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Alabama-based designer Peter Azzouni has a futuristic truck concept called the Atropos that will certainly make a few long-haul truckers feel better: the front seat spreads out flat like a bed. It's got plenty of room to unfurl thanks to the spacious, cylindrical cabin, which also gives the truck a decidedly futuristic appearance, coupled with that heavy, rounded beak it's got.
Azzouni also stresses the important of green design and, if this truck is ever produced, would like to see it take full advantage of hybrid technologies and alternative fuels.
Via Peter Azzouni
That battery you're throwing away may not have enough energy left to power your gadgetry, but it does have enough juice to light up a low-energy LED. That's the driving idea behind South Korean designer Sung Woo Park's conceptual Energy Seed, a stylish street lamp powered entirely by discarded batteries.
Drop a battery into one of the Energy Seed's disposal holes and it'll fall down into a tube. Several batteries can be stacked one on top of the other, daisy-chaining drained batteries into a long-lasting power supply for an LED lamp that will give pedestrians a bit of light on the sidewalk. It's a great way to re-appropriate trash that we'd otherwise consider useless.
Check out the gallery below for more of Sung Woo Park's Energy Seed.
This might look like a regular old fleece sweater, but it's got a bit more technology on board than your average warmth-providing garment. It actually has two LED screens, one on each sleeve, and built in thermometers to tell the temperature. One sleeve gives the temperature in Fahrenheit, the other in Celsius.
I'm sure it'd be useful in loads of situations. You know, like if you want to know how hot or cold it is wherever you are. Or if you've somehow lost the feeling in your skin and want to go outside and then report back inside on what the weather's like without letting people know about your awkward skin paralysis condition. Or, uh, many other situations, I'm sure. Whatever, it's a sweater with LED screens! It's just cool.
Via Generate Design
You remember the floppy disk, I'm sure. A once-useful storage device with a drive built into every computer, it could hold just over 1MB of data, which is basically nothing nowadays. That's why you never see them anymore. But come on, you've got to admit that you have a soft spot in your heart for the resilient little things.
This awesome USB floppy disk makes the lovable little square relevant again. It can be plugged into your USB drive and can then store GBs worth of data rather than MBs, and it even has a built-in stand that flips out so it can stand up next to your computer. And it's just as portable and durable as you remember it. How awesome is this?
Via Core77
It had to happen. Now there's an electric Porsche, made by German Porsche modifier/carmaker RUF Automobile GmbH. The company dropped a 204hp electric motor into a Porsche 911 chassis, powered it with 96 lithium ion batteries from California battery maker Calmotors, and the result? An electric Porsche 911 that sprints from 0 to 60mph in less than 7 seconds with a top speed of 160. Whoa.
Don't expect to carry much luggage along, because the back and front trunks are filled with batteries. Its 180-mile range is not quite up to that of the Tesla Roadster, either, nor is its acceleration. But just look at it! We are filled with auto-lust over this gorgeous machine, hoping it will find its way out of the prototype stage and onto an assembly line, pronto.
You sit at your desk all day, typing away for the man without any encouragement at all. Wouldn't it be nice if you had something that made you want to type faster other than your general fear of getting laid off? Because really, that's not very fun encouragement.
This mouse in a wheel, however, is very fun encouragement. You simply plug it into your USB port, and as you type faster, the mouse runs faster on its wheel. If you stop, it stops, giving you a nice visual of how unproductive you are throughout the day. Of course, if your boss notices this and also notices over time that the mouse is stationary more often than not, you might be just giving him a big signal as to who should be first to go when the hammer falls. But hey, it's cute! Right?
Either Aussie singer/guitarist Josh Pyke shrunk to a tenth his size, or somebody built a scaled-up replica of his Maton acoustic guitar. Indie rocker Pyke takes a ride on the seaworthy mega-guitar in an upcoming music video of his song "Make You Happy," released last Friday. By the way, the guy is a really good guitarist/singer/songwriter.
It looks like it would be pretty hard to actually play a song on this guitar-zilla unless he could get a couple of assistants to stand on the proper frets. But this guy Josh, we'll just call him Captain Pyke, our real guitar hero. That does it — we want a submarine shaped like a saxophone.
YouTube not high-def enough for you? Just synchronize four YouTube videos for quadruple the resolution! If you don't mind those YouTube logos and the transport controls splitting the frame in half, it's not too bad. To play it, go here, and then be sure to click the "play" link at the top of the page, rather than any of the four individual "play" buttons, and you'll see the four videos synced up perfectly. You may need to restart it a time or two for perfect sync.
