Gizmo Watch

Sound Asleep has announced a memory foam version of its musical pillow for more comfort and fun. Yes, sleeping with the earphones clipped gets painful to the ears, but the idea of a foam pillow with built-in speakers is good to satiate those music frenzies amid us. The Sound Asleep memory foam pillow allows the user to attach an iPod or a MP3 player into it so that he can enjoy his favorite music right below the ears, all painless and comfortably. Selling for a price of about $50, the memory foam pillow is also accompanied by the company’s inflatable chair, which lets the user stick iPods, MP3 players and a TV to it.

Tired of moving your fingers over multitouch surfaces, then this transparent glass display from Microsoft Research, which lets the body to be used as a control mechanism, is sure to be your liking. On display in various colleges across the United States, this prototype display recognizes inputs through touch-free gestures and eye-tracking. The content on the display can be manipulated with the help of voice commands or some other notable hand gestures, and in case you’re concentrating too much on something particular, the computer interface can automatically enlarge the same based on the eye-tracking technology. Check out the video demonstrations of the transparent computer prototype on istartedsomething.

To know why a baby is crying is perhaps a mother’s biggest problem, but it’s time now for all mums to rejoice, for an iPhone application is here to figure out the same in just 10 seconds. From Biloop Technologic in Barcelona, the Cry Translator is quick to identify a child’s cry, based on five emotional conditions reflected out of hunger, sleep, stress or if the baby is bored.

The $29.99 app has been clinically tested to be 96% accurate, and is easy to use, trigged to work with only a touch of the Start button. Besides analyzing and informing the parents about the cause of the baby’s cry, the app also advices on what to do, depending on the translation it manages. The application is currently on sale for $9.99 until November 11, 2009.

Via: GadgetLab/HuffingtonPost

Remote control cars have matured big time lately. Breaking the bounds of being only toys for child play; these cars have reached the limits of functional technology. Affirming the same is the G-Bound, a remote controlled amphibious car from CCP, a subsidiary company of the Japanese giant toy maker Bandai. As mentioned the USP of this 9V battery powered R/C car is that besides the trilling rides on land the car can also float in water. This is possible because of its waterproof body and the tires that inflate to keep it from sinking. You’ll have to be in the range of ten meters to keep the car moving, so only a nearby pool would be a good idea, or else the outing with the R/C car could fail for you.

Now, this could be the way we’d read the newspapers in the near future, or are e-book readers or good old paper better? Come, you take a pick, but do read this to decide.

Designed by a group of students af the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, the Infractor is an interactive and artistic software application that is based on the article database of the New York Times i.e. information from 1985 to the present. Being an interactive application, it is developed basically for a multitouch table; wherein more than one person can work together at the same application.

Not many of us are seen playing pinball anymore. No matter how addicted we may have been to the game back in its time, it has lost out now. Nanotech, however, wishes to revive the lost era of pinball, and has thus popped up the Multipin, a digital pinball simulator. Living that authenticity and size of the classic pinballer, the Multipin is a collection of 17 pinball machines finding refuge in a single electronic cabinet.

The gamers can enjoy a number of original pinball games along with some new and more gripping ones on the Multipin’s 32-inch 720p High Definition LCD monitor. The second LCD screen featured under the cabinet’s backglass display, displays scores, game graphics etc. The entire gaming experience is made all modernly-nostalgic with the machine’s mechanical plunger, clicky flipper buttons, classic trappings and wonderful music you’ll just love to hear through your gaming routine. In case you’re willing to try your hands on the Multipin, then do check out the video below. The Multipin is available for $6000 over at Hammacher.

Scientists from the VTT Technical Research Center of Finland and the Helsinki University of Technology have developed a loudspeaker system, which unlike ever before, uses tiny aluminum wires suspended like a bridge between two supports to create a wide range of thermoacoustic applications. We’ve seen the technique of thermoacoustics tamed by the Chinese researchers in their effort to create a loudspeaker from carbon nanotubes, but this Finnish process may just be a simplification of the technique.

Herein, the aluminum wire bridge that measure 200 micrometers long, 3 micrometers wide and just 30 nanometers thick is suspended just a few micrometers above a substrate. When a controlled voltage is passed through this aluminum wire bridge, slight vibrations are generated which create tiny sound waves. By adding direct current however, researchers managed to generate speech and music from the morphed loudspeaker.

USB 3.0 is still juvenile, but it is steadily making a niche for itself. We’ve seen a storage solution and a webcam made to cope with this superfast technology, and now we have Super Talent delivering the first USB 3.0 thumb drive, the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 RAIDDRive, to impress us. Besides the fast data transfer, delivered at speeds of up to 4.8Gbps, these drives measuring 95 x 37 x 13.5mm will be made available in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB capacities sometime in December. Have you got the supporting drives and USB 3.0 ports already? If not, then you still have a long time before you can benefit from those blistering speeds guaranteed here.

Via: The Register/Pocket-lint

A walking robot done at the expense of time and money, but the result still remains to be seen. Dubbed the Gigar (what and why on Earth this, no idea), it is a DIY robot that’s been resurrected at a cost of $10,000 and with over 100 hours of labor. The two-foot humanoid is an outcome of such high cost because the designer has used Dynamixels RX-64 and RX-28 units, which come in at $300 and $200 each, respectively. The servos used are expensive, but in context to the other cheaper DIY servos, these can deliver an amazing 1,000 ounces per inch of torque. In addition the tiny little humanoid is integrated with a camera and Wi-Fi and runs on Linux. What is all this used for, hit the jump to see it for yourself in the video.

My experience with District 9, a recently released sci-fi film, wasn’t too pleasant. But that gun Wickus van de Merwe carried around in the movie was surely exciting. There’s another guy out there who feels the same about the gun. While I am only praises for it, this designer has actually made one for himself and is ready to help you build one, in case you too have the same fascination. The designer’s actually done a great job with the detailing and other aspects of the unique gun. If you’re too lazy to follow the instructions to make one for yourself, just jump over to eBay and order it here.