It may be tired to bring up Minority Report, but remember the scenes in the movie where our hero gets bothered by interactive targeted advertising wherever he goes? Thanks to dear ol’ NEC, this nightmare of advert pestering may really be in our future: its new ad display panel watches its watchers with a camera, then tailors the adverts to the audience. The 50-inch plasma’s camera and software doesn’t quite go so far as identifying specific people, but it does guess at age and sex and then offers you the chance to grab data on the products wirelessly to a mobile phone. It’ll be demoed at Fuji Television’s festival in Tokyo: go along and see how irritating (or not) the future of advertising may be, if you’re interested. [Times of India via Dvice]
Either that or their agency just really loves Thomas Friedman. Anyhow, Microsoft’s US$300 million campaign to return fire after Apple’s “Mac vs. PC” ads with our buddy John Hodgman–which, like it or not, were a wildly successful campaign and definitely helped shape the public’s perception of Vista–has begun with this image from microsoft.com, comparing the potential realisation that Vista doesn’t suck to the debunking of the flat earth theory. It took a bold voyage to the New World by one Christopher Columbus to change everyone’s mind on the first one–but Microsoft is hoping a little ad campaign will do the trick to clean up the gross misconception the public (and tons of Windows users) seem to have about Vista.
It’s tough to make out much from these shots, but according to their source, they are of the next PSP (the PSP model 3000). The specs include a built-in microphone as well as an updated button set that replaces the “Home” button with a PlayStation button (to more closely resemble the PS3).
Bad news for TiVo subscribers–the company is about to reach for new levels of advertising debauchery. If you thought those banners in the TiVo menu system were bad, know that the company is about to take things a big step further and invade actual television programming with Amazon as their partner. From the NY Times:
Garmin has just announced a new member of the Nuvi GPS range, the 500 series. In a first for Nuvi, the rugged, waterproof 500 units are specifically designed to be multipurpose, with maps for driving, walking, cycling and boating built in. For out-doorsy types, there’s a shaded digital elevation map option, and a dedicated compass page and tracklog. Plus the battery is a swappable 8-hour Li-ion type, so you can carry a spare for extended trips away from a power source. The 500 comes with City Navigator, and topographic maps of the US, while the 550 has highway coverage of the US and Canada, but no topographic data. The units are on show at the British International Motor show in London form today, and go on sale soon in the US for US$499. Press release below.
The 2008 International Design Excellence Awards are in. These are like the Oscars of the industrial design world, taking the pulse of what’s going on, highlighting tons of weird and wonderful gadgets. We have picked the best, the weirdest, and the most wonderful, from laser liners that look like Wall-E’s Eve evil twin, microwave containers with lids, and wall-mounted home server enclosures straight out of Star Trek, to self-propelled sprayers (like me), NYC condom dispensers/wrappers (no connection there), a “vibrating massager” that looks like an aubergine, and even a precision timing detonation system.
Repurposing the design of a kid’s toy rocket into an innovative gun may sound pretty dark, but it creates a weapon with selectable lethality. Rockets made by Lund and Company Invention of Chicago use a liquid hydrogen variable fuel-air mix to give a selectable-power launch, and now the US Army is funding research to apply the tech to guns. The Variable Velocity Weapon System uses a similar liquid or gaseous fuel-air mix in a combustion chamber to propel bullets from the rifle, which lets you set the bullet speed as non-lethal at 33 feet to lethal at 330 feet, for example. Current research VVWS are .50 calibre rifles, but the design is scalable from “handgun to howitzer.” Sounds like a useful addition to a soldier’s arsenal, though I suspect there’ll be plenty of worries of the “I used the wrong setting” type. [New Scientist]
Previously named the DS400GB, the SmartMirror is a GPS system that is mounted in place of your conventional rear-view mirror, and has a rear-facing cam input. With Navigon Mobile Navigator 6.5 inside, it’s got “reality view”, a 4-inch touchscreen, integrated speakers and Bluetooth and takes SD cards. It’s actually got two inputs for rear-view cameras, which may be good news for the parking-skill-challenged. It sounds like a neat solution, but I’m a little unconvinced that mounting a GPS high up there on the windscreen isn’t actually going to distract you from looking in the rear-view mirror— after all, we know how distracting GPS can be. SmartMirror will be available August 1st for US$799. [Navigadget]
It’s the third birthday of Sony Ericsson’s Walkman phone label, and to celebrate it’s launching three new music-based mobile phones. The W302 and W902 (left, centre in the image) are both candybar handsets, with the 302 having an FM radio, and 2-megapixel cam, and the 902 with a 5-megapixel cam and apparently matching the high audio quality of the W980 phone. The W595 is a slide phone with built-in stereo speakers so users can “share sounds with their friends” (read: annoy passers-by with irritating tunes) but it also has twin jacks so you can share music privately. All four phones are quad-band GSM, have “shake control,” come in a selection of colours and will hit the streets at the end of the year. Press release below, which also details some new accessories like wireless portable speakers.
It’s an interesting week in the world of LEDs: on the weekend we heard about ultra-cheap ones, and today Osram (yes, the lightbulb people) has news that they’ve pushed white LEDs to world-record brightness. By optimising the diode, light converter and the package, their lab test squeezed 500 lumens out of a single LED at 1.4A. That’s bright enough for projector tech, and certainly makes the single unit good for car lighting and even interior lights. At a lower, more optimal, current the 1mm-square white LED had an efficiency of 136 lumens/W which makes it about twice as efficient as standard fluorescent lamps and 10 times a normal bulb. Press release below.
