I’m all about creating new sports. When we were kids my siblings and I were particularly adept at re-appropriating sports equipment for new athletic endeavors, not unlike Calvin did with his greatest creation, Calvinball! So while this new take on racquet sports is probably going to take a while to catch on, I applaud the creators of 360ball for trying something new.
I’m not going to go into too much detail about how the game is played, the overly dramatic video I’ve included below, which makes 360ball seem like a gift from the heavens, does a far better job at illustrating how a match unfolds. But the CliffsNotes version is that after a serve the other player or team is allowed to touch the ball twice before bouncing it off a special plate in the middle of the court, returning it to the other team. If a player is hit or the ball hits the ground, the other team gets a point. It sounds simple enough, but when you watch it being played you can see there’s a lot of room for strategy.
Now obviously 360ball requires a special circular court to be played in. So unfortunately you can’t really use an existing Squash, Racquetball or Tennis court which is going to be a bit of a stumbling block preventing it from catching on quickly. But the first official permanent court has already been installed in Knysna, South Africa where the game was invented, and when you think about it playing in a circular court has a lot of advantages. Both players or teams are constantly moving around its circumference so neither side really has an advantage when it comes to wind or sun, while spectators are able to sit all the way around with everyone having the exact same view of the court. And as a big fan of Squash, I think it just looks really fun!
While it raises privacy issues, I think most parking garage patrons will be happy to turn a blind eye to the Big Brother-ness of the Park Assist system if it means they never forget where they parked their car again. Well to be more specific, they can forget all they want since the system uses a series of high-resolution digital cameras that can not only tell when a spot is empty or full, but can also snap and catalog every vehicle’s license plate number.
So when you get back from shopping, or whatever you were doing, and are a bit fuzzy about where you parked, all you need to do is visit one of the Find-Your-Car kiosks, punch in your plate number, and it will create a you-are-here, you-want-to-be-here map so you can easily find your ride. Of course if your vehicle is associated with any warrants or parking tickets you might be a little shy about leaving it in a Park Assist-equipped garage since I’m sure the Police could ‘request’ access to those constantly updated databases (they use similar license plate scanning techniques) but for the rest of us law abiding citizens, remembering where we parked is now one less thing to have to worry about.
While the lack of technical details makes this idea seem like nothing more than an impractical concept, from what I can tell it does exist and it does work, and will supposedly be available starting sometime in February of this year. Created by Nicolas Triboulot, Laurent Grapin and Thibault Thomas of Quark Design, the ON/OFF paint can be applied to any surface like regular household paint, but when used in conjunction with a special ‘electronic mechanism’ that entire painted surface then becomes a touch-sensitive light switch.
So instead of fumbling around at night in the dark hunting for a small switch on the wall, the entire wall can serve as the switch. Or, you can limit it to being just a thin painted strip that runs around the entire perimeter of a room. The point here is that the idea is infinitely flexible, not to mention the fact that it frees you from having to route electrical wires everywhere. Now the aforementioned ‘electronic mechanism’ which seems to make it all possible does have to be hidden somewhere, so it’s not a perfect alternative, but the pros do seem to make the idea very tempting. And let’s just hope the price does too.
If you’ve transitioned to a high-performance laptop, or like to keep your computer tower hidden away, Moneual Lab’s newest case won’t be of much use to you. But if you still prefer to have it sitting on your desk right next to your monitor, then their DSPC, or Dual Screen PC case, which they unveiled at CES will be most useful to you.
Technical details are a bit sparse on the Moneual Lab website at the moment, but as you can see the tower-style case sports a tall and slender LCD display which can be used as a second monitor to display widgets, tickers, toolbars or other apps that don’t require loads of screen real estate. I’ve no idea what the resolution is, but according to a CES press release the DSPC case will tentatively be available in Q3 of this year for ~$1,500.
Like the engineering students behind yesterday’s AutoFrost Cake Decorator, Japanese researchers at Keio University’s Yasuaki Kakehi Laboratory have come to realize there’s far more important research to undertake than say cloning sheep. Instead, they’re improving candy using augmented reality. Their TagCandy system uses an actual sucker attached to a fairly hefty sensor/speaker device. When it detects the candy has touched your tongue, the vibration speaker kicks in and is able to recreate various physical effects in your mouth like drinking a fizzy carbonated drink, biting into a crisp apple, or even fireworks. And when your teeth touch the candy, you’ll even hear sounds thanks to the effects of bone conduction.
Their ultimate goal is to develop a system where a neutral flavored sucker could end up tasting like anything you’d want it to, with people even developing and sharing their own flavors online.
