today and tomorrow » hardware

Bismuth

pieter | today and tomorrow — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 22:28:58 +0000

Maybe you still remember the metal Bismuth from you chemistry classes. When you had to look it up on the periodic table, you found all it properties but you still had no clue what it looked like. Till today.
This is a Bismuth crystal with an iridescent oxide surface.

Nearness & Sniff

pieter | today and tomorrow — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 06:39:18 +0000

Nearness is a Rube Goldberg machine like you probably have never seen one before. It works with with RFID, so it means that the elements of the machine interact without touching. Nearness is the first exploration into designerly applications for RFID by BERG. BERG was inspired by “The Way Things Go” by Peter Fischli & David Weiss and the Honda Cog commercial.

Sniff by Sara Johansson, Timo Arnall & Einar Sneve Martinussen, Nearfield, is another RFID application. Sniff is an interactive dog that “sniffs” objects that come close to his nose. It reacts through sound and vibration while creating games through behaviors, melodies and emotional responses.

Y’all Can’t Ball

pieter | today and tomorrow — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 01:04:58 +0000

Believe me. Just watch what this robot already can do, even with throwing some hoops. Sensor Fusion is another project of the Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory of the university of Tokyo.

found at kottke

Touch the Invisibles

pieter | today and tomorrow — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:46:35 +0000

The problem with most touchscreens is that you don’t get any tactile feedback. Touch the Invisibles, a project by nosigner, Hiroyuki Ando, Junji Watanabe and Eisuke Kusachi, let you feel what’s happening on the screen. They placed a small vibrator on the fingernail and by tracking the position of the finger with the touch screen, the user can get some tactile feedback. It’s probably not the most elegant solution to this problem, but I would like to try it out anyway.
Touch the Invisibles will be on display at siggraph 09.

found at designboom weblog

Sticky Light & scoreLight

pieter | today and tomorrow — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:56:04 +0000

Sticky Light is a project by Alvaro Cassinelli, Kuribara Yusaku and Stephane Perrin of the Department of Information Physics and Computing at the Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory of the university of Tokyo. Indeed, this should already spark you interest.
Sticky Light is a 3d tracking technology using a laser diode (low power), a pair of steering mirrors and a single non-imaging photodetector. The big difference to other tracking technologies is the fact that the Sticky Light doesn’t use a camera or projector. So what could you do with? It can track the contour of objects and even augment real-time drawings. Or you could build games like air hockey or a pinball game. Or … just watch this video, after 2 minutes they show you the games demo.

Daito Manabe visited the lab recently and added some functionality to the system: sound. soundLight can now generate sounds based on the movement of the laser.

found @daitomanabe

LED’s in Your Mouth

pieter | today and tomorrow — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 12:19:22 +0000

Daito Manabe is up to something new, you know his Electric Stimulus experiments right? This time he doing something with LED’s in his mouth. For now he just moves them around with his tongue. I don’t know what he’s planning but if he can hook them up to his Electric Stimulus … That would be great.

It seems like the LED’s are sound reactive in this second video.

EDIT:
Daito posted some more tests in his YouTube channel. Just keep an eye on it.

Propeller

pieter | today and tomorrow — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 07:38:39 +0000

The cheap CMOS sensor of an iPhone does not expose the whole thing at once, it scans from left to right. If you take a picture of something that moves very fast (like an airplane prop) you can get some crazy pictures out of it since each column represents a slightly different time.

found at Global Nerdy

Lost Luggage

pieter | today and tomorrow — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 10:04:09 +0000

Lost Luggage by Steve Jurvetson, a rockter covered with a decorative finish of airline baggage stickers.

found at FFFFOUND!

Large Hadron Collider

pieter | today and tomorrow — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 09:34:06 +0000

Maybe you’ve heard about the Large Hadron Collider, a 27 kilometer long, circular particle accelerator. CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) has build this huge research centre a 100 meters under the border of France and Switzerland. It is almost finished now, actually they are still cooling down the entire collider to -271.25°C (-456.25°F). When everything is up and running they will do high-energy collisions.
That sounds all very exciting… but I’m really amazed by the beauty of this. Who says that engineers don’t have any sense for esthetics? Just look at these pictures!

Augmented Reality on the iPhone

pieter | today and tomorrow — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:53:25 +0000

Augmented Reality is nothing new, but till now it was mostly a nerdy webcam demo thing. But when you use a mobile phone like the iPhone, where you can move the camera and the display in one device, the user experience could really become enjoyable. Just think of all the possible applications with this technology. ARToolworks developed a version of the free ARToolKit (a software library for building Augmented Reality applications) for the iPhone. In this video they show us a preview, unfortunatly they only managed to get 10 frames per second. But maybe with some help from Apple they could boost the speed over 20 fps.

Warning, mute the sound of the video right away! Believe me!

Machinecollective

pieter | today and tomorrow — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:57:49 +0000

Physical computing is where it’s at!Â Machinecollective developed these open source hardware modulesÂ based on frequently used components, sensors and indicators. Just think of knobs, sliders and buttons which you can hook up to your software or use to build your own hardware project. The modules are designed to work with Arduino and Wiring, 2 development environments based on Processing.

found at MAKE: Blog

AirPiano

pieter | today and tomorrow — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 11:56:58 +0000

The AirPiano is project by Omer Yosha, an Interface Design student from the FH Potsdam (Germany).

The AirPiano is an innovative musical interface which allows playing and controlling software instruments simply by moving hands in the air.

Above the AirPiano is a virtual matrix of keys and faders, each assigned with MIDI messages and ready to be triggered. The length of a triggered note is equivalent to the time a hand
is placed on the corresponding virtual key.
This is also confirmed by LED feedback.
The AirPiano Software allows easy setup, loading/saving presets and transposing notes.

The AirPiano is still in its prototype phase and its concept of a virtual matrix might eventually be used for other applications and purposes.
The AirPiano concept is filled as a Provisional U.S. Patent Application (Number: 60/989,986).

In this video he uses his AirPiano to control Ableton Live.

found at Create Digital Music

Tapehead Inspector

pieter | today and tomorrow — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:30:10 +0000

The Tapehead Inspector allows you to read magnetic tapes manually. You can scratch your old tapes with this device! I really like that they payed attention to the casing, the hardware is hidden in an old videotape. Switching ‘tapes’ is no fuss eather.

found at MAKE : Blog

Mine

pieter | today and tomorrow — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:07:08 +0000

One more month baby!

Reload

pieter | today and tomorrow — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 13:56:59 +0000