There are several very nice 3D mice out there for navigating services like Google Earth or Second Life. 3Dconnexion for example makes a whole line of devices for 3D navigation. Their compact units offer 6-8 degrees of freedom with several customizable options. The company has an SDK available and many of their devices are natively compatible with Linux (or available for access through an XInput driver). So while that is all well and great, lets look at some alternative ways people are navigating 3D spaces.
Day: May 30, 2008
Upcoming Convention Roundup
Lots of con news is coming in these days so lets do a quick roundup of upcoming events:
REcon
June 13-15, 2008
Montreal, Canada
REcon has started posting information about their training sessions such as the Advanced Reverse Engineering session with Nicolas Brulez.
The Last HOPE
July 18-20, 2008
New York City
The Last HOPE just announced its speaker list. It includes the infamous Kevin Mitnick, Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage, and author Steven Levy to name a few.
DEFCON 16
August 8-10, 2008
Las Vegas
The DEFCON team also released the first batch of speakers for this year’s convention. Qualification starts tonight at 10PM EST for the capture the flag (CTF) contest so be sure to get registered. Check the txt for more information. We recently talked about the beverage cooling contraption contest, but you can find many other contests on the forums.
OiNK Arrests
British authorities have reportedly begun arresting users of OiNK. Last week at least one person was arrested for seeding a single album on the now-defunct torrent index. The user was questioned by police and then released on bail.
Though it is not new for record companies to engage in civil action against users of filesharing networks, legal experts who have commented on the case are puzzled by what – if any – criminal charges can be filed against filesharing defendants. It is unknown if any further arrests have been made.
PSP External Controller Wiring
Acimods contributor [Blizzrad] has just finished one of the cleanest mods we’ve seen in a while. With minimal modification to the outside of the PSP he was able to add an external PS2 controller. This naturally took a lot of internal modification. The controller and PSP use a 25 pin SMT connector salvaged from a laptop. The controller’s connector housing is from a set of component cables. Video after the break plus some wiring pictures.
XY Fabric Interface
[Maurin Donneaud], the giant fabric keyboard builder, has also been working on the XYinteraction tactile interface. XYinteraction is made of two sheets of fabric stretched across a square frame with the conductive threads of each sheet running in opposite directions. When the user touches one of the sheets, it makes contact with the other sheet, relaying x-y coordinates to a computer via a LilyPad Arduino. More details after the break.
LED Ambient Light Strips
[Shadow] sent in his ambient LED strip project. He picked up a ton of RGB (Red/Green/Blue) LEDs off of eBay and built several LED strips. To get up and running, he used an LED-wiz controller. With the off the shelf controller, this is a pretty easy project, and the ambient lighting effect looks great. Check out the video after the break or on the project page.
In 2006, we posted about [rafkep]’s similar ambient lighting project.
Best Of The Rest
Here are some more stories from yesterday that we found interesting:
- MediaDefender takes down Revision3. Revision3 posts about it; takes down self.
- Monkey cyborg
- Multiplayer iPod Touch Pong [via Waxy]
- Powered exosuit available for preorder, 200 pound capacity
- Atari Punk Capsule [via BoingBoing]
- That CSS history leak keeps getting pitched as a feature [via Download Squad]
- Turbografx-16 emulator for iPhone
- Video of cyborg Luke arm from All Things D shows a 3 armed engineer; we’d like one too.
- Comcast gets defaced by meddling kids.
- BBtv goes to a wearable technology fashion show.
- ASUS Eee Box teardown [via Engadget]
See an interesting project? Please send us your tips!
