Hasta La Ideas

This concept for a digital camera would let users look through a hole right in the middle of the ring of sensors, rather than framing their shot on a screen or through a viewfinder (+ movie).

The design was a response to a challenge set by technology and science website BBC Future, who asked Jared Mankelow, senior product designer at Conran & Partners, to re-imagine an everyday item.

He came up with a Post-it note-sized camera that would have a hole in it for users to look through when they’re taking a picture.

Traditionally a camera’s viewfinder would be above its sensor, but in Mankelov’s design the hole itself acts as the viewfinder, with multiple sensors forming a ring around the eye.

“The ultimate goal is to take a photo of what you see. What we’ve done is punch a big aperture through the camera’s centre to connect the photographer with what’s in front of them,” explained Mankelow.

Inspired by an old SLR camera, he also decided to do without a digital screen and instead control the device manually with buttons and wheels. A ring flash around the hole would also make it suitable for close-up photography.

We previously featured an eye-tracking camera controlled by blinking and squinting and a wearable camera that decides which moments of your life are worth photographing – see all cameras.

Other technology we’ve published lately includes headsets that allow their wearer to adjust their sight and hearing as they would with a TV and a cuckoo clock that announces new Twitter messages – see all technology on Dezeen.

The post Digital camera concept
by Jared Mankelow appeared first on Dezeen.

News: nanotechnology scientists at an American university have 3D-printed a bionic ear that can hear radio frequencies beyond a human’s normal range.

The ear is designed to integrate electronics with biology and create a flexible and fleshy alternative to mechanical prosthetics.

“This concept of 3D printing living cells together with electronic components and growing them into functional organs represents a new direction in merging electronics with biological systems,” said the scientists in their report, published in the journal Nano Letters.

The Princeton University team printed the ear from hydrogel – a material used as scaffolding in tissue engineering – using the commercially available Fab@Home 3D printer.

The hydrogel was infused with cells from a calf and intertwined with a polymer containing silver nanoparticles, which conduct radio frequencies.

The calf cells then matured into cartilage and hardened around a coil antenna, seen in the middle of the ear.

When tested, the bionic ear was found to receive signals across an extended frequency spectrum of 1 MHz to 5 GHz, far beyond the normal human range of 20 Hz to 20 KHz.

The team also created a complementary left ear and used a piece of music by Beethoven to successfully test the pair’s ability to hear in stereo.

At present the ear can only receive radio waves, but the scientists believe it would be possible to expand its hearing with other materials, such as pressure-sensitive sensors that register acoustic sounds.

Medical applications for 3D printing are becoming increasingly commonplace, as bioprinting expert Michael Renard recently told Dezeen in an interview for Print Shift, our one-off, print-on-demand magazine about this emerging technology.

“We’re working with small pieces of tissue at the moment – a small piece of blood vessel or liver,” he said. “Once you have the cells ready, we can print something in a few hours.” Read the full interview with Renard.

Other 3D printing projects we’ve reported on lately include prototypes of 3D-printed burgers and pasta and designer Ron Arad’s single-piece 3D-printed spectacles – see all 3D printing.

Top photograph by Frank Wojciechowski.

The post Scientists 3D-print bionic ear that
hears beyond human range appeared first on Dezeen.

As Internet access becomes ubiquitous and bandwidth drops in price, so-called “cloud” services (which store your information on a server that’s accessed via the Internet) are growing in popularity. Many are very useful and help you perform tasks like sharing photos and video, storing files, and keeping up with family and friends. Most cloud services are inexpensive, some are free, and many offer great convenience.

The trouble starts when you subscribe to more than a few. I found myself checking Instagram for photos, Facebook for updates from friends, Dropbox for shared files, Path for updates from family, and Pocket and Instapaper for articles to read. Fortunately, I found Jolidrive, which lets me keep all of those services (and many more) in one, tidy, organized layout.

Jolidrive is free to use. You can create an account by signing in with your Facebook credentials or email address. Once you’ve done that and clicked the link in your confirmation email, you’re all set.

There are several “services” you can have Jolidrive connect to, including:

1. Exfm
2. Vimeo
3. SoundCloud
4. YouTube
5. Box
6. CloudApp
7. Google Plus
8. Instapaper
9. Picasa
10. SkyDrive
11. SugarSync
12. Tumblr
13. Ubuntu One
14. Dropbox
15. Facebook
16. Flickr
17. Google Drive (formerly Google Documents)
18. Instagram
19. Pocket

As you add each service, you’ll be asked for your login credentials. Once the connection is made, it appears in the sidebar of Jolidrive’s beautifully designed web interface. Tap any one to explore.

For example, I can click the Instagram icon to get a beautiful grid of the latest photos in my feed. I can also browse my own photos and those I’ve liked, as well as the most popular photos across all of Instagram. Finally, I can see who I’m following, as well as who’s following me. All from the one web page. In fact, jolidrive has become my favorite way to browse Instagram.

It works much the same with Facebook. I can see my news feed and my own timeline, my list of friends, photo albums, and videos. Again, there’s no need to visit another site. It’s very convenient and tidy.

I’ve also got Pocket in my account, it lets me browse and read saved articles in a layout that is just as pretty as the Pocket iPad app.

But Jolidrive is not just pictures and articles. I can browse and interact with almost any file I’ve got stored on Dropbox, Box, or SkyDrive. The fact that I don’t have to navigate away to all those different sites or apps is a real time-saver. On top of that, it looks great.

If you’re like me and you subscribe to a large number of cloud services, consider jolidrive. It keeps everything organized into a single, great-looking website. I have and I’m glad I did.

Need help getting organized? Buy the DRM-free audiobook version of Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week today for only $8.99.

The birds inside this cuckoo clock by London design studio BERG are programmed to poke their heads out to announce Twitter messages, retweets and new followers (+ movie).

#Flock, which was commissioned from BERG by social networking service Twitter, was built using BERG Cloud, the design studio’s operating system for network-connected products.

Using a wirelessly controlled Arduino microcontroller, the three birds inside the clock are choreographed to respond immediately to activity on Twitter.

Retweets, direct messages and new followers each trigger one of the three birds to pop out of the clock, accompanied by a snippet of birdsong.

Like the studio’s Little Printer, the tiny thermal printer that led to the development of BERG Cloud, #Flock is a web-connected device designed to give digital data a physical expression.

BERG isn’t the only design studio exploring ways of making digital data tangible – we previously featured a project to print muddled news headlines harvested from the internet and a plotter set up to write and re-write text from Wikipedia as it’s updated.

Other machines on Dezeen include a mechanically operated sliding whistle that uses a bellow and levers to mimic birdsong – see all machines.

Photographs are by BERG.

The post #Flock by BERG
for Twitter appeared first on Dezeen.

MagPen is a magnetically driven pen interface that works both on and around mobile devices. The device introduces a new vocabulary of gestures and techniques that redefine the way we use our current standard capacitive stylus. With this new pen we can explore ranges like detecting the orientation the stylus is pointing to, selecting colors using locations beyond the screen boundaries and more.

MagPen recognizing different spinning gestures associated with different actions, it even infers the pressure applied to the pen, and uniquely identifies different pens associated with different operational modes.

As the designer explains, These techniques are achieved using commonly available smartphones that sense and analyze the magnetic field produced by a permanent magnet embedded in a standard capacitive stylus. This paper explores how magnets can be used to expand the design space of current pen interaction, and proposes a new technology to achieve such results.

Designer: SungJae Hwang

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(Magnetically Driven Pen was originally posted on Yanko Design)

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