BMW has built a concept car that has a flexible skin over a skeletal structure. This allows the car to transform and appear more like an animal with expressive emotions than an inanimate object.
Youtube link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=kTYiEkQYhWY
The New York Times does a great job presenting interactive visual displays of data alongside the newspaper’s stories. For a story profiling Tiger Wood’s golf game, here’s the interactive display of how Tiger Woods wins majors. For a story on inflation here’s the interactive display showing how Americans spend their money and how that’s effected by inflation.
As Hans Rosling has shown, the proper visual presentation of facts can be illuminating, reforming opinions in a way that pure text often can’t do.
When will websites beyond the NY Times obtain and start to use such capabilities? It may be that displays like this only make sense when the effort put into making the data presentable is sure to reach a very broad audience, but some blogs are already reaching very large audiences. Here’s hoping more websites develop such capabilities.
Dean Kamen and his group at DEKA are remarkable inventors. Their inventions include the Segway, a wheelchair that can go up stairs, and a water purification device. They may have made their most amazing invention yet, a nerve reading prosthetic arm that can pick up a water bottle without squishing it:
Link: http://d6.allthingsd.com/20080529/deka/
The NY Times also has a story well worth reading, about how monkeys can control a prosthetic arm through a device implanted onto their nerves: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/science/29brain.html?em&ex=1212206400&en=312f177c2cb3fde2&ei=5087%0A
