If you still don’t know what you’re getting Dad for Father’s Day, HybridSpace Furniture has come up with an all-in-one home entertainment “Man Wall,” which includes gadgets that are stereotypically man. More »
These are the walls of a Human-Computer Interaction Institute lab at Carnegie Mellon, and as you can see, they provide plenty of opportunities to create such interactions on the fly when you snag your sweater on some spiky solder leads or that ZIF socket handle. Chris Harrison, a PhD student, bought old motherboards on eBay by the pound to completely adorn the lab in mo-bos. And while this is great for the computer science lab and maybe OK for the garage (maybe), don’t even think about doing this in your bedroom if you ever want to have sex again. It does look pretty sweet, though.
Yes there are pool treadmills, desk treadmills, and water-resistance treadmills for dogs, but the Treadwall throws the horizontal nature of previous treadmill innovations out the window. For 10-grand, you can climb yourself to death in your own living room without getting higher than 10 feet or so, making the inevitable fall when you fail to keep up with the scrolling handholds all the more manageable. But let’s see how some drunken Jackass wannabees fare in the following video. AU: Wow. I was climbing something very similar to this at the local rock-climbing centre when I was in Cadets back in 1996. Unlike the US to be so out of date…
Microsoft’s getting some competition for its Surface device. Panasonic is showing off a very Surface-like product it’s calling Digital Wall, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. While at this point it doesn’t appear to offer all the the features of Surface it could also come in much cheaper that the Microsoft version, and for many people that’s the key. Hit the jump for a short video of the Digital Wall in action. [Digital World Tokyo]
This is what happens when you get a couple of cheap RC cars and add proximity sensors, extra batteries, robot brains, and name them Steve McQueen and Burt Reynolds: totally-automated racing all around your house. These electric robocars can detect the walls around them and race against each other for as long as the batteries last. The resulting Tron-lightcycle-like action is impressive.
Bocci’s wallplugs are a DIY project, but the end result is stunningly minimal and clean, especially compared to the ugly plates we’re all used to. Just a sparse power outlet, floating in your wall. It’s totally geeky to rave about power outlets, but I really love this. Sadly, I’d have to mar it with a honkin’ plug for a massive strip with battery backup. [core77]
It could be a line in that Alanis Morrisette song about ironic things that aren’t actually ironic: the German Government is going to hire out about 500 GPS-enabled PDA-like gadgets for tourists who want to see the Berlin Wall but are disappointed that so little of it is left.
The devices, known as the “Mauerguide” (Wall guide), will be available to tourists from May 1 for between 6 and 15 Euros ($10-$25). The device will show pictures, video and audio at five major points along the Wall’s route, including the Bernauer Strasse, the Brandenburg Gate, the Topography of Terror, Checkpoint Charlie and the East Side Gallery, with more locations to come in the future. It will relay information in both German and English at first, although more languages will be added.
Hopefully we’ll see other international governments incorporate gadget-based tours into their tourism plans – who knows, it might actually make some places interesting.
[Yahoo News and Net Tribune]