The world already has enough electric cars at this point, so I’m happy to see a group of engineering students from the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering tackling another important issue- cake decorating. Their AutoFrost machine, created for their Principles of Engineering class, is a 3-axis cake decorator designed to replicate a design created in a custom graphical UI onto a cake using an Arduino-controlled frosting plunger. A second Arduino unit controls the bed the cake sits on, moving it along its X and Y axis, allowing the custom designs to be drawn out.
I doubt the students have any intentions of taking the AutoFrost any farther, but if one of them manages to improve the machine so it does all the baking and prep work as well, they’re guaranteed at least one sale here. Actually make that two, I could always use a second in the bedroom.
Evan Ackerman, tech-blogger extraordinaire and Senior Editor of BotJunkie, was the first person in the United States to don Cyberdyne’s ‘Hybrid Assistive Limb’ or ‘HAL’ robotic exoskeleton suit. Or more specifically, just the pants. Using four sensors attached to his waist and his thighs the suit reads the signals being sent to Evan’s legs when he wants to walk, but its electronic muscles end up doing all the work for him. The suit is designed to help those who are unable to walk on their own, and as a result has 4 different strength levels. Because Evan is still able to walk they left it at level 1, but according to him it was still remarkably powerful even at the lowest setting.
So based on how my legs and feet feel right now after a week roaming the CES show floors, I think I’ll be adding a set of these to my blogging kit for next year.
I’ve already made my disdain for large wallets well-known, but another approach to minimizing the amount of crap in your pockets is to minimize the number of cards you have to carry. Dynamics Inc.’s MultiAccount credit cards do that by conglomerating several accounts onto a single card, allowing you to select which one you want to use at the time of purchase. The selected account has a small blinking light next to it so you know which one’s active, and the pertinent details are written to the magnetic stripe on the back automatically so you can swipe it like a normal credit card.
The cards, which are apparently already in use in the U.S., have a built-in battery that’s good for about 4 years of regular use, but if you spend too much time showing it off to friends, it will automatically let the bank or credit provider know the batteries are low and the card needs to be replaced. The company also had a few other cards on display that are still ‘coming soon’ like the Dynamic Credit Card pictured above which has a small e-ink display for displaying a unique security code that has to be entered at the time of every purchase.
Hasbro’s new Scrabble Flash was a popular gift over the holiday season, and if you had a chance to play the multi-interactive LCD cube game you already have a good idea of what the Sifteo gaming platform is all about. It’s Scrabble Flash taken to a whole new level. The most obvious improvement are the cubes themselves which each feature a full color and clickable LCD display, a gyro/motion sensor so they know how they’re oriented and the ability to store multiple games at one time. The cubes wirelessly interact with each other allowing gaming elements to be spread across all of the LCD displays which allows for more creative games than just spelling out words.
During our hands-on we got to play a sort of Bejewelled clone where matching pieces across multiple cubes would all disappear, and the individual colored elements could be sifted around by just picking up and rotating the cube. Another example had a character traversing a maze which extended in different directions depending on which side of the cube you decided to place the next one.
The Sifteo system is definitely pretty unique and original, and if they manage to inspire and excite game developers it has a lot of potential. Though they can only be used with a running computer nearby which facilitates their wireless communications and presumably some of inter-cube processing. And while the charger included with the base kit features 6 slots, when available later this year Sifteo will only come with 3 cubes for $149. With additional cubes running $45 each.
Once dot-matrix printers were replaced by inkjets, printer technology hit a long period of stagnation when manufacturers realized they could just sit back and make a killing by selling replacement ink cartridges. But Memjet hopes to shake things up with their new inkjet technology that’s able to print at 12 inches per second, which equates to about 60 full color A4 pages per minute. That speed, which is actually about twice as fast as color laser printers, is made possible by a page wide printhead dotted with 70,000 ink nozzles (about 17 times as many as current inkjet printer heads) dropping 700 million drops of ink per second.
It’s easily the fastest printer I’ve ever seen, and it’s not like it’s spitting out low-quality draft prints either. These are full color, 1600 DPI copies that look as good as what you’d get from the current crop of home inkjet printers. Minus all the waiting. And while they had a functional prototype on display, Memjet actually plans to license their technology to OEMs. One of the first companies to announce a Memjet-based printer was Lenovo oddly enough, and it’s expected to hit the market for around $5-600 later this year. As for actual printing costs, the Memjet technology does it’s thing for about 5 or 6 cents per page.
