Playing Tetris on a Building

Some folks at MIT hacked a building to play Tetris on the side of it.

via laughing squid

Frogger Using Real-time 5th Ave Traffic

5th Ave Frogger is a hacked version of Frogger pulling in real-time 5th Ave traffic as game data. If you’re in New York this weekend, you can play.

via laughing squid

Nubot – A Video Chat Robot Doll

Nubot is a doll ready to host smartphone video chats via Skype.

The remote user can control the doll’s body gestures (wave, bow, turn) giving them more of a physical presence.

The folks at Nuuo that developed Nubot use it to have teleconferences between their offices.

We’ve seen a more mobile, albeit less cute, telepresence robot named Texai in the past.

A Grocery Scanner That Recognizes Produce

Toshiba has developed an object scanner designed to speed up the grocery checkout process. The scanner has the ability to recognize produce and even distinguish between varieties of apples.

via laughing squid

Touché Advanced Touch Detection

Disney Research presents Touché, demonstrating that touch interactions don’t have to be limited to an on/off detection on glass, but rather any type of touch on any type of surface.

via laughing squid

Digital rug

Prototype of a digital rug that changes shapes as you walk over it.

Contributed by Ellie Hardy

Frisbee Rush – Mobile to Desktop/TV Game

Unit9 premiered a new gesture-based, multiplayer, mobile-to-desktop synced game called Frisbee Rush at a few weeks back and are now finishing the app to be released in the coming weeks. More details on vimeo.

A Day Made of Glass Part 2

Corning released a follow up to their ‘A Day Made of Glass’, demoing the future of touchscreen technology.

Here’s Part 1 with 17.5 million views as of this posting:

Finding your way…

Two mobile apps for navigating the city in two very different ways:

Embark – maps plus some more hand-holding (i.e. alerts, underground access)

Via Laughing Squid

Serendipitor – maps plus simple instructions to follow along the way — for the more whimsical commuter

The Expressive Web

Adobe’s The Expressive Web demos the emerging capabilities that html5 and css3 deliver.