Keyboard Pants

May 11, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 44 Comments

kbpants

[Zach] sent us a link to his keyboard pants. Frankly, we were astonished, not only by his craftsmanship, but by the fact that we were working on a pair ourselves. Admittedly his are much better looking and ours will probably never be finished. The inspiration for both his and ours, was this sloppy version. [Zach’s] pair have been cut in half, and he never really found a convenient way to reconnect the two halves, so only the left works. Watch this video to see him playing some Tetris in his awesome shorts.

Mud Tub: A Tactile Computer Interface

May 11, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

mud

[Tom Gerhardt] has made this very interesting mud interface for a computer. Follow the link to see a video of it in action. It appears as though he’s using a laser grid of some kind to establish elevation. We might be way off on that though, there aren’t any details on the construction. He does mention that it is an open source hardware and software project, so maybe the details are available on request. In the video you can see it running as a projection surface where people are interacting with items directly on the mud. You can also see it being used as an external input device. People play Tetris using it in that example.

UPDATE: [Moon] reports from the ITP show that the tub has a 16×12 grid of generic pressurs sensors on the bottom. These feed into a MacBook Pro which is projecting on the surface. Despite the sparse grid, [Tom] says he gets good resolution by interpolating between sensors; it can detect a resting hand pivoting on the surface.

Fancy LED Invitations

May 11, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 26 Comments

INVITE

We would be thrilled to get something like this in the mail. What you are looking at is the inside of probably the coolest invitation ever to be mailed. This LED array was enclosed in a mirrored box so all you could see were the lit LEDs. This was then inserted into a hole all the way through a catalog. You’ll have to see the pictures on their site to get the full effect. Only 40 of these were sent out, so we probably won’t get a chance to play with one ourselves. They mentioned that the first prototype was soldered by hand, just to make sure everything worked.

[via Moritz Waldemeyer]