Design

MIT to turn sky into dancing-umbrella light show

Forget the Umbrellas of Cherbourg. MIT presents the Umbrellas of Cambridge.

This Sunday evening, participants in a large-scale interactive performance will hoist programmable umbrellas outfitted with LED lights skyward in a shimmering spectacle of red, green, and blue.

The project, called "UP: The Umbrella Project," is part of a collaboration between MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Connecticut-based Pilobolus modern-dance company.

Using hand controllers designed by researchers at CSAIL's Distributed Robotics Lab, hundreds of MIT students, faculty, and staff will be able to independently change the color of their umbrellas, thus spontaneously choreographing a kind of umbrella dance that will then be projected onto a giant screen so everyone can see the aggregate moving image. … Read more

'Pinterest stress' not just for moms?

I don't know exactly when it happened, but I can now say for sure that I live in a Pinterest household. The influence of the digital pinboard has infiltrated numerous aspects of life in the Mack family palace, from our wardrobe to nightly dinners to the bling I've been instructed to install on the door of the oven those dinners are cooked in.

That's right, I'm going to bling out my oven because my wife told me to, because it looked cool to her in a thumbnail on a punnily named social network.

This is not quite the future the Jetsons promised us, but we're living it.

So I was very interested to read the findings of a recent survey about what stresses out American moms. The online survey of more than 7,000 women in the U.S. was conducted by Insight Express/NBC News for TodayMoms.com and revealed one particularly fascinating nugget:

Measuring up to all the cool crafts they see on Pinterest causes stress for 42 percent of moms.

… Read more

Desktop Othermill carves out circuit boards, jewelry

What if you could easily add custom-designed circuits to DIY projects like 3D-printed stuff? Here's a small mill that can churn them out with precision and power.

Othermill is a Kickstarter project that has quickly exceeded its fundraising goal. It's designed to be a portable, desktop three-axis mill that can produce printed circuit boards, jewelry, molds, and other objects.

Conceived by the wizards at San Francisco-based R&D shop Otherfab/Otherlab, known for its crazy inflatable robots, Othermill works with CAD software to cut material in three dimensions. Unlike 3D printing, it cuts material away instead of adding it. … Read more

Giant NES controller table gets the steampunk treatment

There's something about the NES controller that lends itself to supersizing in coffee table form. We've seen more than a few -- the original (as far as we can tell); Baron von Brunk's working Lego version; and a working wooden version for a touch of class.

It's that last one that concerns us today, since its creator -- Charles Lushear, aka Bohemian Workbench -- has just come out with a brand new "steampunk" version, made from salvaged antique parts and wood. … Read more

3D-printed designer shoe contains working iPhone

If you don't have a bag, pocket, or anywhere to stow that iPhone, how about kicking it around on your heels?

The iPhone Mashup Shoe was created by Alan Nguyen of Freedom of Creation, a 3D-printing house in Amsterdam.

The shoe was designed around iPhone cases from 3D-printed accessories site FreshFiber. You can see the cases in the base of the heel. … Read more

Relive Earth's wild history of meteor strikes

Aside from death and taxes, there's another thing certain in life: meteors. To get a historical perspective on just how many dazzling space rocks have fallen through our skies in recent times, peep at Carlo Zapponi's visual graph called Bolides, which puts meteor strikes in a chronological view.

Inspired by the Greek word bolis (missile), Bolides features data from a range of historical meteor records, ranging from MetBase to London's Natural History Museum catalog of meteorites, and displays the data in a way that makes you want to click around and explore. … Read more

Future-tech fair exposes geeky visions

It's that time of year when student boffins the world over display their final projects, offering tantalizing glimpses into their mad-scientist machinations, and possibly the future.

If inventions out of the California Institute of the Arts -- founded by Walt Disney in the early 1960s and now one of the nation's top art schools -- prove prescient, that future includes a wearable interface that lets dancers control music with the flick of a finger and a virtual studio where you can compose tunes by crouching toward the floor. The school will feature those and more student and faculty innovations Thursday at its Digital Arts and Technology Expo, which this year focuses on future directions in gaming, animation, human computer interaction, digital performance, graphic design, projection mapping, and machine learning. … Read more

$1.55 million Tumbler Batmobile ready to race

The 3,000-mile Gumball 3000 rally turns 15 this year, and there are some pretty impressive cars in the mix.

We have an absolutely clear favorite, though. Saudi Arabian Team Galag, two brothers and second-time Gumball 3000 racers, have built something new to the rally table: a scale model of Batman's Tumbler, built by Florida-based bespoke car builder Parker Brothers Concepts, at a cost of around $1.55 million.

"Every year, the Gumball 3000 plays host to some of the most expensive vehicles in the world," Team Galag said on their Web page. "This year it was decided that we wanted to drive something a little more original. Enter the TG1." … Read more

Levitating bike powers your phone, creates Wi-Fi hot spot

When you pedal a bicycle, the kinetic energy is channeled into propulsion, but what if it could be used in other ways? Architect Michael Strain isn't the first to think of using pedal power to charge your gadgets -- in fact, there are products on the market that already allow you to harness that excess energy -- but his concept bike, has a few other tricks up its suspension.

The bike, called Levitation and designed for the 2013 Hi-Macs Annual Design Contest, looks like a more low-tech Tron Cycle. It features an on-board generator and battery that stores the power collected while cycling. The power can then be used in two ways: charging small gadgets via the USB port on the bike's handlebars, or sending it into your home's power supply via a drain cable to alleviate grid usage. … Read more