D G

Thanks Mike (from Spain)

 

Thanks DGNB

 

Thanks DGNB

 

Thanks TPG

 

Thanks Tommy Salami

 

Since breaking out on Arrested Development a decade ago, Michael Cera has gotten a lot of flack for his tendency to stick to the George-Michael Bluth type — awkward, timid, but fundamentally sweet. But just as George-Michael has matured into a more confident, independent young man in the new fourth season of the series, Cera’s started to branch out into darker, stranger material.

Among his intriguing recent work is Sebastián Silva‘s psychological thriller Magic Magic, in which he plays one of several jerks that poor fragile Alicia (Juno Temple) has the misfortune of getting stuck with during a Chilean vacation. Emily Browning, Agustín Silva, and Catalina Sandino Moreno also star. Watch the new trailer after the jump.

Magic Magic drew mostly positive reviews at Sundance. Our own Russ Fischer complimented its unsettling feel:

Programmed as part of the Midnight series at Sundance, there’s the implication that Silva’s film is a horror picture. And it is, to a certain extent, but it’s of the sort seen in Roman Polanski movies such as Repulsion and The Tenant. As with Stoker, this is a horror film where the monsters are simply people; here, they’re too selfish and short-sighted to see what damage they’re doing.

In its best moments, Magic Magic has far more power to unnerve than most horror. The disintegration of one girl’s psyche is rendered in such familiar, insistent terms that you might feel your own sanity crack slightly while the film runs.

Unfortunately, while that kind of deep discomfort may make for interesting viewing, it’s probably not the best way to attract mainstream moviegoers. As such, Sony’s chosen to give Magic Magic a straight-to-DVD release starting August 6.

But fans of Silva and Cera can take some comfort in the fact that Magic Magic is just one of two collaborations they have out this year. The other, the drug-fueled comedy Crystal Fairy, is getting a proper (if limited) theatrical release thanks to IFC Films on July 12.

• ‘Magic Magic’ Review: Michael Cera Pushes Juno Temple Into Madness [Sundance 2013]
• Casting Bits: Topher Grace in ‘Gently Down the Stream;’ 50 Cent in ‘Odd Thomas;’ Juno Temple in ‘Magic, Magic’
• ‘Crystal Fairy’ Review: Michael Cera Quests For an Ecstatic Drug Trip [Sundance 2013]
• Michael Cera Cast in ‘Magic Magic’
• Sundance 2013 Adds Four Films Including Quentin Dupieux’s Work In Progress With Marilyn Manson And ‘El Mariachi’
• Michael Cera Learning Spanish For Sebastian Silva’s Next Film

It's the year of Luigi, but apparently Nintendo doesn't want him headlining a major trade show, so instead we get a charming little video about the game that takes place partially in his mind. It's the Herman's Head of video games. Yeah, I just pulled that out.

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When we (Matthew was complicit!) recently posted a photo showing that you could see the rear of an owl’s eyes through its ears, some confusion ensued, and we didn’t know whether that photo involved removing part of the owl’s ear to expose the inside of its head. So the burning question remained: can you really see the back of an owl’s eye through its ears?  We now have the answer.

Thanks to an alert reader, Dr. Kelly Williams of the Department of Biological Sciences at Ohio University in Athens, we’ve learned that the original post was indeed correct. If you peer into an owl’s ear-hole, at least in a saw-whet owl, you can see its eye. Kelly sent an email and photos documenting this amazing fact (reproduced with permission):

Just thought I’d give some info on the photo of the external ear and eye of the owl picture that was posted. The hand holding the owl [JAC: in the original photo] is mine and the owl was indeed alive and flew off just fine. We host several hundred visitors each year to our Northern Saw-whet Owl fall migration station and frequently gently part the feathers (as you saw in the photo) to show people the asymmetrical ear openings. I’ve attached my own photos (so not my hand this time) that show each side. Saw-whets are one of 3 species of owl in NA that have an asymmetrical shape to their external auditory meatus (several species have one ear higher than the other – like the barn owl). In Europe, I believe a greater proportion of owls have this asymmetry. The eye is supported by a sclerotic ossicle.

