Click Your Tongue Or Wink To Control This Tiny Computer Earclip. It looks like we’re one step closer to becoming cyborgs with little chips implanted in our skulls. Researchers in Japan are currently developing the “Earclip wearable PC,” a tiny computer that clips onto your ear. It weighs all of 17-grams (0.59 ounces), but manages to house a GPS, compass, gyro-sensor, battery, barometer, speaker and microphone, and its functions are controlled by your facial expressions: the blink of an eye, a raise of an eyebrow, a click of the tongue. As inconspicuous as a hearing aid, it's less dorky-looking than Google Glass. "We have made this with the basic idea that people will wear it in the same way they wear earrings," creator Kazuhiro Taniguchi, an engineer at Hiroshima City University, told AFP in a recent interview. This little ear computer can be connected to an iPhone, iPod, or other mobile device.
The device’s curvy design, which hooks around the outside of the ear, was inspired by traditional Japanese flower arrangements, called Ikebana. How Spritz Redesigned Reading, Letting You Scan 1,000 Words A Minute. When we read, our eyes move across a page or a screen to digest the words. All of that eye movement slows us down, but a new technology called Spritz claims to have figured out a way to turn us into speed-readers. By flashing words onto a single point on a screen, much like watching TV, Spritz says it will double your reading speed.
Spritz Inc. is attempting to redesign reading--and renaming it “spritzing”--by streaming one word at a time at speeds varying between 250 and 1,000 words per minute. Words are centered around an “Optimal Recognition Point" in a special display called the "Redicle. " This method reportedly eliminates the time-consuming need to move your eyes across a page, which Spritz's research suggests improves focus and comprehension. “Atlas Shrugged in a day? “Spritzing is not for everyone,” CEO and co-founder Frank Waldman tells Co.Design. Waldman believes the technology has promise for educational settings, too. Try out Spritz yourself here. Why Wearable Devices Will Never Be As Disruptive As Smartphones. Wearables moved from the buzz idea of 2013 into a tangle of clips, bands, badges, brooches, glasses, earpieces and headsets.
It’s all too easy to be cynical about the products launched at this annual tech frenzy in the Mojave Desert, but here’s a skeptical case between the tech crowd’s boosterism and the casual scoffing. Let’s step back and try to separate the potential from the hyperbole. Nike, Google, Samsung, Intel, Jawbone, Fitbit, and maybe Apple can’t all be wrong--right? As the smartphone boom matures, the tech industry is casting around for the next big growth category, and the one now being worn on many manufacturers’ sleeves are wearables. In a typically breathless statement from CES, one analyst summed up the hype: "The first big story [of CES 2014] is the real inflection point for wearable devices...
It is about these devices moving from niche applications and early adopters into much more mainstream products. " Fitness freaks are not bellwethers for the mass market. Tangible Media Group. Tangible Media Group. The I/O Bulb and the Luminous Room are the two central ideas in a project whose goal is the pervasive transformation of architectural space, so that every surface is rendered capable of displaying and collecting visual information. An I/O Bulb is the conceptual evolution of the ordinary lightbulb: one which not only projects high resolution information but also simultaneously collects live video of the region it’s projecting onto.
A Luminous Room is the structure that results from seeding an enclosed space with a multiplicity of coordinated I/O Bulbs÷enough, specifically, so that every location is treated by at least one I/O Bulb. Tangible Media Group. The Furp (“Future of Urban Planning”) project exists as a first step toward disseminating the work undertaken in the Luminous Room project into the world at large.
Specifically, we are engaged in a collaboration with MIT’s Department of Urban Studies; the first effort has been to develop a customized version of the Urp system (see Luminous Room) for use in a live classroom setting (Professor Eran Ben-Joseph’s 11-304J:Site and Urban Systems Planning). The system has recently made its in-class debut, and is now undergoing intensive week-by-week modifications and refinements in response to what’s being learned about its real-world usability and about requirements for additional, unforeseen features and functionality.
