Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on October 20, 2011
Virtual Pen and Ink Lets Kids Scrawl on Walls
The KLEXL is a concept Interactive Painting machine from designer Dario Jandrijic. It tricks your kids into thinking that they are scrawling their childish rubbish onto your pristine walls, and cleanup is as easy as flicking an off-switch.
I was never allowed to draw on the walls as a kid, which was never a problem as my dad always seemed to liberate enough office stationery to keep me occupied. A friend of mine had more liberal parents, though, and his bedroom ended up painted black and with the legend “Alien Sex Fiend” on one wall. Try covering that up when you move out.
The KLEXL is a smart projector. It has an auto-focus lens which shows the actual images, and these are painted onto the wallpaper with LED-tipped pens which are detected by an infra-red tracking camera back on the base unit. To change colors, the kids just tap the pen onto a color wheel on top of the projector.
It seems perfect, letting the kids be as messy as they like without actually causing any real mess. I can see only two downsides: you’ll be training your children to write on walls, and this could go very wrong when you visit a friend who has real pens lying around. Second, you can’t put any of your offspring’s awful, lame attempts at art on the front of the refrigerator. Actually, maybe that’s a feature…
KLEXL_Interactive Painting [Coroflot via Core77]
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Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on October 15, 2010
Remote Palette Uses iPhone to Pick Colors for iPad Paintings
Remote Palette is a very neat iApp for painting pictures. The twist, which will excite anyone who has ever painted real pictures with real paint, is that the app hooks together an iPad and an iPhone (or iPod Touch). The iPad is the canvas, and the iPhone is the palette.
The app is universal, so one $0.99 download works for both devices. On launch, you pair the iPad and iPhone via Bluetooth and you’re off. Swipe between pages on the iPhone to choose your colors, and splodge the paint onto the iPad’s canvas. The experience is incredibly intuitive. Somehow it really feels like you’re transferring real paint with your finger.
If you’re expecting a full-featured painting app like Brushes or Sketchbook Pro, you’re going to be disappointed. You’re limited to the pre-defined colors and just four brushes, which vary in thickness but not texture or transparency. The app is probably great for kids, though, and even has a few coloring-book style outlines that can be used.
This should be added to Brushes ASAP. I love that app, but with a color picker on a separate screen, and maybe pinching to adjust brush sizes, it would be killer. Pretty please, Steve Sprang, add this to your app.
Remote Palette product page [iTunes]
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Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on October 14, 2010
Yummy Science: Make Squishy Circuits with Conductive Dough
If you have kids, you’re going to love the Squishy Circuits Project: it involves cooking and electronics, although not at the same time.
Squishy Circuits is a great sets of recipes from Samuel Johnson and Dr. AnnMarie Thomas at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. Essentially you will make two batches of Play-Doh, one conductive and one non-conductive, and preferably different colors. The dough can then be formed into any kind of circuit and, with the addition of some wires poking into the dough and some batteries, motors and light-bulbs, you can have yourself some sticky, squishy, educational fun.
The recipes are almost exactly the same, both based on flour, water and oil. The insulating dough has added sugar and granulated alum in the mix to keep the electrons from flowing through, and its water must be distilled. Otherwise, you already have everything you need in the pantry.
I wonder just how complex the circuits can be? My first experiment, after testing the properties of the two batches of dough, would be a swiss-roll capacitor. Imagine how useful that would be: if your phone runs out of energy, you could recharge it. If you run out of energy, you could just eat it. Yummy. I’d better just check on the toxicity of that alum first, though. I remember something about that from crystal-growing back when I was a kid…
OK, I checked, and we’re good to go: Alum is only toxic to humans in doses of around an ounce. This recipe uses a teaspoon, or just 0.167 fluid-ounces. Now we just need some non-conductive cocoa-powder for some really tasty science.
Squishy Circuits Project Page [University of St. Thomas via OhGizmo]
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Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on August 31, 2010
UDraw Pen and Tablet for Wii
A Wacom-style graphics tablet for the Wii? It’s a fantastic idea, and if THQ, the maker of the uDraw, can make it work as well as a Wacom, it could have a winning peripheral.
The tablet, officially a “GameTablet”, has a slot onto which you slide the Wiimote, and this allows it to communicate with the console and also powers the tablet. The pen is tethered (a good thing, otherwise the kids would lose it in five seconds), and lets you draw on a 9 x 7-inch panel.
The uDraw will cost $70 and will ship with a game called uDraw Studio, a painting app which also uses some of the Wiimote’s buttons as controls: hit the minus-button to undo a brush-stroke, for example. It all looks worthily educational, and has the bonus that you won’t have to clutter the beautiful door of your SMEG refrigerator with the paper detritus of your kids’ scribbling sessions.
THQ has some more titles on the way already. A draw-along platformer called “Dood’s Big Adventure” (which sounds awful) and a version of Pictionary, which could be a genius move from THQ.
The uDraw will ship at the end of this year, almost certainly in time for Christmas. The games will follow, for $30 apiece, in 2011.
uDraw [Wonderful World of uDraw via Yahoo]
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Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on August 17, 2010
Terrifying ‘Kid-Friendly’ Syringe Disguised as Mouse
Designer Jesper Nilsson took one look at the hypodermic needle and had a flash of inspiration: The skin-piercing sharps need to be more kid-friendly, right?
The result of this terrifying insight is the Syrinx, a needle and syringe made to look like a cute little animal. See the picture above to see just how fun it is! The idea is that kids will be less scared of a glinting needle if it is disguised as a mouse wearing sunglasses and with the number 13 painted on its haunch, but what is much more likely to happen is that the poor child will probably grow up with a world-class mouse-phobia.
And is a mouse the best they could do? What about making things a little more educational? As the Syrinx is designed to calm children whilst taking their blood, what about shaping it like a giant mosquito, its proboscis now a razor-sharp, surgical-steel spike that pierces the soft pink skin effortlessly and sucks out the blood within. What could be more kid-friendly than that?
Prick of The Syrinx [Yanko]
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Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on July 23, 2010
