University research dollars poured into developing a Holodeck

holodeck-project

It may seem like this would be an early April Fool's joke, but the image above shows serious research in action. [Ben Lang] recently had the chance to interview the director of a program that wants to make the Holodeck a reality. The core goal of the research -- called Project Holodeck -- is to develop an affordable multi-player virtual reality experience outside of the laboratory. We've heard … [Read more...]

[Limor] from Adafruit to hang out with President [Obama]

adafruit_1200-1

In a positive twist on the usual publicity events that our administration has experimented with over the years, President [Obama] will be hosting a google+ hangout with some lucky people to discuss, well, whatever matters. It is nice to see the people running the country finally getting to grips with some technology. It is still scary to hear how many people making the laws about data still don't … [Read more...]

Build an eye tracking headset for $90

per_white_lines_faint_800

Eye tracking is a really cool technology used in dozens of fields ranging from linguistics, human-computer interaction, and marketing. With a proper eye tracking setup, it's possible for a web developer to see if their changes to the layout are effective, to measure how fast someone reads a page of text, and even diagnose medical disorders. Eye tracking setups haven't been cheap, though, at least … [Read more...]

Automatic, custom Eagle schematics

sch

It's a simple fact that for every circuit you design, someone else has done it before. If you're working on a high altitude balloon project, there's already a project out there with a microcontroller, barometric pressure sensor, and an SD card somewhere out there in a corner of the Internet. Google will only help so much if you want to copy these previous builds, which led [Ben] to come up with … [Read more...]

The Firecracker Crossbow

if firecracker-crossbows are outlawed, only outlaws will have firecracker-crossbows!

If there are two things that we love at [HAD], giant German firecrackers, and medieval weapons would have to be close to the top of this list. This clever hack gives us both, with a toy crossbow capable of both lighting and launching firecrackers to a safe distance. We didn't see a blooper reel, but being ready to run in case of a malfunction is probably a good idea as well. The post has some … [Read more...]