‘Clap Your Hands,’ Digital Camera USB Key
‘Clap Your Hands,’is Mini Digital Camera that you simply plug into your computer for easy file transfers and quick charging. The little device sports two megapixels, takes 1280 × 1024 quality videos, and supports JPEG/AVI formats. Read More…
Immersive Movie Experience
A group of filmmakers create a 3D experience using what they call “immersive imaging.” The the 3-video series feature a guy in his living room while experiencing the ultimate movie experience with PlayStation, once he turns the movie on, the whole room becomes the movie.According to the production company, it was all shot in one take, no post production, no SFX, frankly it’s one of the coolest projects I’ve seen, and I wish I was in that room to live this experience!
The World’s Lightest Material Developed
A team of researchers from UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories and the California Institute of Technology have developed the world’s lightest material – with a density of 0.9 mg / cc, making it around 100 times lighter than Styrofoam . Despite being 99.99 percent open volume, the new material boasts impressive strength and energy absorption, making it potentially useful for a range of applications.
The 0.01 percent of the material that isn’t air consists of a micro-lattice of interconnected hollow nickel-phosphorous tubes with a wall thickness of 100 nanometers – or 1,000 times thinner than a human hair. These tubes are angled to connect at nodes to form repeating, three-dimensional asterisk-like cells.
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Passive Walking Robot Propelled by Its Own Weight
“This robot is walking down a slope, and its only source of power is potential energy. It doesn’t use any kind of motor or control, so we think it’s very environmentally friendly.”
“The robot has three main parts: thighs, lower legs, and ankles. It’s made of aluminum, and it contains only mechanical components, which have been adjusted so that the robot has the same thigh and leg lengths as a person, and weighs the same.”
In a walking test last year, this robot walked continuously for 13 hours, taking 100,000 steps and going 15 km. That achievement has been listed in the Guinness Book of Records.
“We plan to develop a commercial version with System Instruments, which is exhibiting with us today. We’re thinking of applying the principle this robot uses to walk in sports equipment as well. Also, people who need care or find it hard to walk could wear this robot to help them walk. Right now, we’re at the prototyping stage, as we’d like to release a commercial version in 1-2 years.”
The Meissner Effect, Quantum Levitation
Tel-Aviv University shows the phenomenon of “Quantum Levitation“ using a track around which a superconductor can float. Superconductivity and magnetic fields are like oil and water, they don’t mix. When it can, the superconductor will push out any magnetic fields from the interior in a process called; the Meissner effect. It happens when a sample is cooled below its superconducting transition temperature, where it then cancels out its magnetic flux.
Because of electromagnetic induction (where an electric current is created when a conductor is moved through a magnetic field), a perfect conductor won’t change the magnetic flux when it cruises through at zero resistance. However, when cooled to the superconductor state the magnetic flux is expelled. Now we have perfect diamagnetism – where the interior magnetic field nears zero. At this point, if an external magnetic field is introduced, it will create an opposing magnetic field.
We start with a single crystal sapphire wafer and coat it with a thin (~1µm thick) ceramic material called yttrium barium copper oxide (YBa2Cu3O7-x ). The ceramic layer has no interesting magnetic or electrical properties at room temperature. However, when cooled below -185ºC (-301ºF) the material becomes a superconductor. It conducts electricity without resistance, with no energy loss. Zero.
Superconductivity and magnetic field do not like each other. When possible, the superconductor will expel all the magnetic field from inside. This is the Meissner effect. In our case, since the superconductor is extremely thin, the magnetic field DOES penetrates. However, it does that in discrete quantities (this is quantum physics after all! ) called flux tubes. Read More…
Delancey Underground, ‘Low Line’ Project, New York
A Lower East Side trolley tunnel could be transformed into the city’s first underground park. The high-tech, subterranean park called the ‘Delancey Underground’ is intended to replace a two-acre abandoned trolley terminal beneath the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge.
Entrepreneurs Dan Barasch, R. Boykin Curry IV and James Ramsey are working to build this community green space the size of Gramercy Park below ground. The project, which will be the size of Manhattan’s Gramercy Park, is the brainchild of NASA satellite engineer-turned-architect James Ramsey, who has developed a technology that can “harvest” sunlight and “channel” it elsewhere via fiber optic cables. Read More…
‘Da Vinci,’ Surgical Robot Peels a Grape
Da Vinci surgical robot requires no introduction.There are more than 1,000 Da Vinci robots worldwide, and this particular robot has performed 450 prostate cancer removals alone. In this video, surgeons at Southmead Hospital in the UK demonstrated its ability to make delicate cuts by peeling a grape.
Clay Dillow from POPSCI says:
No man wants to think of his grapes anywhere near the forceful hands of a massive multi-armed machine, but this demo shows just how magnificently precise and steady-handed our robot surgeons can be.
