The sidewalk in front of the store has been fitted with small infrared lights, and the installation with infrared cameras; this is how Sniff, an art project designed by Karolina Sobecka and Jim George, knows where its audience is, and can anticipate which direction they’re moving.

Some might see a playful interactive exhibit here, but I see something more insidious. Walking by confused, platter-eyed puppies every once in a while is a part of city life; each time you do it, you make an easy—but still present—decision not to buy that dog that evidently loves you more than anything, for some reason. With Sniff, you don’t have a choice: he seems to like you, but you physically can’t take him home; likewise, there no risk that your walk-by buddy is going to get incinerated at a shelter, because he isn’t real. Technology, you’ve stolen the richness from our relationships to dogs that aren’t ours. Thanks. [Sniff via Urlesque via Neatorama]

The Price

Available later this month for $US30.

What’s Good

I’ve never hunted actual ducks, but I would imagine that the real experience offers up a similar (albeit more intense) mixture of fleeting thrills, unpredictability and satisfying violence as the game — except this way you don’t actually have to kill anything. Plus the action sounds the gun makes when pumping the forearm and pulling the trigger are a nice touch.

What’s Bad

As I mentioned earlier, this game is fun in short increments. The typical flight lasted anywhere between five and 15 seconds depending on how I set the directional control pad near the tail. As you can see in the videos above, setting the tab for a straighter flight tends to keep the duck up in the air longer while setting it more to the left or right results in shorter, more compact flights. Either way, the flights were inconsistent and it was difficult to get hits before the duck glided naturally to the ground. They say you can play this game indoors, and that’s probably true if “indoors” happens to be a gymnasium.

You will break Duck Hunter. Seriously, even if you didn’t get tired of the game after a few hours of flying, you will probably break it well before that. The infrared gun feels cheap and the bird is nothing more than a piece of styrofoam with a few bits of plastic and wings that have about the same tensile strength as masking tape. Every time I pushed the duck down on the charging post located on the barrel of the gun I thought I would snap something. And that happens a lot because you need to charge it for 10 seconds after each flight.

The Verdict

The $US30 price tag isn’t a fortune, but that’s probably more than you want to spend on something that will end up forgotten or broken in a few weeks. Early on, there was talk of a premium, $US40 version that could be remotely controlled by a second person — I’m not sure what happened with that, but it might have been a worthwhile upgrade.

Definitely feels like a live action version of the Duck Hunt NES game.

Gun sounds and the mid-air “stumbles” when the duck is hit are a nice touch.

Flights are inconsistent. Patterns are hard to contain, so it is best used in a large open space.

The equipment feels cheap and fragile.

Sharp, at the request of Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, has developed a method to ruin the camcorder footage shot by pirates in movie theatres. By placing mega IR lights behind the screen (which are invisible to the human eye, of course), the light can tunnel through tiny holes that are already in screens for the passage of sound.

The result is a wash of light protruding from the screen, ruining camcorder footage. The other result is that, while you’ll still never buy a ticket to Wolverine, you’ll never get to know how bad the movie really was until, hungover on the couch one afternoon, you catch it on TV or something. [Fareastgizmos]

Note: Unfortunately, the IR blast won’t look nearly as awesome as it does in this photo. I imagine a lame grid of lights, not a reworking by JJ Abrams.

Designed by Korean firm D’strict, the tech is a combination of infrared motion sensing and 3D imagery, pretty much like Microsoft’s Project Natal. It’s not quite as seamless as Natal, but given that it’s main purpose is just to add a little flash to a mobile phone announcement, we’re awfully impressed—and distracted. Check out the video below for a clip of one of the announcements, and you’ll see what we mean. [Fast Company]

Samsungmobile Jet making film from d'strict on Vimeo.

Energizer’s latest industrial-grade flashlight will take LEDs to war…or just your next backyard camping trip.

The Energizer Hard Case Tactical Flashlight 2AA features a 70-lumen white LED, along with four additional LEDs including red, blue, green and infrared—a selection of fine lighting choices for incognito map reading or simply an impromptu infiltration disco.

Droppable from 5 metres and including a swiveling head with a range of motion of nearly 180 degrees, it’s pretty neat for a flashlight, but it’ll set you back $US125. And you can call me cheap, but I just don’t assassinate world leaders in the dead of night often enough to justify the purchase. [Popular Mechanics via Newlaunches]

It’s as if thousands of preteens sharing naughty videos cried out over a direct line into Samsung’s R&D department.

The Samsung SCH-W760 is a pretty typical slider for Korea (the only place it will most likely be released), but it features a 3MP camera that can shoot video calls in the dark. The system uses an old technology, infrared, to capture your black and white video transmission in the absence of visible light.

Just don’t do anything we wouldn’t do, you young adults of Korea. In other words, always pretend that your end of the video transmission is broken and that you’ve “never done this before.” [Telecomes Korea via unwired view]

We’ve covered Google’s attempt to suck the text from every book ever written before, but here’s a recent patent filing that details the infrared technique—in glorious pictures! [NPR via Memex 1.1 via Boing Boing]

Probably not, you’re right.

Anyway, the program, as you may know, is called Google Book Search, and it’s pretty simple: Google is right now busily scanning as many books as it can get its hands on and adding the images to a search database. It’s just another way the company is slowly taking over the world, but who cares—you can click links in the books when they mention locations and Google Maps will take you there!

But on their way to putting public libraries out of business, Google ran into a decidedly low-tech problem when scanning the physical books for uploading into their new digital medium. Basically, the character recognition software requires a relatively flat 2D image of the text to work 100% properly. The books’ bindings aren’t cooperating, however, as they cause the pages to arch upward on either side. This has made the process take far longer than our future overlords would have liked.

Luckily, Google knows a thing or two about frickin’ laser beams (but thankfully not how to attach them to the heads of sharks—yet). By casting an infrared beam over each book, the Google team can use infrared cameras to map the 3D shape and filter out the distortion with some nifty error correction software. And now the books are just flying off the shelves and into the digital ether. [New Scientist]

In order for the system to work, a receiver must be placed on top of the screen to capture pen movements, but the result is a decent-sized screen for your doodles. That sounds like a pretty handy device for around $US104. [Hanwha via Akihabara News]

Designed by Dr Gordon Dougal, apparently just a GP, the helmet bombards the patient with intense waves of infrared light for a few minutes a day to stimulate growth of brain cells. The device will undergo clinical trial ’soon’, but the doctor sees promise:

Sir Terry used the helmet for about three months. Over that period there was a small improvement. Not significant, which was a bit disappointing, but it didn’t get any worse.

One mildly positive report is basically meaningless when it comes to treatments like this, but for the sake of the good Knight (and the aesthetic future of medicine—look at this thing!) I hope it works. [Dailymail via BoingBoing Gadgets]