Our short-term goal is to transform Urp from its state as a (successful) proof-of-concept system into a tool convenient and facile enough to permit ongoing and casual use in a classroom context. Urp. We introduce a system for urban planning - called Urp -that integrates functions addressing a broad range of the fields concerns into a single, physically based workbench setting. The I/O Bulb infrastructure on which the application is based allows physical architectural models placed on an ordinary table surface to cast shadows accurate for arbitrary times of day; to throw reflections off glass facade surfaces; to affect a real-time and visually coincident simulation of pedestrian-level windflow; and so on. We then use comparisons among Urp and several earlier I/O Bulb applications as the basis for an understanding of luminous-tangible interactions, which result whenever an interface distributes meaning and functionality between physical objects and visual information projectively coupled to those objects.
Finally, we briefly discuss two issues common to all such systems, offering them as informal thought-tools for the design and analysis of luminous-tangible interfaces. Tangible Media Group. Tangible Media Group. Durrell Bishop Marble Answer Machine. A Clever iPad App Gets Kids Drawing On Paper Again. Drawnimal may be my new favorite iPad app, despite the fact that I’m about 25 years beyond its target demographic.
It’s essentially an alphabet game in which each letter pulls up an associated animal (“A” is for alligator--you know the drill). But naturally, there’s a twist. Players are asked to place the iPad on a blank piece of paper. With a pencil in-hand, they’re instructed to draw a somewhat anonymous shape around the iPad screen (Is that a tail? Are those ears?). And only when the drawing is finished do they see an on-screen portrait to complete the drawn picture, a green cartoon face coupled with a warm, grandfatherly voice that confirms, yes, the “A” really is for alligator.
I asked Drawnimal’s visual designer, Lucas Zanotto, why more apps don’t use the iPad as part of a greater mixed media experience? “Using touch screens as we do today is still seen as something new and advanced,” Zanotto explains. Download it here. Watch This $200 3-D-Printed Robot Crack Your iPhone ⚙ Co. You might trust your phone’s four-digit PIN to keep an Apple picker from cracking your precious smartphone, but if they’ve got $200 to blow on a 3-D-printed machine, the Robotic Reconfigurable Button Basher (R2B2) can bust your phone wide open.
The R2B2 isn’t fancy: It cracks codes through sheer brute-force determination, but it works with buttons, touch screens, or pattern-tracing codes. It will punch in a code per second, exhaustively cracking an Android four-digit PIN within 20 hours, but “times for other devices vary depending on lockout policies and related defenses.” R2B2’s inventors, security researchers Justin Engler and Paul Vines, developed the machine to prove the “nobody’s going to try all 10,000 combinations” argument wrong. They even did it for under $200 using a few servomotors, an Arduino chip, 3-D-printed parts from a desktop Makerbot, and a $5 webcam that tracks whether the code’s been cracked. Its open-source software can be used on Mac or PC and controlled via USB. Would You Wear Google Glass If It Looked Like This? Whether or not you're sold on the technology behind Google Glass, it's hard to argue the headset is anywhere close to fashionable.
Even Google's own developers won't be seen wearing Glass. So a few designers at the software development startup Sourcebits reimagined Google Glass as a device mainstream consumers might actually want to wear. These sleek glasses aren't associated with Google in any way, but they are reminiscent of the specs sold by hipster eyewear purveyor Warby Parker, which was reported to be in talks with Google in February to design a more stylish version of the headset. Google Glass won't go on sale to the public until at least the end of this year, but some have already questioned whether or not it has a branding problem, driven in part by an aesthetic that has "all the sex appeal of orthodontic headgear.
" Would you wear a version of Google Glass that looked like this? [Images: Sourcebits] Will Someone Please Design Wearable Devices That Aren't Fugly? ⚙ Co. It's a good thing that Gianni Versace didn't live to see the era of wearable computing. On the other hand, perhaps he's exactly what we need. On the absolute cutting edge of fashion for decades, Versace set the bar for dramatic design--something that, in the tech world, we often look to Apple to do. Unfortunately, Cupertino hasn’t entered the world of wearable computing yet, and it’s perhaps because of their absence in the market that the devices we see today are all hideously unwearable. Am I the only one who feels this way? There is so much great buzz about wearable technology right now, from Bluetooth devices to smart watches, that one would expect chic, fashion-forward designs that capture our imaginations to be replete.
And it's shocking, with the proliferation of sexy technology in movies these days--think Iron Man--that there's obviously not a lot of thought put into the aesthetics of these gizmos. When will these tech giants start tapping Prada or Gucci for help? Or maybe this: