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A Crave shout-out of the Graffiti Research Lab variety

A few months ago we wrote about the Graffiti Research Lab, a set of artists who have created LASER Tag, the hacked projector that can be used to create temporary laser graffiti. The guys at GRL got their start at Eyebeam, an art and technology center in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood that always has some Craveworthy stuff going on (a few months ago, they had a real live Mooninite on display!)

Last night, at Eyebeam's tenth-anniversary benefit party, I had the chance to play around with one of the GRL's laser pointers and tag the side of a … Read more

'Second Life' publisher responds to open letter

Amid a healthy dose of skepticism, Second Life publisher Linden Lab held a town hall meeting Thursday to address some of the concerns raised last week in an open letter complaining about many of the most severe performance issues suffered by users of the popular virtual world.

Among the issues raised in the letter were regular issues with grid stability, inventory loss and build tool problems.

During the town hall meeting, which took place in Second Life, Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka answered questions for more than an hour. Many were unrelated to the specific issues raised in the letter, … Read more

Engineering dean named new HP Labs director

Hewlett-Packard has named Prith Banerjee, dean of the college of engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a founder of two start-ups, as the new director of HP Labs, the computer and printer company said Wednesday.

Banerjee, 46, will take over August 1, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company said. Dick Lampman, the earlier director, announced in 2006 that he'd retire this year.

Banerjee has spent 23 years as a research scientist, professor and administrator in the domain of electrical engineering and computer science. His interest has been in running computing tasks in parallel on groups of … Read more

'Second Life' users: Fix it, already

As the virtual world Second Life has grown and grown, with its total number of users heading into the several hundreds of thousands and concurrent users nearing 40,000, it has been going through some very visible growing pains.

Now many of the most visible members of the Second Life community, including land baroness Anshe Chung, as well as many others, are circulating an open letter to the virtual world's publisher, Linden Lab, spelling out their concerns and clamoring for positive action.

Among the problems identified are regular issues with grid stability--that is, that the virtual world's performance … Read more

Microsoft Labs' Deepfish: iPhone for everyone

Microsoft announced Deepfish , a new mobile browsing technology from itslabs group. Deepfish is a small, downloadable application for Windows Smartphone users. The app presents Web content the same way you'd see it on your computer's Web browser. If you've seen the mobile version of Apple's Safari on the upcoming iPhone, then you have an idea of how Deepfish works.

Deepfish is designed like an array of photo thumbnails. To zoom into a section you want to see in more detail, you just select it with a "magnify box" controlled by your phone's directional pad or pointer. If you want to zoom back out, the original version of the page will still be loaded in your phone's memory cache--which should save a considerable amount of time (and data usage).

In our brief hands-on with it today, we noticed a few quirks.… Read more

iPod dock for the laboratory

Who would have thought that the latest design trend for iPod docks would be tubes? And no, we don't mean the Internet(s).

A few months back we wrote of a vacuum tube docking stereo for music players that had been developed in Japan. Now we see that U.K.-based Roth Audio has a similar idea with its "Music Cocoon" system.

The Roth version doesn't have speakers but does sport the same mad-scientist-lab look of the Japanese version and promises superior quality at its price of 400 pounds, or about $768 (which is a bit … Read more

What happens when Web 2.0 goes real-world?

As some of you may know, I host a weekly video feature on our sister blog Crave, where I talk about fun tech-related stuff that's going on in New York City. This week, my video turned out to be rather Webware-related, so I'm posting it here for you as well. In this clip, I go over to Etsy Labs, the new real-world communal space opened by online handmade craft marketplace Etsy. It's a really cool convergence of the online and offline, in a way that kind of made me wonder--will the next iteration of the Web see … Read more

Grab your Visine and prepare to be scanned

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to that club you were thrown out of, they come up with another way to keep you behind the rope.

Touted as a "non-invasive" approach to checking ID, iris scanners rely on pattern recognition of the image reflected from the iris's convex cornea--which, when converted into a digital template, will give you away every time.

The problem with conventional iris scanners is that they require the subject to hold still and submit. Now, a new-fangled unit produced by Sarnoff Labs in New Jersey can reportedly identify up … Read more

A Pottery Barn for your kitchen

The MIT Media Lab is ground zero for all things awesome, and Leonardo Bonanni's DishMaker is no exception.

Bonanni's dishwasher-sized machine uses recyclable discs of acrylic to create plates, bowls, and cups right in your home. Once you're done with the plates, you put them back into the DishMaker, where they're recycled and remolded into the dishware of your choice.

The DishMaker does not clean your dishes just yet, but Bonanni's working on it for a next-gen prototype.

According to his Web site, the DishMaker is the same size and consumes the same amount of … Read more