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Tag Archives: Concept

Smart Apron Automatically Alerts the Gang When the Grub’s Ready

By Hazel Chua on 11/06/12 • 1 Comment

Smart Apron

My friends and I have this thing where we take turns hosting dinners at our houses. I think most of us can relate that the most annoying thing is when someone keeps popping into the kitchen to ask if dinner’s ready because they’re starving. Something that can help along these lines is the Smart Apron.

It’s basically an apron that lets people know when you’ve started cooking and when you’re already finished, as signaled by when you put the apron and when you take it off. The Smart Apron makes use of wireless XBee radios hooked to Lilypad Arduinos to alert diners on the status of dinner (or lunch) by sending notifications to smartphones, tablets, or desktops that are following the cook’s progress.

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‘Bye Bye Laundry’ Hangers Get Rid of the Stink on Your Clothes

By Hazel Chua on 10/16/12 • Leave a comment!

Odor-cleansing hangers

Too lazy to do your laundry? Then here’s a bit of good news for you: One day you might not have to do it every day–that is, if British designer Lisa Marie Bengtsson’s Bye Bye Laundry hanger concept catches on. These hangers are made up of a loop that’s attached to a dome encasing oxygen-processed activated charcoal. Instead of washing your clothes, all you’ll have to do is hang them on the loop and let the charcoal do its thing.

These hangers aren’t available commercially yet, and we’re not sure if they ever will be. And while they promise to get rid of the stench on your clothes, they won’t remove stains or bacteria, so you’ll eventually have to wash your clothes after a few wears. But that’s better than having to throw them in the wash after every use, right?

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Smart Bra Monitors Your Mammaries for Signs of the Big C

By Hazel Chua on 10/16/12 • Leave a comment!

Smart Bra

The earlier you catch it, the better your chances of treating it and living a longer life. I’m talking about the Big C. Every year, over 50,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer–and a number of them will end up succumbing to the disease, depending on what stage their cancer is and on their overall health.

This is why I think the Breast Tissue Screening Bra is such a wonderful project! It’s a smart bra that’s equipped with sensors that can measure small temperature changes as they occur. The temperature spikes could mean nothing, but they could be caused by the growth of blood vessels which signal the growth of tumors. The sensors will take note of the chronology of cell cycles and use a pattern recognition system combined with statistical analysis software to pinpoint tumors even before mammograms can detect them.

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BendDesk is a Workstation and Multitouch Computer in One

By Hazel Chua on 10/10/12 • Leave a comment!

BendDesk

Imagine a time when your computer is embedded right into your workstation. You don’t have to think too much because Malte Weiss, Simon Voelker, Jan Borchers from the Media Computing Group and Christine Sutter from the Department of Work and Cognitive Psychology of the RWTH Aachen University in Germany came up with a working prototype that puts two and two together called the BendDesk.

The BendDesk is basically a working prototype of a desk that’s got a huge, multi-touch computer built right into it. The horizontal and vertical surfaces are connected, so users can interact and do their work on both screens seamlessly.

Check out a video of the BendDesk prototype at work after the jump.

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The Hop! Is A Suitcase That Follows You Around

By David Ponce on 10/10/12 • 1 Comment

The Hop! is pretty cool. It’s a compressed air-powered piece of luggage that has a set of caterpillar tracks, and is able to follow you around the airport. It locks onto your cellphone signal and triangulates its position and then attempts to remain at a fixed distance from you. If it fails at this and “gets lost”, the suitcase locks itself down and your phone vibrates to alert you. It’s called The Hop! because it’s supposed to remind you of a bellhop.

We can foresee a couple of problems with this, not the least of which is the presence of electronics that could intrigue the very competent TSA agents. And the fact that you won’t really be able to say that your luggage was “with you” at all times. And also, well, it’s not a product you can purchase at the moment. It’s a concept and one working prototype, but there’s no other info.

Hit the jump for a video of the herky-jerky machine and links.

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Autographer Chronicles Your Day By Taking Snaps Automatically and Randomly

By Hazel Chua on 09/28/12 • Leave a comment!

