Winter’s around the corner, which means ski time for lots of people. And while strapping a GoPro camera to your helmet may be one way to capture your snowy prowesses, there are more dedicated solutions. Like these ski goggles that feature an HD camera directly integrated into them. The goggles themselves are dual-pane, anti-fog with UV protection, while the camera has the following features:
• Records 1080p video at up to 30 frames per second
• Records High Action HD 720p video at 60 frames per second
• Has a 136° full field of view wide angle lens
• Goggles can connect to a television using the RCA cable (included)
• Includes 4 GB SD card for photo and video storage
A rechargeable Lithium battery provides up to 2 hours of operation on a 2 hour charge from a USB connection. Of course they’re not cheap. At $400 you better be doing some crazy stunts for this to be justifiable.
The things that marketing executives come up with sometimes baffles the mind. In the latest case of creativity gone wild, one of Sony’s agencies (or perhaps Sony’s own marketing arm, we’re not sure) has devised a peculiar promotion for the game Uncharted 3. Since the game revolves around a ring, Sony’s put up a website called “Grab The Ring to promote the game and give out prizes, including a $10,000 grand prize. This is how it works: you activate your webcam and extend your arm into a particular zone of the screen, as if holding out your hand to “grab the ring.” You then… hold on to it for as long as you can. The longer you hold it, the more stuff you win, which includes an in-game T-Shirt after 15 seconds up to a mystery weapon after 2 hours. But it’s not just in-game rewards, as each day the person who holds on the longest will win $500. And at the end of the 2 week promotion period, whoever held on the longest gets to take home $10,000. As of this writing, the time to beat is 6:01:36.
Now… here’s a tip, folks. It turns out that you don’t really need bionic muscles. If you read the FAQ, you find out that it’s ok to prop up your arm. As long as you’re sitting in front of that webcam and that it’s actually your own arm (and not a rubber dummy), you can rack up the hours. So go ahead and take a day off work, because $10,000 are up for grabs! The contest ends November 14, 2011.
Let’s face it, when you’re charging your iPhone, you usually just plug it in and flop it down on a table somewhere. But there are those who are inordinately proud of their Jeevus phones, and wish to take any opportunity to put them on display. Made of maple or walnut wood, the BaseStation for iPhone 4 has recessed spaces that will fit the phone, its connector and some length of cable for all to see. It serves no practical purpose of course. It just looks sort of neat.
It’s $52 and can be custom engraved.
Hit the jump for a couple more pictures and links.
Someone points a gun at your face and tells you to empty your pockets. If you’re wearing these babies, you’ve got no problem. Well, you still have the gun-in-face problem, but assuming your assailant can be satisfied with chewing gum wrapper and old receipts and will simply walk away, miffed… you’ve got no problem!
Although you do still have a bit of an issue, which is that as practical as this underwear is, it’s also expensive at $30. Still, could be a good travel accessory for safekeeping passport and cash stash. Comes in 4 colors (blue, black, grey, green) and 4 sizes.
You’re the outdoorsy type and tend to get your electronic gear in places it shouldn’t go: you could just toss it in a Ziplock bag. Or you could get a fancier type of plastic bag to put it in. The BubbleShield is just that, a double-zipper bag with a hook. The hook is there for easy transport, while the pattern at the back is interrupted in the general vicinity of the iPhone’s camera, allowing you to still take shots with it. And while it’s clearly aimed at iPhone owners, this would work with any phone, really. It’s rated at a IPX5 waterproofing specification, which means:
Protected against water jets – Water projected at all angles through a 6.3mm nozzle at a flow rate of 12.5 liters/min at a pressure of 30kN/m2 for 3 minutes from a distance of 3 meters.
So no submersion but decent protection.
However given that it’s $20 for a pack of 5… maybe double that Ziplock bag and call it a day?
Refreshing lines and advancing technology means falling prices, even on normally “premium” items such as Apple’s MacBook Pro. This is an early 2011 model, with a 2.3GHz Core i5 processor which normally would sell for $1,199 but hits the sub-$1k point today, at $999. “Features Thunderbolt port, Gigabit Ethernet, FaceTime HD camera, SDXC card slot, Aluminum unibody and more.”
The SNAP! case comes from company Bitplay, which we talked about a few days ago in the context of a wacky shootout lamp. This particular product doesn’t do much more than make your iPhone look a lot like an actual camera, but in our eyes does it really well. There’s a dedicated shutter button and of course you can keep your device’s full functionality. It should work with the iPhone 4 and 4S though pricing or availability information have not been released yet.
You should be able to see a prototype at Tokyo Designer’s Week event if you happen to be in Japan this week.
Unmanned aircraft such as surveillance drones are really nothing compared to the stuff the Air Force is working on. Miniaturization marches onwards and gives rise to the sort of little devices you see in the picture.
At the Micro-Aviary at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, researchers rig the walls with super-sensitive motion capture sensors that track a tiny plane or helicopter’s position ”within about a tenth of an inch,” according to researcher Greg Parker. Information from those sensors helps engineers develop “flapping-wing flight” drones — “very, very small flapping-wing vehicles,” in Parker’s phrase.
And how. One of the vehicles on display in the video above, released by the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Pat, is a robot dragonfly. It doesn’t appear to be much more than a circuit board, a super-tiny motor and two insect-like wings
No camera on that “insect” yet. However we can deduct a couple of things from the information that is given to us. The bleeding edge of military research is always and understandably classified. So if we’re being shown something like this little dragonfly in the picture, you can make a safe bet that there’s something far more advanced already in production. What shape this technology would have is pure speculation, but this writer is picturing this: swarms of semi-autonomous insect-sized flying bots with video reconnaissance capabilities, all simultaneously feeding back to a base station. They’d be impossible to fully shoot down and would be indistinguishable from actual insects. Are we there yet? There’s no way to know right now.
So Halloween is over. You know what that means. Santa music’s gonna be blarin’ in malls across America and the pressure is on to spend money and buy gifts. For what it’s worth, the American economy could use a little consumerism at the moment. So here’s a nice and inexpensive present to buy someone. It’s a small RC replica of a Boeing AH-61A Apache helicopter. The remote control however is not your typical radio joystick box but your Android or iOS device. Simply attach the IR dongle (seen in the pic) into your 3.5mm jack, run the app and you’re good to go. The helicopter is gyro assisted so it should level itself out. Better yet, pitch, roll and possibly yaw are all controlled via your device’s own gyro sensor. You’ll just have to use the onscreen controls for elevation. Range and battery life are not discussed, but this is clearly more of a cool toy than a serious RC application so don’t expect to be able to use this from very far for very long.
Related Tags: HD, Outdoors, Video
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