I believe the picture that was posted was taken by Jim McCormac—more photos and information are at his blog. (If you think the ear and eye are neat – check out the black light photos of the wing that fluoresce pink due to the porphyrins).

Here it is: an unretouched and intact living owl. The eye is clearly visible through the earhole:

And here’s the lovely creature itself, looking a bit peeved (but owls always look peeved):

And here are two pictures from McCormac’s website, Ohio Birds and Biodiversity. The first shows the wings fluorescing pink, the second the total cuteness of these tiny owls (the Linnaean binomial is Aegolius acadicus).

Finally, here’s one of Kelly’s PowerPoint slides showing the asymmetry of the saw-whet skull. It’s quite striking. I’m pretty sure it’s directionally asymmetrical; that is, it’s not random which ear is up and which is down. But that raises the question of how, during ear development, the skull “knows” which side is right and which is left.  (By “knowing”, of course, I mean that there must be some biochemical/genetic cues that distinguish right from left.)

The last we heard of the Power Mac G4 Cube—a computer everyone loved, but no one could quite figure out—was in a press release from 2001. Twelve years later, we've finally met its beautiful, brilliant, and not altogether sane successor.

Back in July of 2001, the future of the Cube wasn't entirely clear. In a press release, Apple's reps explained their reasoning:

“Apple® today announced that it will suspend production of the Power Mac™ G4 Cube indefinitely. The company said there is a small chance it will reintroduce an upgraded model of the unique computer in the future, but that there are no plans to do so at this time.

‘Cube owners love their Cubes, but most customers decided to buy our powerful Power Mac G4 minitowers instead,’ said Philip Schiller, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing.”

And with that, Apple killed one of the most innovative personal computers it had ever produced. Placed between Apple’s entry-level iMac and high-end Power Mac, the Cube was too expensive for consumers and not expandable enough for pros. Still, everyone loved it because it was, for lack of a better description, awesome. And so, for the last twelve years, we hung onto that “small chance" that Apple would reintroduce the Cube, hoping that someday, the product’s concept would finally make sense.

That day came yesterday.

The Concept

Last week, I wrote about the future of the Mac Pro, a time-tested machine that had slowly become the most anachronistic product from Apple’s hardware offerings. As I saw it, the company had four options: kill the Mac Pro, give the current Mac Pro case a spec bump, evolve the design, or completely change the game.

Apple obviously went with the fourth option. It’s important to consider it they would choose this path over the others. Successful revolutions of product archetypes occur when a team realizes that an underlying technology has advanced or been replaced. This is what happened with the iPhone. Every mobile phone company in the world had touchscreen designs they never released; Apple, though, was the first to realize that touch screens had caught up in usability and manufacturability. In cases like this, it pays to be the first to discover and take advantage of the opportunity. Usually, it puts you years ahead of the competition, which is stuck making products the old way.

Conversely, sometimes the archetype is too advanced for the underlying technology. For example, Alan Kay came up with the idea for a thin device with a keyboard that could be carried around like a book back in the 1970s. But it wasn’t until the 90s that computing technology could even approach what he had in mind, and it wasn’t until the 2010s that the tablet truly came of age. You can’t force an idea if the tech isn’t there to support it.

The concept of the new Mac Pro is very similar to that of the old Cube: A powerhouse PC that is very small and externally upgradable. That concept was not viable in 2000, when all we had for I/O was FireWire 400 and USB 1.1. Fast forward to 2013, and the technology has caught up to the archetype. We now have Thunderbolt 2, 802.11ac, and USB 3, not to mention cloud storage options. The expandability limitations are gone.

Put simply, we’ve come to a tipping point where the internals of a tower PC limit upgradability more than the externals do. There will be users who will miss optical media and PCI card slots—just like there were users who missed SCSI and floppy drives—but the vast majority of what gets added on to a pro computer today is done externally.

The Design

Let me just say this about the Mac Pro: this type of design can only be produced by a company that is first, truly led by its industrial design team, and second, completely nuts. No sane engineer would ever let this leave the design stage because it goes against everything you’re supposed to do with electronics. You’re supposed to arrange boards parallel to each other to maximize space efficiency. You’re supposed to have I/O ports that attach to the board in parallel, not perpendicularly. You’re supposed to end up with something that is roughly the shape of a box, because that's the easiest and most efficient way to manufacture a device.

To get a design that looks like this on the outside, you have to start with the inside. Like the Cube, the new Mac Pro is designed around a thermal core that pulls air from the bottom to the top of the machine. Unlike the Cube, which relied on convection cooling alone, the Pro has a fan located at the top of the machine to accelerate the air moving through it. Apple is using some of the same tricks it first used on the Retina MacBook Pro to ensure the fan runs as quietly as possible with a specially designed blade.

The triangular thermal core is a single piece of extruded aluminum that has been machined, and anodized black to act as a large heat sink. Extruding aluminum is a lot like using the old Play-Doh Extruder, except you’re using aluminum instead of Play-Doh. Large, solid billets of aluminum are heated in an oven and then forced through a small die. That triangular-shaped core comes out of the extruder as one large tube. Here's a video demonstrating the process:

After the tube is cooled, it gets cut into shorter sections and then goes through a series of secondary machining operations, creating mounting fixtures that allow other parts to attach directly to the core. Herein lies the beauty of the thermal core design. Not only does it act as a cooling chamber, it also provides the underlying structure for the entire device. Every component attaches directly to the core—boards, fan, the base, and even the outer housing. It’s an extension of Apple’s "unibody" philosophy: Several parts are replaced by one well-designed part. This allows Apple to reduce complexity and invest money in making the remaining parts much higher quality.

The outer housing is made through a process called impact extrusion, shown in the video above. This process is commonly used to make products like Sigg water bottles. A solid puck of aluminum, called a slug, is loaded into the machine and then punched into shape in one quick motion. After this step, the part goes through a series of secondary operations that cut the holes for the I/O and add the now-trademark Apple polished chamfer. The part is then polished and anodized black, creating a mirrored black finish.

Here again, Apple took the hard way out. A typical sandblasted finish—like you would see on the back of the iPhone 5—hides imperfections in the surface. Polishing makes imperfections more pronounced. Basically, Apple needs to get the housing absolutely perfect before it gets polished.

Small Details That Caught My Eye

• The location of power button could be problematic. Maybe people will be more likely to leave their Mac Pros on their desks now that they are so tiny, but no one will be able to hide them under a desk because the power button is hidden amongst the back ports. Of course, why would you want to hide something that looks this good, but it’s still a pain in the butt. Another point—because the housing is polished, you’re going to leave a ton of fingerprints on the case when you hunt around for the power. A possible solution: What if the top of thermal core, inside the outer housing where I think the antennas are located, was one large power button? It would be hidden from view and would be a cool way to interact with the machine.

• Black. Everything—the board, the aluminum inner structure, the fasteners—is jet black. It looks sinister. In a good way.

• Backlit ports. The ports on the back are backlit when you turn the machine around to plug in a new device. Of course they do.

• Polished chamfer. The detail that was first seen on the iPhone 5 and then propagated over to the iPod line and iPad mini shows up here as well. This is typically an expensive process, but Apple gets away with it because of economies of scale. A classic Ive & Cook mindmeld. If you use an expensive process on your entire product line over the course of millions of products, you’re going to dramatically lower its cost. Aesthetically, I like it much more on the Mac Pro than I do on Apple’s other products. On the Pro it’s a nice detail that makes you want to peer into the core of the beast. On products like the iPhone 5, I think it’s a bit too distracting.

• Antennas. After trying to figure out how Apple was sending Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals through the all metal casing, I think I found an the answer. The antennas seem to be located at the very top of the Mac Pro, just inside the opening to the thermal core. It’s likely that the domed part that covers the fan’s motor is a material that allows signals to pass through it. Possibly glass or plastic.

