Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment just announced a couple of new educational Wii titles aimed directly at kids, Sesame Street: Elmo’s A-to-Zoo Adventure and Sesame Street: Cookie’s Counting Carnival, and each game comes with a corresponding Wiimote cover designed to look like Elmo and Cookie Monster. Besides cranking the Wii’s cuteness factor all the way to 11, the covers also provide extra grip for little hands, and simplify the Wiimote’s button layout by masking unnecessary controls. The games will also be available for the DS and PC sometime in the Fall, and like most videogames targeted at kids, they’ll probably run a bit cheaper than the Wii’s more popular titles.
If you have a phone with an unlimited data plan, it can be frustrating when the carrier won’t allow you to use your phone as a modem. After all, if you’re paying for unlimited data, why shouldn’t you be able to use it as you please? One company has designed a very special USB cable that claims to let you do just that.
Pretec’s new H220 Intellicable cable has a built-in flash drive, which contains a special suite of software. This allows your computer to trick the phone into thinking it’s a USB modem. Thus, free internet for your laptop. The software takes care of all the necessary communication handshakes in roughly 10 seconds, with nothing actually being installed on your computer. It’s supposed to work with most phones that use either mini-USB or micro-USB. We’re not sure when this will be available, or for how much, but it sounds like it would be worth looking into.
Got kids? Got kids who like playing with your iPhone or iPod Touch? Well check out this brilliant children’s book, or PhoneBook, created by Japan’s MOBILE ART LAB. It’s a picture book that features a slot for your iPhone/iPod Touch that leaves just the display visible in the middle of each page, allowing your child to interact with the accompanying (and free) app that enhances the adventures of POPO and MOMO with interactive elements, animations and music.
The book was officially released in Japan on May 25th, and is available from Amazon for about $32 (￥2,980). Of course since the app is free you probably don’t actually need to buy the book, but the whole experience seems just a bit less charming without it.
According to their press release, Seiko was the first company to introduce a watch with a low-power e-ink display way back in 2005. But the display on that original model only had a few hundred “pre-positioned segments” which resulted in a screen that worked and looked a lot like traditional LCD-based segmented displays. But the company’s ‘Future Now’ project has developed a way to fit the active matrix EPD, or Electrophoretic Display, technology used in today’s ebook readers into something as small as a watch, giving you a display with 80,000 pixels that are each capable of displaying 4 shades of gray. That equates to a resolution of about 300 dpi and the ability to do a certain level of anti-aliasing. So like an ebook reader, it should be able to display just about anything, but Seiko’s new technology actually uses just 1/100 the power of current e-ink technologies.
Thankfully the watch pictured here is just a prototype designed to demonstrate the new technology, and a “modified version” will be available for sale sometime in the Fall of this year, though specific availability and pricing information has yet to be announced.
Even though USB 3.0 is starting to appear on high end PCs and notebooks, the rest of us are still stuck with slow and old USB 2.0. There’s no point in investing in something that you couldn’t even take advantage of for now. This is especially the case with USB 3.0 flash drives which get a massive boost in performance, but they come at a jaw-dropping price premium. So, there’s still a market for USB 2.0 flash drives even if the room improvement is small.
Corsair’s latest Flash Voyager GTR flash drive – backed by a generous ten-year warranty – comes in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB. What makes them special isn’t the sequential read or write speed (which is already bottlenecked by USB 2.0), but the small file write. This is noteworthy since transfer rate tends to drop as file sizes get smaller. The Flash Voyager GTR is able to maintain a respectable 21MB/s during 2MB write test, twice the speed of other drives. The large file tests are equally impressive. All in all, it makes sense to check out write performance as most companies primarily focus on read.
It started out as a slick, minimalist concept design by Vadim Kibardin, but according to BLTD, the Sputnik Watch is actually available for pre-order for a mere $40 by contacting Kibardindesign directly at info[at]kibardindesign.com.
The watch features a simple housing made of ABS plastic, which means it could be available in a wide variety of colors, and uses an inverted LCD display to complete the overall clean look of the timepiece. Functionality includes the time, date, alarm and a chronograph, basic watch stuff, a couple of buttons on the side for adjusting settings and changing modes, and an electroluminescent backlight. From the looks of it the strap appears to run right through the watch too, so you should be able to swap in any material you’d like.
While you don’t get quite the same level of tactile feedback as you do with a potter’s wheel and clay, the L’Artisan Electronique installation, created by Belgian-based design firm Unfold, allows you to go through the pottery making process without all the mess and misadventures provided by a spinning wheel and a lump of clay. A user is able to manipulate a virtual wireframe pot by simply moving their hands in the air, while their motions are captured and translated using a combination of a video camera and a green laser. Once their creation is complete, the results can be saved and sent to a modified RepRap 3D printer that uses clay instead of plastic to ‘print out’ a real version of their virtual pottery.
Convinced that someone’s stealing your mail? Using your pool while you’re at work? Or maybe the dog’s been raiding the fridge while you’re away. Whatever the case, you won’t be able to confront the culprit without catching them in the act, so I suggest filling your home with these compact wireless cameras from Panasonic. The BL-C230A provides a constant 640×480 H.264 full motion video stream which can be monitored from a browser, anywhere in the world, using a personalized secure address that Panasonic provides for free. The website interface also allows you to remotely pan and tilt the lens, or zoom the image (digitally) to get a better view when you see shenanigans going down.
But even the paranoid have to sleep and can’t monitor a live video feed 24/7, so the BL-C230A includes built-in body heat, motion and sound sensors that will keep an eye out for suspicious activities for you, and can automatically trigger the included recording software to capture the event. Unfortunately again peace of mind comes at a premium, and this camera will set you back $299.25. So I’d recommend buying two and pointing them at each other, so if one of them gets stolen, you’ll know about it!
You might expect to find this full-sized ‘model’ of the Hubble telescope down in Texas, where everything is bigger, but it was actually created by an Australian artist named Peter Hennessey. Looking at his website, Peter is no stranger to ‘sculpting’ and recreating NASA’s handiwork, and interestingly enough, according to designboom, this creation known as ‘My Hubble’ (The Universe Turned In On Itself) was created without the use of 3D modeling software. Instead, the artist used 7 photos of Hubble and Adobe Illustrator to create all the parts which were laser cut from plywood and steel, and from start to finish the whole process took about 3 months.
‘My Hubble’ (The Universe Turned In On Itself) is currently on display at the 17th annual Biennale of Sydney contemporary visual arts event, which runs from May 12 until August 1 this year.
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