I would love to get a few of these and put them in some of the local comic book shops. Some of these toys are down right amazing! The first time I saw these was when I was in japan a few years ago. The Gashapon (I think that’s a Japanese onimonipea, they make a distinctive sound when the knob is turned) machines were dotted in various locations, hobby shops, grocery stores, and even an entire store devoted to them. The place was set up like a laundromat, machines on in four rows two high. It was wild. The place must have been some sort of fan hang out, there was a cosplay shop a few floors above it.
I wonder how you go about getting the toys in bulk so you can stock your own machines.
Gashapon/Capsule Toys
Category: Japan
Mini Tank Madness!
So cool! These are just one of the coolest things ever. I think the ultimate version would have beefed up suspension so you could move over good sized rocks, stereo cameras and a set of VR glasses (with an adjustable parallax so you could either drive a little tank or a full sized one), a set of IR sensors to detect hits and an visible/IR laser on the main gun (with an program that will simulate the reload cycle and maybe windage). A few of those in your back yard would be quite the evening.
R/C Tanks
Paper Katamari Damacy
If I were to play a game on the PS2 it would be Katamari Damacy. Weird, wacky, totaly different than any other game out there. Plus if you go here you can build a paper version of its main character. How cool is that? (A while ago I reported on the PePaKuRa Designer software used to make some of these)
Lump soul (Oji) papercraft
For more paper projects (build the robot, it looks neat):
Funny character coffee papercraft
Living in Akihabara
Tokyo is crowded and busy no doubt about that. You would think that the place have no one living it it by what you see on TV and movies. Once you look a little closer you begin to realize that there are people living in this robust metropolis. Here is part one of a story on what it’s like to live in (or not live in) the famed Electric City, Akihabara.
Living in Akihabara – Part One
Business card style USB memory
Now here is a clever idea, a USB memory device that is about the same size as a business card. The obvious (to me at least) would be as a portfolio vehicle for artists and designers. Just remember to make a Mac and a PC version and include return postage and your ready to wow the future clients.
Doggy Player
This could be a cool toy to have around, maybe… The display on its head is polychromatic and does tricks and what not so it will give you nice visuals while playing your tunes in addition to moving about a bit. But thats not all! It can make up it’s own ‘music’ from an internal supply of clips. As long as it won’t walk off my desk it could be pretty cool if you set it to ‘trance’ and go to work on some OT at the office.
(I think that the name will change if it ever to be sold here, Apple may say that ‘iDog’ dilutes the ‘iMac’ name….)
The site is in Japanese and in Flash so translating it is of little use (I hate sites like that… When will there be a language translator for Flash pages?). You can get some pretty good looking wall papers of the iDog but they are compressed in .lzh (!) format, so you might have to hunt for a proggy to handle it.
idog???????
Here you can read about its features in English:
Sega’s idog: the iPod reborn in canine form