A Modular Garden That Floats Across The Sea. We may be able to deal with looming overpopulation by stacking people into ever taller high rises, but growing crops that way becomes a much tougher proposition. What happens to food production when we simply run out of land? We can go to the oceans. Sealeaf is a floating garden, designed to grow crops off coastlines. Designed by Jason C. Cheah, Idrees Rasouli, Sebastian Wolzak, and Roshan Sirohia, it’s a modularly expandable system that’s essentially a floating dock with a greenhouse on top. “Essentially, we believe that instead of trying to design against rising sea levels and urbanisation, why not use it as a source and view the situation as a positive?” Cheah writes. Sealeaf modules, which cost $50 apiece, are linked together by a mortar of walkways. Then, when you consider all of the saved ancillary costs--all those trucks burning diesel that no longer need to ship in certain fresh goods--the idea certainly becomes exciting. As of today, Sealife is about 70% realized, 30% concept.
Menu Gif by MVBen. Microsoft SketchInsight lets you build a story with interactive sketches. Microsoft is putting its SketchInsight interactive whiteboard system on display at the company's TechFest event this week. Designed as a system for storytelling, SketchInsight is a prototype project straight out of Microsoft's research labs. SketchInsight simply lets you tell a story using interactive sketches on a whiteboard. In Microsoft's demonstration the company shows how you could use this to present a story by drawing sketches that turn into animations. The system can mine data from a database and suggest options for charts, diagrams, and other visualizations. It's really about presenting data in a meaningful way.
Microsoft has clearly analysed traditional meeting scenarios with spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations and has invented a system it hopes will eventually make presentations a lot more engaging. Opower. AlertMe.