Month: October 2013

Companies Reading Your Mind

mind_reading
Companies Will Start Reading Your Mind To Figure Out How Much You’re Willing To Pay
In the future, store prices may be based on your brain waves. And unfortunately, your brain waves can’t lie.

Aeromobil 2.5


Aeromobil Roadable aircraft 2.5
Stefan Klein from Slovak Republic was developing aeromobile concepts for the past 20 years. His Aeromobil 2.5 concept is a propeller driven lightweight airplane (980 lb or 450 kg), with a 100hp Rotax 912 water cooled engine. This engine is located behind the seats, with the drive shafts leading to the propeller on the rear side, and also providing power to the front wheels. It utilizes steel tube frame with a carbon fiber composite shell. The aircraft can fly in excess of 200kmh (124mph), with a flying range of +700km (430 miles). It should also be noted that the vehicle can be driven around with the regular automobile fuel vs. special aviation fuel.

Skully Helmet


Skully Helmet provides you with an advanced situational awareness system, showing navigation and blind spot data, allowing you to stay focused on the most important part of your ride – the road.
180 DEGREE REAR VIEW CAMERA. GPS MAPPING. SMARTPHONE INTEGRATION

Fitbit Bracelet

Fitbit

Track steps taken, distance traveled, calories burned, stairs climbed and active minutes throughout the day. At night, track your sleep and wake up silently with a vibrating alarm.

Trunk for Your Bike

bike-bag

Reinventing the (Hubless) Wheel: ‘Transport’ Is a Trunk for Your Bike, by David Hotard, Matthew Campbell & Edwin Collier
“Transport” is a commuter bike design project sponsored by SRAM. Although panniers and saddle bags are on the market to make commuting easier, we found that many cyclists prefer to ride with a traditional backpack. This doesn’t mean that a backpack is comfortable; it’s just more practical than the panniers that clip to a rack. We discovered that many commuters didn’t want a bag that felt like a dedicated commuting bag but rather a bag that would work in any scenario. We started to look at what we do with bags when we’re traveling by car, plane, train, and other means and realized that there is almost always a compartment for them. We realized that what commuters wanted was that compartment… on their bike. Research on futuristic bike concepts inspired us to use the negative space of the much-debated hubless wheel for our trunk. The result shows that a trunk in the wheel could easily accommodate various backpacks and might well be very feasible solution.

Magzip = Magnetic Zipper

1handZIPPER
onehand

Under Armour has a one handed zipper solution. Starting this November, its clothing will include the Magzip, an ingenious zipper that magnetically clasps automatically and still provides just enough leverage for you to zip up one-handed if you need to…

Tactile 3D Touchscreen

Disney Research shows off a process it calls “rendering 3D tactile features on touch surfaces.” For the project, the researchers used an electrovibration-based display and a new algorithm developed in-house to allow the human hand to feel the textures of objects as presented on the screen.

See also: Technostalgia: 20 Misty Memories of Personal Computing

The algorithm maps the frictional forces between the screen and the user’s finger to the surface contours of the virtual 3D image presented on the touchscreen. This dynamic allows the system to adjust to various virtual surface sensations on the fly, rather than offering canned sensations as some tactile touchscreen feedback experiments have demonstrated in the past.

This tactile touch system works on everything from map topographies, animals and any number of 3D-rendered objects.

Top 100 Global Innovators

top100

This proprietary program recognizes the 100 most innovative companies in the world according to a series of patent-related metrics that get to the essence of what it means to be truly innovative.

Smartphone controlled Sphero 2.0

Sphero
Available for $129 from Amazon.ca, the second generation of the company’s game offers subtantial improvements over the first Sphero. It’s faster and more nimble; the dual LED setup can create thousands of light combinations; its Bluetooth sensor is more accurate, its motor quieter and its battery longer-lasting. More importantly, Orbotix has released dozens of self-contained games, many using augmented reality, to add some visual fantasy to what could otherwise be misconstrued as a remote-controlled Hot Wheel car without the stripes and logos. Controllable via Android and iOS (it’s also compatible with iPod touch), and easily paired over Bluetooth.

BOX

Box.

Box explores the synthesis of real and digital space through projection-mapping onto moving surfaces. The short film documents a live performance, captured entirely in camera.