Control your computer at a distance by waving your hands in the air (for $39.99)
For a few hundred dollars the Apple iPhone provides a multi-touch display you can control by touch and the Nintendo Wii allows you to control video games from a distance by gesturing with a wand like remote control. What if you could combine the multi touch gestures of the iPhone with the midair gestures of the Wii for $39.99?
Sure, Steven Spielberg showed such a device in the movie Minority Report (see video), but researcher Johnny Lee has created a super cheap system that works by buying the Nintendo Wii’s remote and using it’s infrared light sensing abilities:
He’s also used the Wii remote to make a low cost multi-point whiteboard and a head tracking virtual reality display, all of which you can see demonstrated in his speech at TED :
You can examine a variety of his hacks, and download free software to make your own input devices, at his website. Mr. Lee has also developed a number of other interesting projects, including a $14 steady cam and a novel way to win a paintball match.
Sea creatures in all their glory
David Gallo shows amazing pictures of luminescent and camouflaging sea creatures:
January 12, 2008 1 Comment
A decline in violence
If you feel instinctively that humanity has been getting more violent all the time, and you feel acutely that modern society is a horror as a result, you should watch Steven Pinker’s presentation at TED, where he provides evidence that human progress has led to diminishing violence over time.
Spaceward ho!
The critical variable for measuring progress in the effort of humankind to get into space is examining how much currency it takes to take a certain amount of mass into orbit. The more efficiently it can be done, the less humanity will be shackled to one planet.
For a long time space travel has been thought of as so expensive that it was the province of governments. Yet governments are notoriously bad at spending money to undertake revolutionary or even evolutionary innovations.
Private space travel is going to put some shame into the debacle that is government funded space travel. Far less money, far more impressive results. Burt Rutan designed SpaceShip One (http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/), a private space ship that reached into the boundary of space. Here he is explaining why government funded space travel sucks at innovation: http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=b_rutan
Now Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket, which greatly decreases the cost of getting to space, has launched successfully enough to prove that rockets much cheaper than the prior state of the art can reach space: http://crunchgear.com/2007/03/20/spacex-successfully-launches-falcon-1-rocket/#more-5140
These achievements are important not just in themselves, but for the new capital, new ideas, and new entrepreneurs they will attract into the quest to reach for the stars above.