Super HD? Hardly, but it's some clever web page scripting nonetheless. As for the video itself, well, the visuals are pretty nice, but you might not care for the artist. This could be the new way to Rickroll someone. You've been warned.
Via Mr. Doob
You may remember the Life Bank, a quirky Japanese toy that displayed a digital family getting wealthier the more money you put away. Well, here's the Life Clock, or Jinsei Tokei, and it's little avatar will mimic your life depending on how you use the clock. You can choose between a salaryman, a schoolgirl or a rock star. When your alarm goes off, your character wakes up. When you set the alarm at night, it goes to sleep. Your avatar will also hit the town for shopping, go on dates, head to work and eat at the appropriate times. You may find yourself jealous of how punctual it is — it really is clockwork.
It's simple presentation doesn't look like it should be $55 — and maybe it shouldn't — but you pay more for the novelty. And it's pretty darn tempting.
Japan Trend Shop, via The Red Ferret Journal
The world of anime is once again invading the real world with the debut of the FST (flexible sensor tube). The FST is a controller suit developed by Kyokko Inc. designed to control the Wakamaru robot. Using the FST, a human's movements are mimicked perfectly by the Wakamaru robot, essentially making the Mobile Suit Gundam fiction a present day reality. A live demonstration of the technology is scheduled for the next Robo Japan 2008, but for now you can check out the FST and the Wakamaru in action here.
Via Nikkei
A company recently sent me a DVD called Living Earth. It's a disc full of high-resolution pictures of spectacular nature scenes that you play as a slideshow. The idea is that you'd have it on while throwing a party, presumably to give your guests something to look at other than your crappy living room.
After popping in the DVD and hitting play, I was horrified. Both sides of my widescreen flat-panel TV were completely black, while photos cycled in and out inside a squarish area in the middle. That's right, the disc was made with a (gasp!) 4:3 aspect ratio, with no widescreen (16:9, to those in the know) option. When was this DVD made — 1998?
The real tragedy is that Living Earth is just one example of how technology gets aspect ratio wrong. All. The. Time. Why is it that my browser can resize websites when I change my window size, and my iPhone can resize photos when I turn it 90 degrees, but somehow the tech world gets video aspect ratio wrong again and again? Click Continue for the answer — and the solution.
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Industrial designers Christopher Bauder and Christian Perstl have designed a kinetic façade called FLARE that dynamically controls how much light a building lets in — and how much heat. Architects frequently design their buildings around these principles, but suffer from the fact that buildings are static, and good planning only goes so far. With FLARE, all of the pneumatic-powered, computer-controlled metal flakes covering the building can adapt to seasonal climate changes, and make the building look unique to boot. The best part: the nature of the flakes allow for FLARE to be a made-to-order system, depending on the size and shape of a structure.
Click Continue for an impressive building of the FLARE shifting façade in action.
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When a company buys ad space on a billboard, it wants as many people to see its product as possible. A good billboard for that? The 'Podium' ad wall in Dubai: a 33-story-high LED display that can be seen from a mile away. The LED wall is planned for an upcoming commercial building, and its designers are working on building the wall so that it won't block out all of the light reaching the offices it obscures — important for easing energy for lighting, heating and cooling, and making them feel less like bats in a cave.
Let's just hope they turn it off at night, or there's going to be irritated people for a solid mile.
Gulfnews, via Coolbuzz, via OhGizmo!
Speaking of not being able to use a computer mouse because you don't have working arms, how much would it suck to not have any arms? That's what happened to Karl Merk, a German farmer who had a really unfortunate run in with a combine harvester. But now, he's the world's first recipient of a double arm transplant.
He can do basic tasks with his arms now, like opening doors and turning lights on and off, but as they heal he should get better control over them. It's going to take time, and he's going to have to take medication for the rest of his life ensuring that his body doesn't reject them, but it's still and incredible feat of medicine.
Using a mouse to navigate a computer is certainly convenient, at least it is if you have working arms and hands. For the disabled, however, it's much harder. That's why researchers from the University of Washington have developed a mouse that's controlled via various sounds you can make with your mouth.
So how does it work, exactly? Well, saying "ahh" moves the cursor up and to the right. "Ooo" will send it straight down, while "ohh" sends it down and to the right. To click, make a soft clicking sound. It allows a relatively precise way of controlling the mouse without needing to use your hands at all. And while yes, it might make you sound a little crazy as you control your computer, it's certainly better than not controlling the mouse at all.
Via Physorg
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