Digital Sundial Shines Time on Walls with Bright Laser Lights

White walls can be a boring waste of space during the day, dull and dark by night . Why not add some color and life, use them to project your schedule, adjust your social calender, view the weather and tell time on demand? This clever little all-in-one gadget proposes to do all of the above, and perhaps even more.
Yonggu Do, Dohyung Kim & Sewon Oh fashioned the device as a simple circular attachment – an unobtrusive, wall-mounted object that is activated by touch or via remote connection. Bluetooth, WIFI, and more – these days, all easy add-ons. A music player (with laser-light display of what you are listening to) would not be difficult either.

A series of lasers project digital information onto the flat surface surrounding the sundial, using familiar frames of reference for things like numerals one expects to see at a certain angle from center (making it easier to read from a distance, knowing the positions of hours and minutes and the relative size of the hands).

How To Send Music and Video Anywhere From An Apple iOS Device

One of the great features of Apple devices is AirPlay, the technology that enables them to wirelessly stream media to one another. The company has also set out to enable a growing range of other equipment, such as A/V receivers and speaker docks, to get content from your iTunes library simply by being near your computer or iOS device. Still, AirPlay has some Apple-imposed limitations, including the required use of iTunes and a relatively small pool of supported third-party devices. Recently, several tricks have been developed to extend AirPlay’s functionality, letting you stream music and video to and from more places.

Easy: Send Video To Your Mac

One of AirPlay’s major shortcomings is its inability to sling content to a Mac. A free app, AirPlayer, solves that problem by transforming your iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone into a video transmitter and allowing them to wirelessly stream iTunes clips to your Mac so you can watch on a bigger screen. The program works its magic by imitating the Apple TV’s connection protocols. Note: This is not to be confused with another app called AirPlayer, which sells for $5 in the iTunes store.

Medium: Enable Non-iTunes Video-To-TV Streaming

With the free content-management application Plex Media Center installed on your computer, the new Plex 1.1 iOS app ($4.99 on iTunes) lets you search through all your media (not just iTunes content) with your iPhone or iPad, stream it over 3G, and channel it to a friend’s HDTV via experimental AirPlay support. You’ll need to enable a setting on your router known as port forwarding to connect devices outside of your local network; for instructions, head to wiki.plexapp.com. Note that purchased videos with digital rights management (DRM) controls cannot be streamed.

Advanced: Stream To Any Device

The biggest difficulty with AirPlay is having to buy hardware that supports it. ShairPort lets you keep your current gear. The software can be installed onto any PC, allowing any device to take advantage of AirPlay streaming. For now, this allows only streaming to third-party software, so you’ll need a second computer to act as a go-between. For example, you could use your primary computer to stream music to the free VLC mediaplayer software running on a home-theater PC, and then from VLC to an A/V receiver. You can get the ShairPort code free at mafipulation.org, but fair warning—using it may void your equipment’s warranties.

Color-Picking Pen Concept Imagines Real-World Photoshop Eyedropper Tool

Designer dreams up pen that perfectly replicates colors in the environment

Any artist or designer who works with color knows that the best inspiration and perfect coloration can often be found in real-life objects all around us. What if you could take your trusty drawing pen and simply scan any color you want and then turn around and draw with it? This innovative pen design by Jin Sun Park allows you to do just that. Next step? A complete texture selector and replicator?

Most of the Photoshop tools familiar to artists import old school analog devices onto the computer. Before computers, artists would use actual razors to crop, and physical scissors and glue to cut and paste. But South Korean designer Jinsun Park has envisioned a pen that reverses the process, taking a tool developed for the computer and porting it to physical reality.
Park has designed a concept pen that adapts Photoshop's eyedropper tool for real life. On one end of the pen is a camera that captures a complex, real world color. Then, like an inkjet printer, a computer in the pen calculates the mixture of red, green and blue ink needed to replicate the color photographed by the camera. Ink in the perfect proportions then flows out of the ball point on the other end of the pen.

A color sensor on the top of the pen registers the color of the object you select, which in turn is displayed digitally on the back of the device for verification. Red, green and blue inks are then mixed – much like in a traditional printer – to create your desired color.

Of course, such an invention has its limitations: space for ink and batteries are challenges to be sure, but presumably you would only use this periodically and would also transfer the color data in some cases directly to another electronic advice, thus saving ink. While only in pre-production and sure to be extremely expensive initially one could easily see this become a household gadget and essential tool for every artist and designer for both real-life and web applications.

Apple iTV Television Concept Shows Up, Based on Steve Jobs Walter Isaacson Biography

The biography of Steve Jobs written by Walter Isaacson has stirred quite a few discussions, especially with the hate against Android and the plans to develop an Apple television set. The latter is now covered by artist Guilherme M. Schasiepen, who created a mockup of the iTV.

The TV looks very elegant and it even integrates Siri, like I heard it would. I’m guessing it sports a 40 inch diagonal, but that’s only my estimation…. It could also be a bigger iMac, one that’s very slim and absolutely surpasses the quality of Panasonic, Samsung, LG and Sony TVs. That’s pretty hard to achieve, but in the end you can borrow technology from other companies, slap the Apple logo on it and sell it with a huge price.
Apple iTV is supposedly coming sometime in the next two years and it aims at being the fourth screen, that will unity the environment made by the iMac, iPad and iPhone. Other features of the Apple television include Siri Control, iCloud support, AirPlay, HD FaceTime, full HD graphics, 3D no glasses graphics, special iTV apps and a multitouch display.