• Assembled in the US. To get this designation, you have to meaningfully modify the components to get the product to its finished state. You can’t just ship a product to the US, put it in a box and slap a “Assembled in USA” sticker on it. If I had to guess, most of the electronics were made overseas, while the housing, assembly of the product, and packaging were made in the US. Good for Apple for taking another step down this route.

• Beyond the desktop. Can you imagine how cool server farms of these things are going to look? If I had to design a data center I would, without a doubt, arrange Mac Pros like the pod towers from The Matrix.

It’s hard not to gush about the Mac Pro. The conceptual thinking behind the device is equalled by its design execution. If the final product Apple releases later this year matches the promise made yesterday, this is as close to perfect as you can make a pro desktop computer in 2013.

Looking at this machine, you can understand the 8 Mile, “Lose Yourself” moment Phil Schiller had on stage yesterday. “Can’t innovate anymore my ass,” he said, literally losing himself in the moment and looking to pick a fight. If you go back and listen to his introduction you can practically hear the adrenaline rushing through his voice as he shoved the question of Apple losing its touch back in the face of its critics. This machine has swagger—and apparently, Apple still does too.

From Slice

I grew up bouncing back and forth between New York and Boston, which, conveniently, put me right in the path of the pizza behemoth known as New Haven, home to some of the world's finest pizzas (or apizza in the local vernacular, pronounced uh-beets), and originator of the clam pie.

Now, at most of the great pizzerias in that neck of the woods—Pepe's, Sally's, and Modern being the big three—fresh clams have taken a back seat to pre-shucked clams. Don't get me wrong, the pies are still great. I love the way the clam juice leaks around and mixes up with the cheese, olive oil, herbs, pepper flakes, and garlic that are standard on a clam pie. But something certainly gets lost when the clams are pre-shucked. Need proof? Just visit Zuppardi's in West Haven, where the clams are shucked fresh to order before being spread onto the pies. The flavor is better, the clams are juicier; it's just a better eating experience.

Clam pizza is the kind of pie that you need to start eating immediately after it's cut into slices, before the copious clam juices have a chance to render the crust completely soggy (though some degree of sogginess is inevitable—some people even consider it a feature).

Even so, roasting a clam in the open heat of an oven is still not the ideal way to do it, even if its been freshly shucked.

Want to know the secret to the absolute tenderest, most flavorful clams and juiciest clam pizza around? Place the whole, unshucked clams on that pie before baking. It may look strange at first, and it will definitely look strange when it comes out of the oven, but the clams will be insanely tender and you won't lose a single drop of those precious juices.

I place the clams on the pie with their hinges pointed down, and then bake the pie as I normally would (in this case I did it on my KettlePizza-converted grill). If all goes well, and there's no reason it shouldn't, the pizza will finish baking just as the clams start to crack open, spilling their juices over the top of the pie.

You can serve the pie as-is and let people pull out their own clams as they eat, but I prefer to be nice about it and finish prying the little guys open, shucking out the meat, and depositing them, along with their juices, into the wells left behind from the shells.

Get The Recipe!

Pizza with Fresh Clams, Garlic, Mozzarella, Romano, and Basil »

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

Get the Recipe!

Wiring everyone up to a single power grid is all well and good—until there's an outage. But what if we could mitigate outages by supplementing the one big grid with lots of smaller ones powered by renewable energy? The Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project aims to find out.

The five-year, $178 million Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project is a massive public-private partnership led by Batelle and involving 17 organizations, from energy companies to the University of Washington, across five states—Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. The 60,000-customer pilot program acts as a testbed for cutting edge technologies designed to improve the region's energy reliability. Among the most promising of these new technologies is the recent installation of a 5 MW lithium-ion energy storage system (read: a very big battery).

