RC Car aficionado Masami Hirosaka does more with this little car in one minute than I’ll hope to do with a real one in my entire lifetime. Notice he doesn’t use the wall as leverage, either. [YouTube via Japan Probe]

If you’ve ever wondered how the Internet was born, but can’t be bothered reading a whole book on the subject, check out this short animated documentary from Milah Bilgil. Entitled History of the internet, it does a great job explaining time-sharing, file-sharing, arpanet and internet. The video uses a new type of info-graphic called PICOL icons, which will soon be made available for free on picol.org. PICOL stands for Pictorial Communication Language – it’s a project that aims to create “a standard and reduced sign system for electronic communication.” PICOL is free to use and open to alter.

Sponsor

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

Discuss

[NeoProj] (only worked in safari for me)

This is one of the most amazing pieces of eye candy I’ve found in a long time: A demolition derby—full of monster trucks, scrap cars, and even a giant Godzilla—filmed with tilt-shift photography, then put together in a time-lapse video. The final effect is extraordinary.

If you wonder how something so gigantic and destructive could look so tiny and harmless, the answer is a combination of techniques. One is the use of time-lapse, which makes you lose frames and gives motion a jerking quality that helps fooling the brain into thinking that you are watching miniatures. Another one is the angle, which makes you think that you are seeing something from above, like you would see a model on a table. Increasing the contrast, to obtain harder shadows, also helps in the deception.

The most important element, however, is tilt-shift photography. While tilt-shift photography can be faked blurring the image to simulate a very shallow depth of field, you need true tilt-shift to get so realistic.

Tilt-shift requires a special camera setup, a lens that can tilt—or rotate—and shift—move parallel to the image plane. With tilt you control the focus of the image, which works better in vertically oriented framing, blurring the closest and farthest part of the image. With shift you correct the perspective of the image itself, making things look flatter than they actually are. [Vimeo via Jalopnik]

There are moments in which, for whatever reason, being it a scientific discovery, a voyage into the unknown, or somebody’s excessive alcohol intake, humanity advances one step forward into its destiny, a final state of clarity and peace that will take us all to the stars. This moment complies with the three reasons. Ah, you Ms. Spinning Blonde in Jeans you. We love you.

We knew that boomerangs work in space because Takao Doi tried one in the International Space Station last month. Now, thanks to JAXA’s obsession with cameras we have proof on video. The usual skeptics who think that Elvis is really the only human that ever went to the moon—and still lives there—will be happy. [JAXA via Pink Tentacle]

University of Pennsylvania roboticists—who talk like robot versions of Alan Alda—have developed modular artificial creatures capable of recomposing themselves in case that they are destroyed—effectively taking the first step towards global annihilation, thank you very much. Happily for Humanity, they are far from T1000, and closer to Jerry Lewis, as the (quite funny, yet sad) end of the video shows.

Composed of 15 modules arranged in groups of five, each of CKbot’s clusters have a module with a 20fps camera, a blinking LED, and a accelerometer to reconstruct the entire robot, tied by magnets. Each of the other 12 modules have an embedded computer, proximity sensors, and a servo motor with 180 degrees that allows for a rotational range of about 180 degrees.

When the main mini-Voltron-wannabe gets destroyed and the clusters are disconnected, they self-right up themselves detecting its orientation according to gravity (don’t keep looking like an idiot and start running now.) Once they are on position, the cameras search for the unique LED patterns, and then two closers start to approach to each other at glacial speeds (by this time, you should have reached the weapons storage and grab a shotgun, five machine guns, and a grenade launcher.) When the two first modules connect, the start searching for the third one (you may fire now) until the finally assemble again, forming a single entity that would inevitably destroy you if we didn’t tell you the steps above. Yes, somewhere in the future, this advice will save your life. [New Scientist Tech]

Evolution Robotics ViPR visual search technology is coming to the iPhone this June. ViPR allows you to take a photo of any movie, CD or book, send it to a server, and automagically get an email back loaded with information and links pointing to YouTube videos or iTunes Music Store links. It will also be deployed in Japan on KDDI’s au camera phones this Spring. As you will see in the iPhone demo after the jump, it works incredibly well, even when the object is partially occluded:

It seems like the perfect software for the laziest people in the world, but it’s one of those “oh wow” things that will make everyone smile when using it.

Breakthrough Visual Search Engine for Mobile Phones Takes Off Big in Japan

Pasadena, CA & Tokyo, Japan – April 17, 2008 – Evolution Robotics Inc., a leading robotics technology company, in partnership with Bandai Networks Co. Ltd, Japan's leading mobile content provider, announced today that KDDI Corporation is including the "ER Search" visual search engine on its new Spring 2008 "au™" line of camera phones, and has made it available for download for any KDDI customer with a prior "au" camera phone. This launch marks a dramatic expansion in the market for mobile visual search, which will enable millions of consumers in Japan alone to do online searches by taking pictures of everyday objects with their camera phone.

