Gadget Hacks News

News: Hacked Kinect Captures 3D Video in Real Time

That Kinect you bought for your Xbox 360? More than just a game controller, it's a bonafide hologram generator! In the clip below, UC Davis researcher Dr. Oliver Kreylos demos the process. The fun stuff begins at the :44 mark. Kreylos explains, "By combining the color and the depth image captured by the Microsoft Kinect, one can project the color image back out into space and create a 'holographic' representation of the persons or objects that were captured."

News: 11 Dirty Tricks Played by Crooked Web Designers

Ever been Privacy Zuckered? Roach Moteled? Friend Spammed? If you've been on the net long, odds are you have — and worse! Fortunately, there's a new resource for keeping track of the web's worst design practices; it's called "Dark Patterns" and it aims to "name and shame" sites that employ "user interfaces that have been designed to trick users into doing things they wouldn't otherwise have done."

News: The Future of the Book Might Work Something Like This...

There are endless possibilities for eReaders, and lots of amazing things are already happening. But wow-worthy visual tricks aside, how can technology really change the way we consume books? In the video below design company IDEO presents three separate concepts for virtual consumption: Nelson, Coupland and Alice. IDEO groups their virtual experiences into three separate concepts: Nelson, Coupland and Alice. Core77 breaks down each concept:

News: To Live in Augmented Reality Land

What if everything in life was controlled by augmented reality? Keiichi Matsuda imagines: "The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape, more and more it is about the synthetic spaces created by the digital information that we collect, consume and organise; an immersive interface may become as much part of the world we inhabit as the buildings around us.

Water Music: Conducting with Conductivity

What do you get when you mix water-filled bowls with electrical wiring and human hands? The answer may shock you. Artists Ion Furjanic & Isaac Souweine write, "Electric Tea 1.0 is the first in a series of works that put sound where it doesn't belong. [It] uses porcelain bowls, metal orbs, speaker wire, water, and the conductive power of the human body to create a water based musical controller."

iPad Fingerpainting: Museum Worthy?

Representational painting requires great skill and practice. The best examples aptly capture light, breathing life into the work. Accurate proportion and perspective is an asset. Matching what you perceive as the correct color to what actually is the correct color requires a highly trained eye.

News: Lang Lang Proves iPad Piano Virtuosity

Another celebrity talent embraces iCulture. We know Lang Lang is the international piano rage. But allow me to make a pedestrian observation. He craves attention like a young Liberace. So, no great surprise that he would integrate an iPad into his sold out performance in San Francisco just this month. Steve Jobs has gotta be proud and beaming.

News: Fingerpainting for Baby Cyborgs

Did you ever, as a know-nothing kid, push against your closed eyelids for the pleasure of the resultant light show? LCD bending takes the low-tech fun of physical retinal stimulation and updates it for the 21st century. And, as the title suggests, the end result looks very much like a sort of angelic, fractal-based fingerpainting.