Developed by Portland General Electric, the $23-million-dollar system works just like the li-ion pack in your laptop except it powers a microgrid providing uninterupted power to 500 southeast Salem customers during outages for up to a half hour. The battery banks are located in the nondescript 8,000 square-foot facility in Southwest Salem, below. What's more, the system can also pull and store excess power generated by local renewable energy sources, like the 616-panel solar array on the roof of the Salem-based Kettle Chips factory.

This microgrid communicates with the larger power grid through a new system known as transactive control. As Geoffrey Harvey of the Pacific Northwest National Lab explains,

The energy storage system will respond to regional grid conditions with the help of a key aspect of the demonstration called transactive control. Transactive control is based on technology from DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which is managed by Battelle. The technology helps power producers and users decide how much of the area’s power will be consumed, when and where. This is done when producers and users automatically respond to signals representing future power costs and planned energy consumption. The cost signals originate at Battelle’s Electricity Infrastructure Operations Center in Richland, Wash. They are updated every five minutes and sent to the project’s participating utilities, including PGE.

The automated signals allow project participants to make local decisions on how their piece of the smart grid project can support local and regional grid needs. Participants are now gathering data to measure how the signal can help deliver electricity more effectively, help better integrate wind power onto the power grid and more. The Salem battery will use the signal to coordinate its charge and discharge cycles with the power grid’s supply and demand.

"Two-way information exchange in the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project allows grid operators to make the existing electric grid more efficient, while also exploring how using other technologies such as PGE's energy storage system, smart appliances and wind power can bolster the reliability of our system," Carl Imhoff, Battelle's Richland Electricity Infrastructure Market Sector manager, said in a press release.

This project will continue to run until 2015, at which point "Micro-grid islanding will be evaluated for its potential to enhance reliability for customers and relieve energy demand," according to the project's abstract. If they're deemed successful, the technology could be scaled up to ensure that even facing Hurricane Sandy levels of infrastructure destruction, the lights will stay on. [PNNL - PN News - Portland General Electric - Smart Grid - Battelle - Images: PNNL]

The Sandlot came out 20 years ago, but the actors who played Squints and Ham in the coming-of-age movie look like they haven’t changed a bit.

Patrick Renna and Chauncey Leopardi, who played the baby-faced Ham and scheming Squints in the 1993 movie about a group of friends, have been making the rounds this summer in celebration of the movie’s anniversary. This week they showed up at a Minnesota Twins game, joining the announcing crew to talk about the movie and its impact.

Renna talked a bit about his favorite lines — including “You’re killing me, smalls” — and Leopardi said his favorite was “L-7 weenie.” For fans of the baseball film, it was a nice reminder of the movie packed with a surprising amount of heart.

Leopardi has not been terribly active in Hollywood in recent years. He was in a number of movies after The Sandlot, including four in 1995 and a stint as the bully Alan White on the coming-of-age television show Freaks and Geeks., but then moved out of acting.

Patrick Renna has also been largely out of acting since the mid 2000s. He had a busy period in the mid-to-late 1990s, but hasn’t appeared in a movie since 2009. He is set to play himself in the upcoming The Man With The Misshapen Head.

Even if they were to leave acting entirely, Renna and Leopardi would be remembered fondly along with the rest of the cast of The Sandlot. Though moderately popular at the time, the movie grew a strong following in the years since as every generation can connect with at least some part of the story.

David Mickey Evans, the director of the movie and its 2005 sequel, has been traveling around the country as part of The Sandlot reunion. He has held a number of screenings of the movie, including one at Target Field in Minneapolis.

More pictures of The Sandlot reunion between Squints and Ham can be found here.

‘The Sandlot’ Stars Reunite For 20th Anniversary, Still Look The Same is a post from: The Inquisitr

Apple revealed an entirely new look for its iPhone and iPad operating system, iOS, yesterday.

Called iOS 7, the redesign was the first major re-do under new Apple design boss Jony Ive.

It's also the first since the death of Steve Jobs.

iOS 7 is supposed to be more modern – sleek, minimal, elegant, and functional.

When Apple showed it off to a room packed with Apple developers at the Moscone Center in San Francisco yesterday, iOS 7 got a standing ovation.

