Japanese movie posters of the sixties and seventies kick ass. They always seemed more exciting than their American or British counterparts, managing to take choice images and compose them like frames from a comic book. Even when the posters were just cut and paste jobs there always a sense of drama, as if you have joined the story at a key scene—explosions blossom, machine guns rip, heroes do battle.
The Tempescope is a novel device designed by Ken Kawamoto that displays the upcoming forecast by simulating weather conditions inside a small translucent box. The device is capable of downloading information about upcoming weather off the internet, which it then translates into a variety of modes to replicate sunshine, clouds, rain, and even lighting. Kawamoto made an early version of the device available as a free open-source project called OpenTempescope so you can try building your own, but a consumer version is planned for Kickstarter later this year.
L’OREAL MAKES COSMETICS AND hair color. It also makes skin. Human skin, created in a lab, so it can test its products without using people or animals. Now it’s talking about printing the stuff, using 3-D bioprinters that will spit out dollops of skin into nickel-sized petri dishes.
The idea is to produce skin more quickly and easily using what is essentially an assembly line developed with Organovo, a San Diego bioprinting company. Such a technique would allow the French cosmetics company to do more accurate testing, but it also has medical applications—particularly in burn care.
Treating severe burns typically involves grafting a healthy patch of skin taken from elsewhere on the body. But large burns present a problem. That has researchers at Wake Forest experimenting with a treatment method that involves applying a small number of healthy skin cells onto the injury and letting them grow organically over the wound. 3-D-bioprinted skin potentially could be produced faster, provided Organovo can successfully replicate the cell structure of human epidermis.
NEWPORT, RI—Audience members at the Newport Rock Festival were “outraged” when rock icon Bob Dylan followed up such classic hits as “Like A Rolling Stone” and “Maggie’s Farm” with an electronica set composed of atonal drones, hyperactive drumbeats, and the repeated mechanized lyric “Dance to the club life!” “We came here to see the authentic Dylan, the one with the Stratocaster guitar and the best guitar amps and signature wild blues-rock band behind him,” audience member Robert Hochschild said. “Then he walks out with these puffy headphones, some turntables, and a laptop? The guy’s a Judas.” When asked later about his musical transformation by reporters, Dylan said he had nothing to say about the beats he programs, he just programs them.
Apple just confirmed acquisition of German company Metaio, which as the Journal reports, has developed augmented reality technology that enables “people wearing Google Glass-like eyewear to make any real world surface into a virtual touch screen.” This purchase assures Apple’s entrance into the virtual/augmented reality industry, a space we’ve been following closely over the last few years. Now just about all the world’s largest high-tech/Internet companies are active in virtual reality:
- Facebook, of course, got the virtual ball rolling with its acquisition of Oculus VR last year.
(sic) VR failed to go mass market durings it first vogue in the 90s, and then failed again ten years later after the buzz around Second Life and other virtual worlds fizzled out. So we’re watching closely to see how well this new wave of VR tech fares over the next few years.