‘Sugru’ Fixes and Sticks to Pretty Much Everything by Jane ni Dhulchaointigh
Sugru is a brightly, colored, self-adhesive, silicone rubber bonding compound that cures overnight at room temperature to form permanent bonds. It has been fabricated by Jane ni Dhulchaointigh, who worked with scientists for five years to develop this material soft enough to mold yet durable enough to fix or “hack” things so they work better. Read More…
Sphero, the Smartphone-Controlled Robotic Cat Toy by Orbotix
Sphero is a robotic ball that you can control with your smartphone or with games that are downloadable on any iOS or Android device. Sphero comes with built-in LEDs, allowing you to change the colour of your robo-ball depending on your mood. The plan is to also develop augmented reality apps, which supplement the real world robot ball with augmented reality obstacles or gaming elements — for example picture Sphere as a wrecking ball crushing virtual objects in your sitting room.
+Orbotix
Driverless Shuttle Pod, the Future of Public Transport Unveiled at Heathrow Airport, Uk
The future of public transport has finally arrived with Heathrow Airport officially unveiling laser-guided travel pods.
The design was a joint effort between Heathrow’s owners DAA and Manufacturer ULTra PRT to prove the technology could be reliable, efficient, and most importantly, can work around complex existing infrastructure. The 22 electric pod cars replaced two diesel-powered buses that made 216 trips every day. They’re a sound solution for the endless loops that airport transportation must make. Plus, they’re not nearly as expensive as a monorail.
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Human Heart, Alive and Beating in a Box!
This is an impressive march in the medical field, heart transplantation team at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center is currently leading a national, multicenter phase 2 clinical study of an experimental organ-preservation system that allows donor hearts to continue functioning in a near-physiologic state outside the body during transport.
The Organ Care System (OCS), developed by medical device company TransMedics, works this way: After a heart is removed from a donor’s body, it is placed in a high-tech OCS box and is immediately revived to a beating state, perfused with oxygen and nutrient-rich blood, and maintained at an appropriate temperature. The device also features monitors that display how the heart is functioning during transport.
Convergence by Giya Djahaya
Convergence is a project that explores computative techniques in the context of fabrication, a triangulated artwork and an interior element.
I made a attempt to go beyond sculpting a shape by modifying 3d meshes manually in order to bring deeper background to just an isolated formalism.This project is not a design of a single object. Rather, it’s a design of a process. It represents my personal exploration of various ideas and the connections between them. The aim was to trace these relations and create a logic, which would unite all the ideas so that they merge with each other on different levels of design process. One of the ideas was to achieve the ability to fabricate output using digital breadboarding methods. The fact that we can take any data and process this data through our custom designed logic and then obtain the desired result as an output of this logic is really significant because this approach holds great potential for design projects and interactivity.
‘Tele-present Water’ by David Bowen
Created by David Bowen, Tele-Present Water installation draws information from the intensity and movement of the water in a remote location. The installation, called “Tele-present Water,” collects data in real-time from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data buoy.
This installation draws information from the intensity and movement of the water in a remote location. Wave data is being collected in real-time from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data buoy Station 46246 (49°59’7″ N 145°5’20″ W) on the Pacific Ocean. The wave intensity and frequency is scaled and transferred to the mechanical grid structure installed at The National Museum in Wroclaw, Poland. The result was a simulation of the physical effects caused by the movement of water from this distant location.
The exhibit in this video is on display at Poland’s National Museum in Wroclaw.
8-Inch LCD TV by Naoto Fukasawa for Plus Minus Zero
This portable eight-inch television has been designed by Naoto Fukasawa for Plus Minus Zero. the television features a flat LCD screen designed in the shape of a traditional cathode-ray-tube set. Read More…
Hyphae 3D-printed Lamp by Nervous System Studio
Hyphae,” is an algorithmically-generated lamp design that is 3D-printed in a process based on the growth of leaf veins.
The lamps are grown using a custom design software that nervous system created in C++ using CGAL and cinder. Each one starts from a base volume and a set of root points; the structures emerging through an interactive process as the roots grow into an auxin filled environment.
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iKini, Solar Powered Bikini
A New York-based designer has invented a solar-powered bikini so wearers can charge their iPod or camera as they lie in the sun.Andrew Schneider, 30, sewed together 40 paper-thin photo-voltaic panels together with soft conductive thread to produce his iKini which comes complete with USB ports sewn into the fabric. Read More…
Australian High Speed Vehicle, Project by Hassel Studio
HASSELL Studio has revealed its conceptual design for an Australian High Speed Vehicle (A-HSV) in response to national debates on environmental, economical and social issues.
Inspired by the brut lines of the iconic Australian speed machine the 1960s HK Monaro, HASSELL has designed the A-HSV to be responsive to the Australian context. The A-HSV presents an alternative low-carbon, safe mode of transport for future travel between Australian capital and regional cities. Travelling at 400km per hour, A-HSV would make the trip from Melbourne to Sydney in just under 3 hours.
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Cellular Wall Printer by Sweet Tech Studio
Inspired by old-school pin printers ,the Cellular Wall Printer by Sweet Tech Studio allows you to manually scroll text from SMS, Facebook, Twitter, etc. across a large flat surface in big dot matrix-looking type. Seven individually controlled servo motors move the markers up and down, drawing dots and dashes. When you manually slide the printer over a wall, the servo motions are carefully timed to produce text messages.
Checking In | by Sweet Tech Studio from Liat Segal on Vimeo.