One of the people in the room who was not so impressed is Josh Topolsky, the editor of The Verge who sometimes goes on Jimmy Fallon to talk about the latest gadgets.

Topolsky has a post on The Verge tearing into iOS 7.

He hates the new icons Apple gave its pre-installed apps. He hates that they are all of different styles. He says one, Game Center, is a abstract "glob" and another, for the Camera, looks like "clip-art. "It looks shockingly basic, and not elegant, but childish." He hates that the weather icon doesn't show the current weather. He writes: "there's an enormous feeling that Apple's designers couldn't decide on a direction."

He doesn't like Apple's fixes to the notification center. "Notifications will still interrupt your work at the top of the screen, and when you slide down the panel you're now presented with options to flip between the kinds of notifications you want to see. Even closing notifications looks harder, the small "X" box now nearly invisible against that soft blur background."

He's unimpressed with the "Control Center." "Control Center" is a new menu for toggling thing likes Wi-Fi on and off that you access by swiping up. He writes, "It feels like for lack of a better location Apple lumped all the other stuff into a single, messy space that floats above your onscreen content, making the already busy utility a visual strain."

In the end Topolsky does give Apple credit for using a new, easier-to-read typeface and building in better multi-tasking.

But even those compliments come with a left-handed one.

He writes: "Apple is showing that it can adapt, borrow, and tweak ideas from the competition."

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Public opinion has changed drastically in the past week, with gamers running away from Microsoft's coming-soon game console, the Xbox One, and toward Sony's, the PlayStation 4.

On Amazon, PS4 pre-orders outnumber Xbox One pre-orders.

Here's how Sony did it.

• Unrestricted Used Games: Unlike Microsoft, Sony announced zero restrictions on its used games, enabling gamers to swap, trade in, sell, and give away their games without limitation.
• Price: Sony undercut Microsoft's base price by $100. The PlayStation 4 will be available for $399.
• Full Offline Capability: While the Xbox One requires a daily online check-in and verification, Sony won't require any such procedure. No internet connection — no problem.
• Design: Sony's aesthetic nod to the PlayStation 2 was a modern take on a classic design.
• Focus on Games: Sony still has social integration, but the console's overall focus is still on creating the best gaming console possible. The Xbox One, however, has marketed itself as the one media device that can do it all. Purists were drawn to Sony's more narrow focus on gaming.
• Camera Not Required: With both consoles offering cameras for motion-controlled games, you don't need to have it connected in order to use the PlayStation 4. Microsoft requires the camera to be plugged in at all times — fueling Orwellian comparisons. 

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A California obesity campaign has come under fire after health officials photoshopped a young girl to make her look fat.

The campaign by agency First 5 was attempting to warn parents about giving their children sugary drinks.

In the advertisement the agency says we need to “nurture and protect our most precious resource — our children,” which may be the case but perhaps not in the way the campaign was carried out.

The original and digitally enhanced photos were placed next to one another for illustration purposes by Marilyn Wann. The FAT!SO? : Because You Don’t Have to Apologize for Your Size author then wrote:

“Children deserve to be protected from this kind of damaging fearmongering. (And from creepy Photoshopping!).”

Wann then continues:

‘It was so mindblowingly hateful that I Photoshopped them together and posted them on Facebook and on Tumblr.”

“Sugary drinks like juice, sports drinks and soda can cause obesity. Choose milk and water instead.”

According to First 5 spokeswoman Lindsay Van Laningham:

‘The ad was intended to show parents the real-life consequences of obesity and what sugar can do to our children’s lives.”

Laningham continues:

“They are just stock images which were Photoshopped. When you are handing a child soda or a juice box to drink you might as well be handing them a packet of sugar. Because that’s what happening.”

In the meantime experts in the field continue to argue over the impact of the campaign. While some experts believe such scare tactics can work, others claim we need to “fight obesity and not obese people.”

Are you shocked by the California obesity campaign and its photoshopped little girl?

