inner-tube for grip and you’re done.
The Eighth-Inch polo mallet head is made from the same HDPE plastic as theose tough pipes, injection-molded into shape. The heads are 150mm long, with marked circles to guide any cutting-down to shorter lengths, and have a sleeve running through the center for the shaft to enter, adding strength. The best part, though, is the addition of end-caps, for more accurate shooting. These are notoriously hard to make and fit, or at least to make them strong enough not to break after a few whacks.
Here I should probably rant about the selling out of bike-polo, the home-made culture and so on. But who cares? These mallet heads look pretty good, and those end caps alone are worth the price of $20 (replacement caps cost $8 a pair). Nobody is going to stop making their own mallets any time soon, and the variety of home-made designs I see every time I play is huge, and impossible to copy. And if you haven’t tried bike polo yet, do. It’s the best combination of dangerous sport and beer out there.
Do we need an excuse to show you a gallery of the most amazing, mind-bending mechanical spiders ever to emerge from the fevered brains of roboticists?
No, we do not.
Something about multilegged creatures just seems to fire the imagination of robot builders. Their stability, agility and — let’s face it — creepiness are hard to match.
They’re fast, resilient and occasionally cute. They climb walls, leap off buildings and spy on enemies.
The amazing thing is how many people seem to be building multilegged robots lately, from NASA to British defense firms to French performance artists.
Technically, not all of these are spiders. Many stand on six legs, not eight, and some were modeled after cockroaches rather than tarantulas. Details, details.
On to the spider robots.
Above:
La Princesse
Ironically dubbed “La Princesse,” this 50-foot spider bot roamed the streets of Liverpool in 2008. It was an art project that, instead of sending people fleeing in a panic, drew crowds of admirers. La Princesse was constructed by the French performance art firm, La Machine.
Game Table will surely join a legion of games on Apple’s iPad, but it is worth a mention here as it stands out in one rather unusual way: it doesn’t actually do anything.
Game Table is just like a real world game table, and comes with boards and pieces for checkers and chess, along with a deck of cards. After that, its up to you. The game provides nothing but a physics engine to let you move the pieces, and to shuffle, deal and flip cards. It’s up to you what game you play, and whether you follow the rules or break them. It is also, like the real-world versions of these games, a two-player experience. If you want to play alone, you’d better enjoy solitaire: There are no computer-controlled opponents here.
I think this is brilliant. You can never lose pieces, a strong wind cannot scatter chessmen when you play in the park, and as long as you have your iPad with you, you also have your chess set. I guess you could even pull off some simple card-tricks.
The future will bring Go and Backgammon to the game, and Game Table will cost just $1 when launched on (hopefully) Saturday 3rd April. I imagine I shall be buying this as soon as I get an iPad.
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.
