Alright, this just kicked my netherparts right off my abdomen. Enter Leonar3do. Before watching the video, I was pronouncing it ‘Leonaredo’ and scratching my head. I think the 3 is silent. Regardless, it indicates the number of dimensions that are about to blow your mind. Surely you’ve heard tell of Zbrush – it’s a popular CG sculpting tool that allows you to, via mouse or preferably tablet (a real, traditional, Wacom-style tablet, not an iPad), get your freak on sculpting dynamically in real time. In its own right, it’s a big step up from traditional Rhino- or 3DSMax-style modelling. As if I just…

Earlier today, I posted a piece on a group of researchers who have discovered a major security flaw with any and all USB accessories. Suffice it to say this is a novel solution: why not remove an accessory from the equation? Computer mice are old hat. They haven’t had a major design breakthrough in a long while. Besides moving to optical and sporting ever-finer resolutions, they’re pretty much done evolving. It could be argued that mice, therefore, have reached the pinnacle of their evolution – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But whatever, let’s throw our mice out anyway. But what will we use instead?…

“Interestingly enough,” says Shahriar Afshar, “I’m not a gamer myself. I’m a physics professor.” Afshar is not of our generation, and as such finds today’s videogames a bit noisy. That said, he understands the gamer’s need to immerse himself in the sound of loud gunfire, rock music, and angry grunting at full volume. So he got to thinking. And boy, did he think. The Kor-FK is Afshar’s answer to the conundrum. Looking like a set of headphones melting around one’s neck, the Kor-FX is essentially a Rumble Pak (albeit a far more sophisticated, subtle one) that straps onto a gamer and translates what…

This is totally flowing my mind. Developed by Dean McNamee and Filippo Cuttica of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (they have freaking schools for interaction design in Denmark. I was totally born in the wrong country), Go with the Flow is a new way to visualize email. Built of tubes and wires, the contraption filters your incoming emails into three cylinders – work, family, and friends – and colours them accordingly. That’s kind of neat on its own, but here’s where it gets interesting: you actually haven’t received any emails yet. They’re just backed up and chillin’. To receive…

Yeah, maybe I talk about iPads and iPad accessories a bit much, but this is seriously cool, so let’s just get this out of the way and I swear I’ll move on to something a little less iPad-centric, aight? Aight. So this is pretty self-explanatory. Jack Zylkin is man who couldn’t be bothered with the comfy, convenient ergonomics of modern input devices, and apropos has taken up the previously-unclaimed mantle of ‘guy who invented the USB typewriter’. Billed as ‘a new and groundbreaking innovation in the field of obsolescence’, the USB typewriter is, in fact, a typewriter – or rather several different…

Finally. Thank you, Toshiba. I’ve always found that iPhone pinching gesture to be so unintuitive and weird. I mean, yeah, we’re all used to it now and it’s totally second-nature to most people, but to say it was an intuitive experience is a bit of a stretch. Speaking of stretching and pinching and stuff, Toshiba has developed a prototype that as far as I’m concerned makes a bit more intuitive sense: a bendable LCD display, controlled by – yes – bend input. Announced at SID 2010, the panel can zoom in and out by bending accordingly – away for zoom out, toward for zoom in. Simple, right? Totally cool. With…

Man, gestural interfaces are really starting to gain ground, aren’t they? Apparently, touch was never enough. Toshiba’s been working on something pretty cool. Yeah, that’s it, just cool. No customary ‘rad!’ or ‘awesome!’ from me. S’just cool. I’ll explain momentarily. The AirSwing is an interface that uses a webcam to superimpose the image of the user onto the screen, that they might wave their hands all over some content and make magic happen. I was under the impression they were just using a really, really crappy high-gloss monitor in the video for a full three minutes. Now, this is sort of puzzling….

Hey, speaking of things in 2010 that feel like they came from the 80′s – no, not me – check out these gloves. Robert Wang, an MIT student, and his professor Jovan Popović, have developed the ugliest gloves I’ve ever seen in my life. But there’s a purpose for the fashion faux pas being committed here, and I’ll touch on that in a moment – first, you’re probably still wondering why the hell I’m talking about gloves to begin with. Simply put, you’re looking at the future of gesture interfaces. Wang and Popović have managed to develop gesture gloves that actually digitally recreate your entire hand, allowing…

With all the ballyhoo Google’s brought over Google TV in the last 36 hours, it would seem that people are about to get excited over television again. With that, I guess it’s only fitting I show you some totally cool TV tech. What you’re watching is a demo of SkÃ¥l. SkÃ¥l (pronounced ‘skÃ¥l’) is an interaction design for television that relies on RFID to tie physical objects to digital media on your computer or, in the case of Google TV, your TV. Just slap an RFID chip onto a small object, link it to the chosen media, and place it in the bowl to instantly experience the content. Sexy. Frankly, a system like…

Apple really likes to tout the iPod Touch (and, by extension, the iPhone and iPad) as a gaming platform. In response, serious gamers like myself tend to laugh and point, largely due to the iPod’s lack of tactile feedback. ‘Button’ controlled iPod games are consistently a joke, and you can’t be a leading gaming platform on tilt-based games alone. But maybe there’s hope! Toshiba has gone and turned this whole tactile feedback problem on its ear by developing a technology that sounds like it fell right out of a William Gibson novel. ‘Senseg E-Sense’ works by making weak electric field changes to a special…