Autographer

Journals are hard to maintain, and you can’t exactly get a sense of what happened during your day outside of the office with just your planner. People often say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and in this case, you can capture enough snapshots worth several hundred thousand with the Autographer.

It was originally meant for people with dementia so that they could remember their day in pictures. But upon the suggestion of a lot of people, its maker OMG decided to release it for general consumers, too. The concept is simple: the Autographer, which is meant to be worn, will automatically take pictures throughout your day automatically, so you can just put it on and forget all about it–until it’s time to check out the pictures, that is. It’s equipped with five different sensors–a magnetometer, color sensor, infrared detector, accelerometer, and temperature sensor–so that the camera can detect any changes in the environment and take pictures when it does.

The Autographer will launch in the UK sometime this November for £399 (about $649), with succeeding launches planned in the United States and Japan afterward.

VIA [ Dvice ]

PUSHit Toilet Seat Design Makes Sure the Products of Your Number Two Go Down

By Hazel Chua on 09/13/12 • 1 Comment

PUSHit Toilet Seat Design

Nothing sucks more than doing a number two and flushing, only to hear a faint gurgling sound and the dangerous rush of overflowing water a few seconds later. At this point, there are two things you can do: call a plumber to fix your drain or wait for some company  pick up on the PUSHit Toilet Seat design so they can start making these awesome toilets.

I’d recommend the former, although I’m all for the latter, too. Unfortunately, it might take before we’ll actually see working prototypes of the concept. The PUSHit is basically a toilet seat-slash-plunger that makes it easier for people to unclog their toilets because the plunger is already incorporated into the toilet seat itself. So the next time you see your crap coming back up, just put the cover down and push, push, push.

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Next Gen Controllers Could Have Joysticks That Tug At Your Thumbs

By David Ponce on 03/08/12 • Leave a comment!

By David Ponce

Current generation consoles are old. Hella old. It used to be that we’d get new ones on a 5 year cycle, but it looks now like it’s a 7 year cycle we’re on. The next Xbox for example is rumoured to be scheduled for 2013, a little over 7 years since it was launched at the end of 2005. We don’t know what specs it’ll have, but if some folk at the University of Utah have their way, the next generation of controllers could have some added haptic feedback, besides the usual rumbling. The idea is that the thumbsticks could have a “round, red “tactor” that looks like the eraser-head-shaped IBM TrackPoint or pointing stick now found on a number of laptop computer brands.” This extra nubbin would tug at your fingertips in different directions, “simulating the tug of a fishing line, the feeling of ocean waves or the recoil of a gun. If a gamer’s avatar runs into a wall, the tactor under the thumb moves back to mimic impact. Both tactors can move from side to side to mimic ocean waves.”

There doesn’t seem to have been any actual contact between the researchers and anyone at Microsoft or Sony, so there’s no certainty any of this will ever make its way into our hands. But with several months before anything is due, who knows what ideas might trickle into the right offices…

VIA [ Physorg.com ]

Is The Future This See-Through 3D Desktop?

By David Ponce on 02/29/12 • Leave a comment!

By David Ponce

Much as the industry is constantly evolving in terms of faster computers and ever more ingenious and polished operating systems, the very basic interaction between man and machine has remained pretty constant over the last decades. You still have a flat screen projecting flat images at a user sitting in front of it. Sure, some of these images may depict a three dimensional object, but the images themselves are still 2D. A project by Jinha Lee and Cati Boulanger, former intern and researcher respectively, at Microsoft Applied Sciences would change all that. They’re using a special transparent OLED screen from Samsung and a series of sensors, along with custom software that reshuffles the keyboard to the back of the screen. So in a way, you’re now working with your hands inside the virtual desktop and you’re free to manipulate what you see. Sensors detect your motions and even where your head is in relation to the screen so as to maintain proper perspective at all times (think of that scene in the latest Mission: Impossible).

There are no concrete plans to put this into production but as a proof of concept allows us to play and discover potential new interfaces for systems of tomorrow. Watch it in action below.

[ Cargo Collective ] VIA [ Geekosystem ]

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