Reader Starblade sent me this one today. If I had a solid month to build this I would, the detail is intense. For example, all the structural backbone pipe work are real paper tubes that you have to roll and glue yourself.
Author: John
The Teddy Bear Gun
A Japanese company has created a gun that will fire a teddy bear into the air for festive occations. Once shot, the bear will safely decend on it’s own parachute.
[via Neat-o-Rama]
Gun-shaped teddy bear crackers ready to liven up wedding receptions – MSN-Mainichi Daily News
Crusher, UGCV
To heck with UAV, UGCV is the real ticket. If you were wondering where the brains behind the DARAP Grand Challenge robots were destine to end up, it’s in a machine like the ‘Crusher’. Crusher is a 6.5 ton unmanned all terrain vehicle capable of packing loads of 8,000 pounds where it will be needed the most. It’s still years away from being a solders mechanical pack mule of choice, but when is does come into general use it should reduce the amount of casualties in convoys. That is assuming that the robots don’t decide to drive off the wrong direction due to a programming glitch.
[via neat-o-rama]
Pinhole Camera Movies
I was checking out the World Pinhole Photography Day page on Flickr today and I saw that someone is going to be using an 8mm movie camera fitted with a pinhole to take some shots. A very cool idea. Even cooler is that Flickr member (and great photographer) Nicolai_g mentioned that there is a TV commercial that was shot with a pinhole equipped movie camera. He even noted a technical discussion about the process of using a pinhole on a motion picture camera. A very fascinating read if your into a very alternative way of capturing life around you.
Here is the post that started this little post:
Insect Eye Could Be Your Next Camera
This could trump the Apple Big Brother LCD screen:
The eyes of insects such as bees and dragonflies are made up of tens of thousands of tiny components called ommatidia. These all point in different directions to give the insect a very wide field of vision.
Inspired by this, Luke Lee and colleagues developed an artificial compound eye consisting of a moulded polymer resin dome filled with thousands of light-guiding channels, called waveguides, each topped with its own miniature lens.
The artificial eye could be used to create surveillance cameras, cellphone cameras, and surgical endoscopes with a much wider field of vision, the researchers say. The whole eye is 2.5 millimetres in diameter. Each artificial ommatidia consists of a lens attached to a polymer waveguide that directs light towards the centre of the eye.
Sounds like an amazing device.
Big Brother Looks Like an Apple?
Now this is neat. Implant gobs of imaging sensors between the LCD pixels and have a chunk of software assemble the output as an image. Sounds Orwellian (yeah, that’s what everyone is saying about it…) to me. Might be handy though, I’m sure that advertisers will love this sort of thing, it so reminds me of Max Headroom.
[via core77]
New Scientist Breaking News – Invention: Apple’s all-seeing screen