Sean Goebel a réalisé cette superbe vidéo en technique timelapse centrée sur les observatoires placés sur les hauteurs de Mauna Kea à Hawaii. Premier site de l’hémisphère Nord, cette vidéo tournée en avril et intitulée « Mauna Kea Heaven Timelapse » offre des images d’une incroyable beauté. Plus d’images dans la suite.
News: Asda is to become the first UK supermarket to offer an in-store 3D scanning and 3D printing service, allowing customers to capture and print scale models of their possessions or even themselves.
From Tuesday, customers at one Asda store in York will be able to have anything up to the size of a car scanned and reproduced as a 20-centimetre model, though the brand expects people will mostly order figurines of themselves.
The scanning process will take two minutes, using a hand-held scanner, then the digital files will be sent away to be printed ready for collection one week later. Prices will start from £40 and the models will be available in white, bronze or painted in full colour.
The service will be trialled at the York store of the Walmart subsidiary.
Printing and packaging firm The UPS Store became the first mainstream American retailer to offer in-store 3D printing in August.
Meanwhile Microsoft has partnered with MakerBot and office-supplies chain Staples has teamed up with 3D Systems to sell desktop 3D printers for the consumer market on their shop floors.
Japanese creative agency Party set up a 3D-printing photo booth in Tokyo last year and MakerBot introduced a photo booth to print 3D models of customers’ faces at its New York store last November.
We had the Dezeen team scanned and 3D-printed as part of our Print Shift magazine all about additive manufacturing earlier this year.
The post Asda supermarket launches
3D printing service appeared first on Dezeen.
A handful of feature-length tech tales have hit the presses (and pixels) this week, just as I hit the halfway mark of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, which I’d finally gotten around to picking up at my local independent bookseller. Coincidence? Perhaps—though I can’t help but wonder if the savvy folks at Simon & Schuster saw fit to publish the new-book-table-worthy paperback edition about halfway between the wide release of Jobs and the publication of Fred Vogelstein’s forthcoming Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution. I’ve been slogging through a backlog of long-ish reads for as long as I can remember, but I knew I had to read the excerpt in the New York Times Magazine, a well-researched chronicle of very first iPhone as soon as I stumbled across it on the forums the other day.
The story touches on many of the challenges and milestones of product design, as well as some that were unique to the iPhone, a foray into uncharted territory both for the wizards in Cupertino and as an entirely new product category. “…it wasn’t at all clear to Apple’s executive team that the features they enabled, like on-screen keyboards and ‘tap to zoom,’ were enhancements that consumers wanted.”
Of course, the longstanding rivalry between designers and engineers comes up; forumite Mrog’s favorite part is a quote from Phil Kearney: “Most of the designers are artists. The last science class they took was in eighth grade. But they have a lot of power at Apple. So they ask, ‘Why can’t we just make a little seam for the radio waves to escape through?’ And you have to explain to them why you just can’t.” (Guess which side Kearney was on?)
Vogelstein’s article is chock full of similar gems—I personally found the level of secrecy to be quite remarkable—and well worth the read. Also interesting: at one point, hardware exec Jon Rubenstein uses the idiom “put all your wood behind one arrow,” which I had never heard before. A thread on Stackexchange includes some interesting trivia on the turn of phrase, noting that it was often used by deposed Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy… who, of course, crossed paths with Jobs and Apple many times over the years. Quoted in a Fortune article (following his ouster) in 2010, McNealy said: “Jobs has been brilliant, and he also understands the power of the secret better than anyone I have ever seen”… which is the very premise of the public’s abiding obsession with his life and times.
Read “And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’,” then watch the Macworld event below. Then do something—anything—on your iPhone and marvel at what just happened…
…then hit the jump and keep reading (about recommended reading, as it were).
Le créatif François Xavier Saint George s’intéresse avec son projet « Roto Drawings » aux processus de création de l’art. Ayant imaginé un système mécanique, l’artiste nous propose de découvrir une œuvre circulaire réalisé non par lui mais par le mécanisme rotatif. A découvrir en images dans la suite de l’article.
Sponsored content: A recent voyage to El Segundo, California, brought us to the doors of the Mattel headquarters. Inside, we were given the chance to take a behind-the-scenes look at the Hot…
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The following is a sponsored post from Staples about a product we believe in. For the past few weeks, I’ve been aggressively testing this product and the review is based on my first-hand experiences. We agreed to work with Staples because they sell so many different products in their stores, and our arrangement with them allows us to review products we use and have no hesitation recommending to our readers. Again, these infrequent sponsored posts help us continue to provide quality content to our audience.
When I was younger my grandfather told me, “Man was not meant to sit.” At the time I thought his cheese was slipping off of his cracker, but contemporary medicine backs up his claim. Dr. Camelia Davtyan, clinical professor of medicine and director of women’s health at the UCLA Comprehensive Health Program, recently told the LA Times, “Prolonged sitting is not what nature intended for us.”
Score one for gramps.
Today, my job requires me to spend tremendous amount of time seated behind a desk, so I want a chair that’s comfortable, supportive, well-made, easy to use, and not out to kill me. I’ve been testing the Staples Vayder chair ($399) for a couple of weeks and can say, a couple of quirks aside, it meets my needs and looks great doing it.
Seriously, this could not be easier. In fact, I hesitate to call it “assembly,” as “snapping a few pieces together” would be more accurate. The chair ships in eight pieces: the seat, the base, the gas lift (or piece that sits between the seat and the base), and five wheels. It also comes with a small pamphlet that explains the three-step assembly process and usage details in English and French.