The deployment of this technology in the mass market also opens up an entirely new range of categories of services for mobile marketing, which is already projected to grow to $24 Billion worldwide by 2013. (Source: ABI Research)

ER Search is a mobile search engine operated by Bandai Networks and powered by Evolution Robotics’ ViPR visual pattern recognition system. It works essentially like using a traditional search engine, but without having to type any text or go through complicated menus. Instead, users simply snap a picture of something they’re interested in and immediately get back relevant content, all in the palm of the hands.

As an example, KDDI customers will be able to take a picture of a music CD that would return links relating to the artist, hear clips from the album and purchase songs to download on their phone. If they are shopping for wine in a store, they can take a picture of the wine label and get expert reviews and recommendations on the spot. Or, if they are browsing through a catalog and see an item they’d like to buy, they can order it immediately by snapping a picture of the item on the page.

“ER Search is an entirely new way for connecting consumers with content and companies,” said Satoshi Oshita, CEO of Bandai Networks. “Because ER Search runs on mobile phones, searches happen when and where the customer is, as soon as they see something that they’re interested in. Additionally, the fact that a customer simply has to click a picture of a product or advertisement, makes the search process far easier and immediate than anything that has been available before.”

“We are very pleased to be working with Bandai Networks and are excited to see the momentum building in the Japanese market,” said Paolo Pirjanian, President and CEO of Evolution Robotics. “Our mission is to take aerospace-grade technologies and make them affordable for mass market applications, and ER Search is a great example. We see this as just the start of a growing market for visual search in Asia and other parts of the globe and are actively working with our partners to expand the range of services that can benefit consumers and companies alike.”

Bandai Networks had already deployed ER Search on over one million phones in Japan in 2007. With this deployment with KDDI, the number of users with access to ER Search will expand by millions more in a very short time, making it even more compelling for companies and advertisers to participate in the service.

About ViPR

The ViPR technology easily supports user-generated content so that users can take new pictures of objects, images, videos or even locations and tag them with links and content to expand the database. That content will then show up in the results returned to other users who take similar pictures, thus creating a robust world-wide visual database for communities to develop and access. (A video demonstration of Evolution Robotics’ visual search technology running on Apple’s iPhone can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/user/EvolutionRobotics)

ER Search’s versatility rests in Evolution Robotics’ breakthrough ViPR visual recognition technology. ViPR is able to learn new objects and images on the fly (such as the cover art on a music CD), without the need for any special encoding such as barcodes or watermarks. Just as significant, ViPR performs well on low cost components such as the cameras used on most mobile phones today, even when lighting and other visual conditions are poor.

For the music search application alone, Bandai Networks has over 150,000 music CD covers already indexed in their database. Other mobile marketing and mobile commerce applications include providing content and links for print ads, book covers, DVDs, product packaging, movie posters, retail displays, business signs, etc. Even animation, streaming video or images from live TV can be supported.

[Evolution via Mobile Whack]

A BBC News crew went to Germany to try ’s Baggers, the robotized, fully automated restaurant in which there’s not a single waiter in sight and plates float over your head on steel rails to reach your seat, Futurama-style. And apparently, they loved it.

As we already knew, everything in this restaurant in Nuremberg is completely automated, from the ordering process—using a touchscreen which also allows you to surf the web or email while waiting for our order—to the delivery of the food to your color-coded seat. Only the cooking is manual, which is done by some Elzar apprentices, 70% human-30% iron chefs, somewhere in the building.

The creator of the technology behind ’s Baggers thinks there’s a big market for these kinds of restaurant, which are convenient, fun, and save costs to the owners and the clients. The BBC seems to agree. Their verdict: fun, delicious, fast, and no tips. Makes a good case to eradicate that awful, ingrate job of waitressing all throughout the planet. Sad, I know. But don’t despair, my friends: there’s always blogging.

Go to the BBC page to get their full impressions. ['s Baggers via BBC News]

Boston Dynamics keeps working on their BigDog quadruped robot, which will probably grow to be the future AT-AT of the Pentagon. Its evolution since the last time we saw it is nothing sort of mindblowing, and a bit spooky.

It looks like an actual biological quadruped. Seeing it climb through rubble, snow, jumping over obstacles like a wild goat, and saving a near-fall on iced ground at the last second (fast forward to the middle of the video) defies belief. It feels so “animal” that I almost feel bad when they hit it to demonstrate how it regains balance on its own.

The new version of the robot can now carry 340 pounds, which is almost triple the previous weight. It looks to me that that $10 million funding they got from Darpa has been put to good use. [IEEE]