Musical Message in a Bottle

Re: Sound Bottle captures ambient noise and remixes it into unique, unexpected tracks. The bottle’s cork interface controls when it both records and plays back the sounds it captured — a fun use of technology to enhance the soundtrack of everyday life.

via Laughing Squid

Catalogue with digital extensions

The IKEA catalogue grows some digital limbs by using augmented reality.

Via Design Week.

Contributed by Jeremy Adirim.

Interactive Chapel Music Installation

In this interactive musical installation laser pointers trigger sounds and visuals projected onto the interior of a Czech chapel.

via Laughing Squid

A Touch-based Weather Forecast

Touch this silver cube for a weather forecast. The Cryoscope uses a simple system with an Arduino controller to adjust heat or coolness levels to represent the temperature outside. Just enter your zip code in a webapp and feel tomorrow’s air temperature!

Evernote Peek

Evernote’s Peek app is a great example of innovation based on functionality — in this case, the “smart case” cover of the iPad 2.

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