If you're grown tired of belonging to the cult of the white earbuds, there are plenty of options on the market that provide better sound, improved comfort, and more style. But if you really want your headphones to make you stand out from the crowd, nothing will do it better than some truly strange earphones. From cutesy to scary to flat-out over-the-top, you'll find something unusual in the roundup below.
(Credit:
Impress)
Hard to believe that before Apple made multitouch cool, the most we ever "touched" our PC was touch typing. Now, here's Photoelastic Touch, a more tactile form of interaction that enters into "Minority Report" realm (still one of the coolest future tech shows) by not even requiring users to touch the screen.
Japanese researchers led by Hideki Koike at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo used a face mask comprising see-through gel as a haptic interface, allowing users to press, pinch, or touch the transparent mold to control the face on the LCD. In this case, the actions prompted a furrowed eye brow or eye movement.
Koike says one application of the technology could involve building a 3D model of the brain from the material to give budding surgeons feedback as they "operate" on it. The researchers showed off the technology at Digital Content Expo 2009 in Tokyo.
Of course, there's nothing like watching all this in action. So catch the video below
(Source: Crave Asia via Impress)
Attack of the killer blob?
(Credit: Tri-Star Pictures Warner Brothers, Sony Pictures Entertainment)Say what? This time, the innovative Japanese have dreamed up an invention that's just too weird for words. New Scientist describes it as a chemical gel that can walk like an inchworm. If you watch the video below, it rather resembles an orange peel doing a baby moonwalk a la Michael Jackson across the screen.
Whatever it is, the roboticists at Tokyo's Waseda University say this morphable gel is just the start of what could one day form the components of a future robot. If that wears the face of Robert Patrick's Terminator T-1000 killer shape-shifter, be afraid, be very afraid. In the meantime, this remains a harmless blob, albeit a Flubber-like gel capable of independent motion, changing colors and performing calculations.
(Source: Crave Asia)
Need an MP3 player that can remotely trigger the sound of a spotted hyena mating call? We've got you covered.
(Credit: FOXPRO)With the iPod's stranglehold on the MP3 player market, one of the only ways to get a new product noticed is to create something very specialized, or just plain bizarre.
These freaks of the industry come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them dance, some of them swim, and some of them involve shoving a spike through Mickey Mouse's head. We're not talking pie-in-the-sky product concepts, here--only real MP3 players made the list.
Click through to see a slide show of our top 10 misfit MP3 players.
(Credit:
NEC)
Someone must have spiked the Calpico vending machines near NEC's R&D labs in Tokyo.
The company made a legitimate splash at Macworld with a giant curved-screen display, but then creativity began giving way to surreality a few days later with its liquid-powered "Flask" phone. Now things are getting almost Dali-eseque with an NEC concept gadget called the "Dew Life Recording Interface."
Apparently this dangling chrome sphere is meant to hang around the neck and visually record every moment of its wearer's life, according to Dvice, kind of like a portable video Twitter. But no one really knows, really, as it's still in the gestational process. And the way things are going at NEC, the final version could be anyone's guess.
Ohhhh...
(Credit: Charles & Marie)There are a lot of things that have racked up frequent flier miles on Crave. Oddly shaped USB drives, awe-inducing Guitar Hero videos, and Swarovsky-covered crap are all par for the course on the average day.
As far as I know, though, this is the first pop-up book we've seen that is also a fully operational lamp. And that's worth blogging about.
When opened, the Book of Lights creates an LED-powered pop-up lamp.
Available in traditional lampshade and Parisian streetlamp versions, it's available for preorder for $95 on Charles & Marie.
The big, linen-bound book is available only in hardcover. It's a quick read, because it contains no words. But if it did have words in it, it would be its own reading light.
...snap.
(Credit: Charles & Marie)There is no audiobook version or paperback version of the Book of Lights, but you can create your own Book of Lights audiobook by recording yourself reading this sentence: "I am a pop-up lamp."
[Via Geekologie.]
Maybe you'll fly inside a saucer someday.
(Credit: CleanEra, Delft University)The grand Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus a380 may usher in an era of more fuel-efficient air travel, but their bird-shaped designs could look downright primitive later in the century.
Dutch aerospace engineers are imagining aircraft that look less like today's big-nosed winged planes, which haven't changed much in shape since the 1950s, and more like flying saucers. So maybe you can rest assured that those UFOs you spotted aren't signs of spying aliens, but instead are just your great-great-great-grandchildren traveling home for the holidays from a future when both saucer planes and time travel exist. The design comes from the CleanEra project at the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. CleanEra stands for Cost-effective Low Emissions And Noise Efficient Regional Aircraft.
The project is geared to meet European goals to design quiet, lightweight, post-2025 passenger fleets that halve the globe-warming, air-polluting carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide spewed by today's planes. While radically re-imagining the architecture of aircraft with saucer shapes or even bringing back propellers, CleanEra's plans are also putting biofuels and hydrogen on the table.
By contrast, the new Boeing 787 already looks retro.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)Airplanes emit up to 3 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, an amount that could double by the middle of the century as more jet-setters take to the skies, according to the International Governmental Panel on Climate Change. But the airline industry has a long journey ahead to make air travel cleaner and greener.
(via LiveScience and Treehugger)- prev
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