The wheels and gas lift snap into the base and the seat fits into the top of the lift. The whole process took me less than 10 minutes to complete. I will note, however, it’s not super easy to line up the bottom of the seat with the top of the lift by yourself, so if possible get someone else to act as your eyes and guide you. Also, one of the wheels only went about 95% of the way into my base, but the first time I sat in the completed chair it popped in the rest of the way.
Of course, I plopped down into the Vayder before reading the instructions, and found myself sitting bolt upright. Fortunately, Staples makes it easy to configure the chairs six adjustment options for a custom feel. The control levers are made of plastic and bear icons that suggest their function. Most are easy to reach from a seated position, so you won’t need to move around to change things.
Seat hight is simple enough and raises or lowers the seat. Tilt Lock lets you lean back or forward and lock the seat back into one of four positions. For me, one click backward is perfect. To use it, just flip the lever down, move your back and then flick the lever back up to lock it into place.
The arm hight adjustment is something I kind of laughed at until I’ve tried it. When I was in college, I had a job filing and my chair’s arms were so tall I couldn’t get my arms on them and under the desk at the same time. The arms on the Vayder chair move up and down by several inches, and the armrests themselves also move forward and back.
Other adjustment options include back height adjustment (this is the adjustment you can’t make while seated), which lets you raise or lower the back support piece, and a slide seat adjustment that lets you move just the “bottom” of the seat, for lack of a better term, forward or back.
Finally, the tension adjustment is the most interesting. Both the chair’s seat and back are made of a mesh upholstery that’s supremely comfortable (more on that in the next section). Tension adjustment is completed by turing a cylindrical handle just beneath the seat. Move it forward for firmer feel, backward for more relaxed.
This chair plain-old feels good. The mesh upholstery breathes so you don’t get hot as you would on a typically upholstered seat. I’ve got the mesh set to be pretty firm, and it feels great, especially against my back. The wheels roll nicely without making a lot of noise and I’ve never been uncomfortable, even after two weeks of 10-hour days. Plus, it just feels solid.
In conclusion I like the Staples Vayder a lot. It does have some quirks, like that stubborn wheel and the fact that assembly is a hassle if you’re by yourself, but those are minor quibbles. My real-world experience with the Vayder has been great and I look forward to many, many more hours in it.
And look at that, I got through this whole post without making one “Darth Vayder” pun.
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Sundials are far from anything but a new invention—they date back to 1,500 BC. But a structure that’s a bench/sundial/augmented reality app all in one is definitely something that’ll grab attention. Designer Joshua Barnes created a bench where sitters can record a video of themselves sharing a message or story for a future sitter to view one year later, not a day less, not a day more.
How it works: The arm of the bench acts as the focal point of the piece and casts a shadow that works as the hour hand of the sundial. Every day, the structure will cast a unique shadow with a different length (corresponding to the hour) that’s repeated once a year on the same day and time. Users can create a video message and associate the day and hour’s shadow with their message using an image-recognition app on their smartphones. Every hour of the day, new videos will reveal themselves from previous years’ users.
The whole project, which was recently on exhibit at this year’s London Design Festival, displays a new look at the concept of the immediacy behind today’s technology, one that unifies a tried and true way of telling time with new age augmented reality.
Roboticists have solved many exciting challenges in recent years, and one of the most important is to ensure that robots remain really creepy. The UK-based team using slime mold to create facial expressions in their anthropomorphic ‘bot have succeeded admirably; not to be outdone, the team at Boston Dynamics are upping the ante with their quadripedal WildCat.
As you can see in the video below, the WildCat starts up with a suitably terrifying chainsaw/dirtbike noise; it raises itself confidently and menacingly; and it then becomes spasmodically excited about chasing down whatever enemies of Boston Dynamics exist. And crucially, there is no distinction between whether the headless ‘bot is running forwards or backwards, as the research team surely knows that that confusion will exponentially raise the terror quotient in any who view it.
While Boston Dynamics claims the WildCat can do “16 mph on flat terrain using bounding and galloping gaits,” the machine is so new that at press time it wasn’t yet posted on their website; they are presumably waiting until they have outfitted it with the appropriate combination of buzzsaw blades, electrified talons and perhaps disembodied clown heads on either side.
The Eye Ring is a Braille Scanner is that fits on the finger. It helps the sight-impaired to scan, read and even listed to a regular text. The way it works is that the scanner converts the captured images to Braille dots, which can be felt as indents on the users fingertips. Using the Bluetooth headset, you can use the text to voice function and listen to the book. Pretty nifty device!
Designer: Yong Jeong
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(Read and Listen With The Braille Scanner was originally posted on Yanko Design)
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When Wacom swung by the Core77 offices to show us their Cintiq stuff, that wasn’t the only demo they had prepared. Rick Peterson, Wacom’s Consumer Products Brand Director, broke out his department’s new tool: The Intuos Creative Stylus. With Wacom’s pressure sensitivity, palm rejection technology and a host of industry software partnerships, the brand has aimed to create a high-end stylus better suited to industrial designers working SketchBook Pro than laypeople scribbling around in Draw Anything. (You’ve also gotta love the nifty case it comes in, which stores backup batteries and nibs.) Check it out:
The Intuos Creative Stylus is currently available on Wacom’s E-store, and should be available through Best Buy any day now.
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