Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
These are great toys. If you ever see one at a yard sale you should not hesitate to buy it ASAP. Not only is it a feat of engineering magic, it’s also hackable. The ICybie site is full of links to info on how to modify and program new cartridges to create personalities, make an RS-232 connection to your PC, and even write your own code in for it.
The grand bin of links and hacks!
[AiboHack] ICybiePet’s ICybie Site
Official site Silverlit
Now THIS is a TV show that I want to see.
Q-TARO.COM POST: Rocket Punch!
I found some more photos of the show here:
Rocket Punch (it will re-size your browser, darn it!)
If anyone has more info on this TV show, like if it has a web page, please leave a comment!
Ah, more virtual reality coming into world. Hopefuly out of the labs and into our homes as well.
Augmented Maps, engineered at Cambridge University, is a system which augments an ordinary paper map with additional information by projecting it onto the map’s surface.
Augmented reality brings maps to life
Who would have thought, origami camping stuff. It would be nice to be able to heat foods in these but I think that would be asking a lot.
These books are a wonderful read, cover to cover you will find contraptions and ideas for solving all sorts of problems of every day life.
Many of them may have been practical years ago but are now jaw dropingly weird, but they will still make you knock away the cobwebs in your brain and appreciate the cleverness of these books.
Volume one is available from Project Gutenberg as a free download (its over 500 pages long!) as it’s now out of print but volume three you can buy from Lindsay’s Technical Books (a goldmine of almost forgotten information can be found there!). It would be worth looking for volume one on eBay just because having a nicely bound book is a heck of a lot better than a stack of papers held together with binder clips.
The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 by Popular Mechanics
The Boy Mechanic: Volume 3 from Lindsay Books
Augmented reality and virtual spaces are going to become more and more common simply because the hardware is dropping in price. Nowadays a video projector and good graphics card will only set you back a few hundred bucks and sensor technology is getting real cheap too. The Augmented Coliseum is a fine example of how this technology can enhance a real world application.
The University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo has developed Augmented Coliseum, an amazing (just have a look at the video) augmented reality game environment that enables virtual functions for playing a game using small robots and vehicles, superimposing computer graphics onto toys in the real world.
The remote-controlled vehicles scurry around, while status circles and other data are projected on the surface. As the vehicle moves, cameras and photo-detectors relay the movement to tracking software.
Images are projected to the areas corresponding to the actual positions and directions of the toys: virtual laser beams and missiles appear to fly out of the real vehicles; explosions are overlayed on the screen as they connect with their targets.
