This is what KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is doing: their incoming check-in system will allow passengers to choose seat mates based on their Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, so he or she would be someone who shares your interests.
That’s not a bad idea…
Continue reading… “Would you like to choose your flight seat mate using Facebook?”
3D art bringing it from below.
Street painting, also commonly known as pavement art, chalk art, sidewalk art, is the performance art of rendering artistic designs on pavement such as streets, sidewalks, and town squares with impermanent and semi-permanent materials. Street painting has been recorded throughout Europe since the 16th century.
Here is another great collection of the art form…
Continue reading… “More amazing 3d sidewalk art”
There’s the potential for the next generation of touchscreen LCD vending machines to be an all out assault on our senses. So here’s hoping more companies will take this subtly animated approach instead of horrifying advertisements.
This concept machine, created by Sanden, Okaya Electronics, and Intel, uses a monstrous 65 inch transparent HD display that still lets shoppers see the actual products being sold. And instead of just playing full screen commercials with music blaring, a series of simple silhouetted animations and menus are used to entice shoppers to give up their pocket change…
Continue reading… “Vending machine of the future”
Optical image of flexible and stretchable thin film transistor array covering a baseball shows
the mechanical robustness of this backplane material for future plastic electronic devices.
Imprinting electronic circuitry on backplanes that are both flexible and stretchable promises to revolutionize a number of industries and make “smart devices” nearly ubiquitous. Among the applications that have been envisioned are electronic pads that could be folded away like paper, coatings that could monitor surfaces for cracks and other structural failures, medical bandages that could treat infections and food packaging that could detect spoilage. From solar cells to pacemakers to clothing, the list of smart applications for so-called “plastic electronics” is both flexible and stretchable. First, however, suitable backplanes must be mass-produced in a cost-effective way…
Continue reading… “Artificial Electronic Skin Device Capable of Detecting and Responding to Touch”
Let’s play a quick game of word association. I say, “YouTube,” you say the first thing that pops in your head. Did the phrase “educational resource” come to mind? I didn’t think so, and therein lies a perception problem that often gets the video streaming site banned from schools.
To tackle this setback, the Google-owned property has created a safe-for-classroom network setting called YouTube Schools that restricts student access to just the content available on YouTube EDU. The subdomain contains hundreds of thousands of educational videos from YouTube’s more than 600 child-approved partners, including Smithsonian, TED and esteemed universities…
Continue reading… “YouTube makes its site classroom ready”
Captured light ‘scattering’ below the surfaces of solid objects.
MIT researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion exposures per second. That’s fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of a burst of light traveling the length of a one-liter bottle, bouncing off the cap and reflecting back to the bottle’s bottom…
Continue reading… “The trillion-frame-per-second video”
Oh the things you will see with these glasses.
Video glasses are a pretty dorky vision of the future. I mean, put on a pair of blockers so you can watch video by yourself? A little bit anti-social, are we? Lumus wants to help a little bit by making glasses which let you watch video and see through the lens too…
Continue reading… “These video glasses will let you walk and watch TV at the same time”
Local geography CAN be interesting.
Atlas Obscura had a great success earlier this year with Obscura Day, a project to get people all over involved in their local geography and interesting places. It was so successful that they are now forming The Obscura Society, a club in which people not only explore places, but share their experiences with others.
Born of the success of Obscura Day, this real-world exploration arm of Atlas Obscura will be seeking out secret histories, unusual access, and opportunities to explore strange and overlooked places hidden all around us, all year round – and we could not be more excited about it…
Learning with a zing-zang-zoom!
Remember the Matrix where all you need to do to learn kung fu is to get it uploaded to your brain? Well, that may soon be coming to real life:
New research published today in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It’s the kind of thing seen in Hollywood’s “Matrix” franchise…
Up, up and away with a quadrotor.
A clever idea, first reported by Gareth a couple years ago: Architects are trying to figure out how touse quadrotors to haul and place individual bricks. The above link is in French; here’s a Google translation…
Continue reading… “Using Quadrotors to assemble a building”
This cube made of gears is a great example of some of the really brilliant stuff coming out of the 3D printing scene; it’s a phenomenon on Thingiverse, where the method for turning any solid shape into a geared wonderment has been generalized into a formula that can be applied to your 3D model-file.
Continue reading… “Gear cube design”
When ‘boom’ is an understatement.
I know the latest trend in audio is to put speakers into clothing wherever possible, but this backpack speaker unit, complete with 8-inch woofer, seems like overkill. For one thing, it can’t be good for the ears of whoever wears the thing. Then there’s the fact that no one will want to be anywhere near you when this thing kicks off…
Continue reading… “Bring the booming system with you”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.