If pictures are worth a thousand words, videos are worth like, a million right?
Archive for the ‘Interactive Displays’ Category
Lego NXT Scorpion Says: “Back Off Mah Skittles!”
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010Trossen Robotics at CES 2009!
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009“You’re going to pay me to go to Vegas? And I get to attend CES? Stop screwing with my emotions!”
I honestly thought my boss was just pulling my chain at first.
Being my first year to attend the Consumer Electronics Show I was quite excited to say the least. I had overheard someone on the shuttle claiming that attendance would be down 10-15%, but when you factor in that up to 150,000 people have attended this in the past… 10-15% was trivial, there were still a LOT of people here. Arriving at the event and seeing a vast crowd of people out front of the main exhibition halls made the enormous size of this event hit home.
At first I wandered the main hall, then ended up in the south hall, and then realized I had just lost 3 hours in what felt like 30 minutes. Electronics as far as the eye could see, multi-story booths (yes, some of the booths had stairs), and rivers of people flowing in every direction. Finally I found a map and figured out that I actually needed to be about 3 miles away at the Sands Expo Center to find the Robotics Tech Zone.
Anybots‘ booth immediately caught my attention: boasting a slick new telepresence robot, QA. This is taking telepresence a step further, in that QA actually stands about as tall as a human and acts as a physical representation for you. The concept is that if you or your company has multiple sites, and you need to say… check out the new wallpaper in your factory in China, participate at a trade show, or attend a meeting, QA grants you the ability to do so in style. You see and hear what QA does, can look and move around fluidly, and speak as if you were on site. Aesthetically QA is very slick, a robot that would easily fit into a scene from a sci-fi movie based in the future.
The crew behind MechRC also had a booth, showcasing their new Groundpounder variant as well as the their upcoming Educational Program. I got a chance to talk with Dr. Jim Wyatt and Victor Chen about their plans for the robotic line, which includes a K-12 adaptable curriculum, future variants such as the Groundpounder pictured above, and the possibilties of Laser Tag kit upgrades!
Also showcasing at the CES was WowWee, iRobot, Kowatech, Robolabs, Hagisonic, and many more. While the Robotics Techzone wasn’t as big as I had hoped, it was somewhat expected as the show is based around consumer electronics, and consumer level robots are still considered new territory. The great thing about robotics however is that there will always be more in the future!
Feel free to check out our CES 2009 Photo Gallery (and if you were there, add your own!). I focused on taking pictures of things relative to robotics seeing as though the rest of CES is covered by everyone and their grandmother. We’ll see you there next year!
How to scare kids on halloween the ‘techy’ way!
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008Hiding behind bushes in a monster costume and jumping out to scare would be trick-or-treaters is sooo 1995. That and it can earn you a beat down from an unsuspecting parental guardian. Here’s a way to do it while you’re safely hiding within your house.
First, either purchase or build a scary pop-out halloween prop, screaming speaker, or flashing lights of your choice. Here’s a pretty fancy one made out of PVC and other various items:
Couple this with one of our simple Floor Mat Switches….
and you’ve got an automatic Halloween gag that is sure to make a few kids soil their costumes!
Giant robots terrorize city in Australia
Saturday, August 16th, 2008That’s right folks, you heard it here first. Except instead of giant think ‘tiny’, and instead of city think ’scale model town’. The guys over at BP have created an amazing web based demonstration called BP Explorer using the Surveyor SRV-1 kit. Between the hours of 9AM-9PM GMT+10, you can pilot one of five Surveyor robots through a very detailed scale town and offroad area, exploring to find clues to unlock a code which allows for extended playing time. The kicker is that these bots are completely powered by BP solar panels, so everyone can have the pleasure of cruising through this hippy-fueled-utopia without the guilt of burning up our precious fossil fuels!
I’m sure this can’t last forever, so make sure to check it out while it’s active!
Laser Harp Mk. III: Now With More Wiimote
Friday, April 25th, 2008Stephen Hobley is at it again. His laser harp was cool enough to win second place in our project contest a few months back, and since then he’s managed to make it even cooler. Using a Wiimote to accurately track the positions at which the beams are interrupted, he added some very clean and precise pitch control to the already impressive instrument. Watch the video. After about a minute of demonstration, he gives a quick explanation of how the modification works, so be sure to watch the whole video.
He started a thread about this in our forums, so head on over there to give him props, ask questions, etc:
Laser Harp Mk III
If you haven’t read the original thread from when he first completed the project, check it out here:
Frameless Laser Harp
If you want more info on how it was made, or if you want to build your own, follow this link to Stephens’s site:
The Laboratory
First Look: Microsoft Surfacing Computing!
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
Most of you have probably seen the Minority Report becomes reality video on youtube by now. It was a very cool demonstration of what kind of user interfaces we can expect to see in the future. The question we always wonder when we see these things is, “Cool, but how and where can we seriously use it?” It turns out Microsoft has been asking themselves the very same question and has come up with some pretty good answers.
Larry Larson over at on10.com got a preview of Microsoft’s Surface Computer where they demo many real world apps for such technology. Things really start getting slick around the 8 minute mark where surface computing is applied to the restaurant experience. There literally is no need for a waiter to take orders or payment anymore with such a system. A fully interactive menu is right in your tabletop to order from. When the meal is over, everyone can place their payment method on the table and divi up the check by dragging and dropping the meal items to their own cards. Amazing.
It’s great to see emerging technologies being applied intelligently toward improving real world experiences. Far fetched interactive musical tools are neat, but what emerging technologies really need to survive is a way to make life better for the common citizen. It looks like MS has envisioned some very real ways to do this.
Here is another demo we found on youtube, this is the quick version.
post via Scobleizer
JazzMutant Lemure Demos – Futuristic Control Panel for Music
Wednesday, April 11th, 2007[/youtube]
From the JazzMutant website:
The Lemur is a top of the range control surface for audio and media applications, that breaks from the prior art on several grounds. Its major innovation consists in its brilliant modular graphic interface concept and its exclusive multitouch sensor technology. The continiously growing palette of configurable graphic objects enables you to design made-to-measure interfaces by using the free available JazzEditor. This endows the Lemur with the unique and protocol independant capacity to adapt its behavior according to the application you are controlling: sequencers, modular synthesizers, virtual instruments, VJ software, 3D animation tools and light control.
