Entries Tagged 'cool' ↓

Great idea, or greatest idea? [Flickr via Neatorama]

RFID tags are everywhere these days, from your passport to your anti-theft devices, but now you can use them for your own good or evil projects with this easy-to-use kit.

The TikiTag RFID Tag Programming Kit is a simple kit that includes a USB RFID reader and a bunch of RFID stickers. You can program each sticker to trigger any number of actions on your computer, allowing you to do things like swipe your phone over the reader to bring up your address book or your iPod to open iTunes. Really, it’s up to you to come up with the most creative ways to use this thing. [ThinkGeek]

[NeoProj] (only worked in safari for me)

Like the Platzhalter bookshelf I discussed yesterday, the REK features an ingenious design that is both visually interesting and practical for those who accumulate a lot of books.

Instead of splitting down the middle like the Platzhalter, the REK expands and collapses like an accordion to eliminate negative space on the shelf. As you book collection grows, the shelves can be pulled apart in a configuration of your choosing. To be honest, I love the design—but if you have ever tried to move even a small bookshelf you know that trying to alter something this large when it is laden with books would probably be more trouble that it is worth. [Dezeen]

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]

Stanford artificial intelligence researchers have developed software that makes it easy to place a photo on the wall so realistically that it looks like it was there from the beginning. The photo is not pasted on top of the existing video, but embedded in it.

It works for videos as well – you can play a video on a wall inside your video. The technology can cheaply do some of the tricks normally performed by expensive commercial editing systems.

Can you imagine how much fun we are going to have with this? I can’t wait! More information at ZunaVision but first watch the demo video:

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“Wow!” was basically my reaction to this video of the Fly Stick levitating toy in action, followed by the realization that this is about as near as you’ll ever get to really playing with magic (or the Force, my inner geek reminded me). Of course the forces it uses are all very real: it’s a mini battery-powered Van der Graaf generator, and it uses electrostatic repulsion to keep some 3D mylar shapes aloft. So you don’t need to utter “wingardium leviosa!” or indeed “use the force!” to make it work, but that’s not going to stop hundreds of delighted users from doing so, now is it? Out now for $27. [ThinkGeek via OhGizmo]

While I was checking out News YCombinator website (a good source of fresh news, by the way), I came across a rather plain page (full specifications as PDF file)

Drawing talent for free

When I was a kid I liked to draw (mostly comics), but I was never very talented. But if I had had software like ILoveSketch then, who knows? Maybe that little passion would have grown and ultimately led to a full time job.

Seok-Hyung Bae, Ravin Balakrishnan and Karan Singh, three students of University of Toronto-Canada (Department of Computer Science), bring a new way to draw 3D curves models.

This concept, named ILoveSketch, will be presented on ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology 2008 (Monterey, CA, USA, October 19-22, 2008). In their words:

The system coherently integrates existing techniques of sketch-based interaction with a number of novel and enhanced features. Novel contributions of the system include automatic view rotation to improve curve sketchability, an axis widget for sketch surface selection, and implicitly inferred changes between sketching techniques. We also improve on a number of existing ideas such as a virtual sketchbook, simplified 2D and 3D view navigation, multi-stroke NURBS curve creation, and a cohesive gesture vocabulary.

After watching their video presentation I was sold (even if I am just a lousy amateur). The software is quite intuitive and it seems it does things that haven’t been done before. For hardware they use a Wacom tablet system.

Every product needs a design

Professional product designers will love this new way of working (a professional designer evaluated the system and shows the potential of their system for deployment within a real design process). I think this could be another startup idea ready to go in the wild. Because almost every new product needs to be designed first, the market for such system is already there. Enjoy the video!

ILoveSketch from Seok-Hyung Bae on Vimeo.

Tilt-shift lenses sit off-center of the film (or sensor) plane of your camera to produce photos with extremely limited depth of field, giving the effect of a macro shot of a tiny scene. When the effect is matched with the surreal speed boost of many stills strung together into a time-lapse movie (here by Keith Loutit), we get the other-worldly privilege of seeing real Australian beach goers as an elaborate Playmobil scape. Or Sydney Harbor in a bath tub…

The folks at Bent Image Lab also used a similar effect in parts of the video for Thom Yorke’s “Harrowdown Hill”:

And there’s even more in this recent Metafilter roundup. Can’t get enough of this right now. [Keith Loutit on Vimeo via Kottke, Metafilter, Bent Image Lab]