Mobile phones today are multitasking machines that we all know and love, but let’s take it to another, more flexible level. In this case, it’s literal with the Flexible PaperPhone, the world’s first of its kind.
Developed by a team of researchers from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, they believe that this new communication device will make the current smartphone obsolete within 5 to 10 years.
Continue reading “Flexible PaperPhone: The Future Flexible Mobile Phone?”
Time for a little architectual geekery this week, with the world’s first proper zombie-proof house.
Anyone who’s ever watched a decent zombie movie (28 Days Later, anyone?) or played one of those nightmare-inducing zombie games (say, Left 4 Dead), will want this zombie-proof house as their humble abode.
Designers KWK Promes has dubbed the design “The Safe House”, and true to its name, it does seem to be as impenetrable as it sounds. Both to the members of the undead who are out to eat you and also to the living, it seems.
Technology today is speeding along at a speed at which is almost incomprehensible. Yesterday’s science fiction may very well become today’s science fact. Though are some facts stranger than fiction? It certainly must be true as we are now able to mass-produce human skin at a low cost for clinical testing and other uses.
The great minds behind this skin producing factory is Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology in Stuttgart, Germany. The factory was just in its infancy merely two years ago, and now it has come online, producing 5,000 penny-sized discs of milky translucent tissue every month.
Continue reading “German Factory Manufacturing Human Skin Goes Online”
Ever wonder what you are going to do with all your microSD cards that are lying around? Most of them must only have a few of gigabytes in capacity, and they’re so small and easy to lose anyway, if they’re not sitting nice and snug in a device.
A lot of them must have come from the heyday of older smartphones that still used microSD cards, and you just don’t know what to do with them.
Here is a superb conceptual design that was envisioned by Yanko Design to solve the problem: The Collector.
The Collector combines both the technology of a USB flash drive and these tiny little microSD chips to create a flash drive that is ‘refillable’.
This is a rather more interesting take as souvenirs go, because it isn’t every day you can strike a pose on the street, and instead of having it immortalised in your digital camera, you get to bring it home with you as your very own 3D-printed sculpture.
For two weekends in January 2011, on Barcelona’s La Ramba street, in a project aptly named Be Your Own Souvenir, the BlablabLAB used three Kinects and a RepRap 3D-printer to render any willing participant to model on the street as their very own little statue.
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I’ve always love the idea of incorporating musical instruments into our everyday clothing. There was one where a keyboard was built into a jacket. Now, a 17 year old student of Hymers College in England has created a pair of jeans that double as a drum kit.
Aseem Mishra won the senior age group title at the Young Engineer of Great Britain Competition for his invention.
Continue reading “Young Engineer Wins Prize for Electronic Drum Trousers”
By now, 3D displays are nothing new, with 3D being rampant everywhere from the cinemas, to your home theatre system and even to handheld gaming devices. Some of these systems have improved upon the idea, with the first step in removing the ever prevalent 3D glasses.
Now, the researchers at Osaka Universiti‘s Oshiro Lab have taken this 3D technology a step further, by inventing what they call a ‘true 3D display’. This display discards both the glasses and a monitor screen, opting instead to project their image onto a fog screen.
Kinect hacks are aplenty out there, and there are many strange and wonderful things that people have come up with to make the virtual and real world a much more interactive place.
This little do it yourself is sure to be a favourite amongst Lord of the Rings fans. The ‘hack’ allows for one to create a giant eyeball that can track you as you move in front of it.
Continue reading “Kinect Puffersphere: DIY Creepy Eyeball That Tracks You Around The Room”
In this day and age of the technological era, we are still highly dependent on non-renewable energy sources such as fossil fuels. In the move to greener and more environmentally friendly sources of energy, we have turned to the power of the Sun. In this case, I think it’s an cool move that Panasonic has invented this table.
Solar power is certainly nothing new, but the twist of putting together the solar-cells with the ability to recharge our mobile devices is pretty interesting.
Continue reading “Panasonic Solar-Powered Wireless Charging Table”
Pretty much everyone has a mobile phone today, in all shapes and sizes and different capabilities. There are smartphones with touchscreens and then there are some pretty cool concept phones out there.
The Elfoid certainly fits the category of strange, and I’ll admit it, rather creepy. This Japanese invention, developed in Osaka University with the help of NTT DoCoMo, is a human-shaped mobile phone that is supposed to make you to feel closer to the person on the other end.
