[William] sent in this project where he’s using his iPhone to control his TV lift. He’s made a custom PCB with a pic18f122 microprocessor to communicate with the lift. He says it connects to the lift controls via a serial port. You can see a video of it in action after the break. We really think the shadow turning into an arrow is cool. That was a lucky accident.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Smai_Z_galE]
iPhones and iPod touches have many advantages over the plain iPod. Have you ever wished you could advance tracks without looking though? That is a perfect example of where the current display/ input trends are lacking. There is no tactile feedback. [Chris Harrison], a Ph.D student at Carnegie Mellon has been working on an alternative.
His displays are rear projected and multitouch like many of the other multitouch systems we’ve seen. However, his also offer tactile feedback by changing their physical shape. Much like a vac-u-form, he is using vacuum to deform a flexible surface over different shapes. Not only are they able to do simple 2 state systems where you have smooth, then vacuumed, they can also do a third state by pressurizing the inside of the display. You can see several variations in the video.
Sometimes you find yourself thinking “this cell phone is far to compact and unobtrusive.” [Trotmaster] had this thought and did something about it. Ok, well actually he’s trying to have some fun and build a glove phone, inspector gadget style. There really doesn’t seem to be a good reason to do this other than it would be cool, so we’ll proceed on those grounds. He has disassembled the phone and extended all the buttons. When wearing the glove, you can dial by pressing the finger tip buttons with your thumb. The screen is located on the back of the hand and can be lifted and rotated for easy viewing. Can anyone think of an application where this would be a beneficial layout, assuming you refined it a bit?
[via instructables]
There’s a new show coming to the Discovery Chanel called Weaponizers. Brought to you by the same people who brought you Mythbusters, this show centers around weaponizing and remote controlling cars. They’ll be building them with several different types of competition in mind, including defense of an object and all out warfare. You’ll note in the press release that they keep mentioning their special effects backgrounds. Judging by the picture above, we should expect to see them shooting lots of fireworks, maybe some flame throwers thrown in. Generally, we think we’ll see lots of flashy stuff that really isn’t effective at destroying an unmanned car. They do mention live ammunition, so maybe they’ll actually try to make these things able to harm each other. Let’s hope they don’t let us down.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ioV2Dj56iw]
Inspired by this year’s april fools day joke from Opera, [Jason] has made facial gesture recognition actually work. While this may seem like a silly project, it could seriously help some people out. This could be a great accessibility tool for people with motor control limitations.He states that it has some problems right now, most notably a performance issue with extended use, so he’s hoping to get some input from some bright minds.
[thanks, Jordan]
[vimeo=4370631]
Cloud Mirror is an interactive art installation that combines you and your easily available online information in real time. Attendees stood in front of the camera and held up their badges. Cloud Mirror then projected them on the wall and displayed a speech bubble containing information from the web. In the example after the break, you can see our very own [Eliot] displayed with his most recent twitter post. To add another layer to it, you could send a text message with someone’s badge ID to the system and it will display your message in that person’s bubble.
Though Time won’t admit it, their poll on the most influential person was hacked. Moot, the founder of 4chan is rated #1. Not only that, but if you read the first letters of the poll results, you get “Marblecake also the game”. This refers to the IRC Chanel where many 4channers congregate as well as “the game” an internet meme. This article is very interesting as it delves into the details of the attack. Focusing mainly on what happened when the autovoting software was shut down due to reCaptcha. you’ve probably seen reCaptcha before. It presents you with two words, made difficult to read by strange kearning, warping, and squiggles. If you can read it, you’re most likely a human. Anon, a common name for 4channers, first tried to hack reCaptcha.
Their attempt at hacking reCaptcha relies on the process reCaptcha uses to identify words. It presents you with two words, one of which it already knows. The other is compared to a database of common responses to that word. Anon decided that if they entered “penis” enough times, they could flood the database allowing their autovoter to function again. This, though clever, was unsuccessful. They eventually settled on manual voting. This was taking too much time, they feared they would never reach their goals. To help with this, they built a simple interface that would preload several reCaptchas and cue up votes. This streamlining allowed them to squeak in the votes they needed to accomplish this.
It’s also worth noting that Time didn’t close the vote entries when the poll closed. They removed the poll from their site, but the streamlined vote software was still working. Anon is a powerful force of nature. If only we could harness it to cure cancer or HIV.
