Things I Like

Woman thanks bear for not eating kayak.

Pepper sprays bear for no reason. 

President Obama just dropped his summer mixtape 

transcranial / embodied cognition

Tech Art performance project from Klaus Obermaier, Kyle McDonald and Daito Manabe deconstructs the visible body parts of dancers into an alternative collage of movement:

Scientists use electromagnetic pulses to create glitches on brain activity by altering neuronal currents. Such glitches may cause temporary failures that can be represented by disassembling the body. As if this would be malfunctioning or out of control. Mind expression through body and body expression through mind. Transcranial explores these expressions of mind and body in an interactive performance where technology and human being play the embodied mind.

Computational Hydrographic Printing

Method developed at Columbia University can accurately apply a print designed for specific surface shape from flat printouts. Interesting to note that this method can compliment 3D Printing with a standard home printer:

Hydrographic printing is a well-known technique in industry for transferring color inks on a thin film to the surface of a manufactured 3D object. It enables high-quality coloring of object surfaces and works with a wide range of materials, but suffers from the inability to accurately register color texture to complex surface geometries. Thus, it is hardly usable by ordinary users with customized shapes and textures. We present computational hydrographic printing, a new method that inherits the versatility of traditional hydrographic printing, while also enabling precise alignment of surface textures to possibly complex 3D surfaces.

Face Capture

Smartphone computational photography app Seene is working on a feature to scan your face in 3D without the need of additional sensors. These scans can then be used for 3D avatars or 3D printing, and should be out in a few months time:

Seene has created a pipeline for high-resolution 3D face scanning on standard mobile devices. All processing is performed on the device without specialized hardware, so anyone can scan their face and see the result in seconds. The raw scan data is then fitted to a canonical base mesh and uploaded to our cloud platform, ready to be applied into virtual experiences and products.

The system is patent-pending and will be launching in Q3 2015 in conjuction with partners in gaming, e-commerce, 3D printing and VR.

More Here

Moon Drawings

Project by Golan Levin & David Newbury will bring your contributed drawings to the moon (and may even be drawn onto the surface by a rover robot):

Welcome to Moon Drawings: a project to extend artistic expression to the Moon. We invite you to contribute a drawing—which will be etched on a sapphire disc, sent to the Moon, and potentially traced by a robot rover into the Moon’s soil. The disc, contained in a sculpture called the Moon Arts Ark, will be shuttled to the Moon in 2016. It will remain there for millenia: a poetic gesture reaching out, far beyond any objective existence on Earth.

308g / 0.68lb

Conceptual net-art publication by Luigi Amato is an eBook for the iPad Mini featuring products which have the same weight of the tablet:

A collection of images from the world wide web showing random objects whose weight, according to their descriptions, is the same as the device used for their representation (iPad Mini). Available for free on the iTunes Store.

Hikibo

Prototype drawing robot which can be easily installed via suction pads, connected to the internet, used to draw in various colours, and can lift away from the surface (avoiding the continuous line issue):

Hikibo is a connected drawing robot, controlled from any device: smartphone, tablet, computer …

Easy to install with its suction force, Hikibo is suitable for casual use as well as permanent. Hikibo loves to draw vector images, he can also draw “classic” pictures. 

Currently in prototype stage, the developer is looking into the possibility of turning this into a product should there be any commercial interest (which I imagine there certainly is, for creatives and businesses).