California Obesity Campaign Under Fire For Digitally Fattening Little Girl is a post from: The Inquisitr

In an interview from Hong Kong with journalist Glenn Greenwald, 29-year-old NSA technologist Ed Snowden reveals that he leaked documents revealing that the NSA was wiretapping millions of innocent US citizens. If you want to understand the future of government, you must watch this video.

Read more...

Russian Kid At Club Can’t Be Bothered

Google Reader, the news reading app that lets you pull in stories from just about any blog or news site, will discontinue on July 1.

It's a beloved Google product, and the company caused quite the firestorm when it announced Reader's demise in March.

In an interview with Wired, Google's senior director of news and social products Richard Gringras said part of the reason why Reader is going away is because people consume news much differently nowadays. Specifically, people prefer to get their news in short snippets through Twitter and other sources.

Here's Gringras:

As a culture we have moved into a realm where the consumption of news is a near-constant process. Users with smartphones and tablets are consuming news in bits and bites throughout the course of the day — replacing the old standard behaviors of news consumption over breakfast along with a leisurely read at the end of the day.

Read the rest on Wired >

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Five weeks before it's set to release the next series in its original-content push, Netflix previews the women's prison drama/comedy with a trailer on its YouTube channel. [Read more]

Ricky, you nasty fuck.

This is the Omni 'Move Naturally In Your Favorite Game' system. Oh, it's not actually a treadmill by the way, it's just slick plastic that you wear special shoes on that give just the right amount of slip and traction so you can run around in there chasing bad guys and shooting them with your gun. Just like a Navy Seal. Well, if Navy Seals didn't get winded after one round and have to take an energy drink break.

The Omni takes virtual reality to the next level-- allowing anyone to stand up and traverse virtual worlds with the natural use of their own feet. The Omni is the first virtual reality interface for moving freely and naturally in your favorite game. Moving naturally in virtual reality creates an unprecedented sense of immersion that cannot be experienced sitting down. That's why we developed the Omni. The Omni is a fully integrated VR interface that comes with sophisticated tracking hardware and software and is ready to play, out of the box, with any game or app that uses keyboard input.

Currently, $430 will get you the whole Omni system including a pair of the special shoes in your size. And, since the Omni has already surpassed it's $150,000 Kickstarter funding goal by over 4X in just three days, production is definitely a go. I guess a lot of people really do want a more immersive virtual reality experience. Or at least think they do until they realize running around for an hour in virtual reality takes the same effort as running around for an hour in real life. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking the system at all, I'm just clearing some room under my bed to store the thing after my first heart attack. Hit the jump for another shot of the system, a shot of a shoe, and several video demos including a walking tour of Riften in Skyrim.

Have a good weekend!

Cow from Nova Jiang on Vimeo.

Hi, it's late on a Friday, it's raining and horrible in the northeast and I'm drinking whiskey (Ed. note: Dan, didn't I fire you already?) and here's, like, the best thing I've seen all week. It's a Rube Goldberg machine, only it's wooden (cool!) and it's modelled after a cow's gastrointestinal system, which is complicated and not very much like our own, what with the chewing of cud and the several stomachs and all.

Make sure to stick around until it poops.

[University of California Research via Lindsey Weber]

Of the contact lens display prototypes that we've seen so far, few if any are focused on comfort -- a slight problem when they're meant to sit on our eyeballs. A collaboration between Samsung and multiple universities may solve this with display tech that's meant to be cozy from the start. By putting silver nanowires between graphene layers, researchers have created transparent conductors that can drive LEDs while remaining flexible enough to sit on a contact lens. Current test lenses only have one pixel, but they're so soft that rabbits can wear them for five hours without strain. Scientists also see the seemingly inevitable, Glass-like wearable display as just one development path -- they're working on biosensors and active vision correction. While there's still a long way to go before we reach a cyberpunk future of near-invisible displays, we may finally have some of the groundwork in place.

Filed under: Displays, Wearables, Science, Samsung

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Via: MIT Technology Review

Source: ACS Publications