There are playmats where you build the roads in seconds, a ballpit where the balls are as big as you, and a drawing-board where your doodles come to life. This is Team Lab‘s “Theme Park of the Future” .. but it isn’t really a theme park. It’s an attempt to bring projection mapping, motion gestures into contact with fundamental playtime activities — and even expand on kids’ creativity. You just need a handful of projectors, some giant walls, and a scanner or two.
Here’s another new use for graphene (that will probably never happen): stopping bullets. University of Massachusetts-Amhers researchers have found that everybody’s favorite potential wonder-material vastly outperforms steel and even kevlar armor. Testing the ultra-lightweight, 1-atom thick carbon sheets has proved tricky in the past, as they disintegrated on contact with regular bullets. So, the team used laser pulses to fire micron-sized glass bullets into the sheets at around 6,700 mph, about a third the speed of an M16 bullet (see below). Sheets from 30 to 300 layers thick absorbed the impacts much better than the other materials by deforming into a cone shape, then cracking.
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Qualcomm already rules the mobile world — now it wants to tackle all of the other gadgets in your life. But none of this should be a surprise if you’ve been paying attention. Its Snapdragon chips already power most high-end smartphones, so it makes sense for Qualcomm to leverage that experience into chips for wearables, cars, home appliances and more. The company is even eyeing the server market, a move that should have Intel shaking in its hermetically sealed bunny boots.
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No, not “airline” rockets. Ariane rockets. According to The Wall Street Journal, EU ministers are finally about to approve plans for a more affordable version of the Ariane series — the same family that launched Rosetta back in 2004. What counts as affordable when developing a rocket, is reportedly between five and six billion dollars. The European Space Agency makes no secret that its goal is to compete with commercial entities like SpaceX, which already has a program to deliver supplies (and humans) to the ISS. No surprise, given that SpaceX’s very own Elon Musk already went on record saying that the current Ariane 5 rocket stands “no chance” against his competition. SpaceX doesn’t need to worry just yet though, as the roadmap for Ariane 6 wouldn’t see a launch until the end of the decade.
It’s that time of year again! You know, the one when you have to hand over your hard-earned cash or dole out the credit card digits to get the loved ones in your life a little something celebratory. Lucky you, we’ve got a slew of great recommendations in our easy-on-the-eyes Holiday Gift Guide.
Need something for that video gaming fanatic in the fam? Then consider this: Sony’s PlayStation 4 has plenty of next-gen horsepower under the hood and all of the streaming apps you’ll ever need. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s home to some of the best exclusive first-party and indie titles out there.
And that’s just a taste of what our gift guide has to offer. Dive in here for the full monty!
Poor OnePlus just can’t take a break. Just as the company’s busy taking care of its Black Friday promotion, its store opening in Beijing and its India launch with Amazon next week, a close partner decided to drop a hurtful bomb. Cyanogen Inc., the maker of OnePlus One’s Android ROM, announced that it’s now inked a deal with Micromax to exclusively support the latter’s upcoming online brand Yu — a direct competitor of Xiaomi — in India. And by “exclusive” we do mean no love for OnePlus, who implies in its latest blog post that Cyanogen knew about its India plan all along, yet it was suddenly shunned to make way for a new partner over there. If true, this is a surprisingly childish move from an up-and-coming company that has no doubt benefitted much from its partnership with OnePlus thus far.
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You know those cartoons where the culprit was revealed to be Old Mr. Jones, the Caretaker, all along? It turns out that Sony’s been pulling the same trick concerning Fashion Entertainments’ e-paper watch. The story goes that the company wanted to create innovative new products, but without the weight of expectation (or, possibly, dread) that goes with the Sony name. According to the Wall Street Journal, FES’ plan is to combine the company’s e-paper know-how with fashionable accessories, including the watch and customizable bow ties. Admittedly, the idea of an e-paper bow tie that you can somehow alter with a digital device sounds like the sort of thing you’d buy from Brookstone, so we hope Kaz Hirai knows how to make it cool.
Plenty of people have switched to smartphones for their photography needs, but that doesn’t mean standalone cameras are dead just yet. Companies like Fuji, Canon and Olympus continue to make great DSLRs and interchangeable lens cameras for photographers who are serious about their picture-taking. But what about users who aren’t that advanced, but still want something that packs a little more oomph than the average smartphone? There’s a sub-category of cameras just for that, known as compacts. They’re easy enough for a novice to use, but still offer plenty of options for experienced users. We’ve taken a look at a few of the more outstanding models on the market to help you decide whether it’s worth carrying a separate camera for those precious photogenic moments.
When Jolla launched an Indiegogo campaign to fund the development of its tablet, the company was only aiming to make $380,000. Somewhere along the way — say the moment it reached $1 million in pledges — the people behind Jolla probably realized that the public are into the idea. So, they’ve now added some nice stretch goal promises, the most ambitious of which being the addition of 3.5G or cellular connectivity — but only if they get more than $2.5 million. While that’s a lofty goal, the other two are a bit more realistic: they’re promising to add microSDHC support for cards up to 128GB in capacity if they raise $1.5 million (at time of writing, the project is just $200,000 shy of that), and to introduce split screen capability for $1.75 million. Jolla has also introduced a $3,499 micro-distributor starter kit tier for 20 tablets. The plucky startup is clearly pulling out all the stops in order to double the current pledge total within the last 12 days of the campaign.
It’s no secret that people like Chromebooks. That can’t be good news for Microsoft, which used to own the market for cheap computers. Not one to take this sort of encroachment lying down, Microsoft came out with a lower-cost version of Windows 8.1 that PC makers could use to build small, lightweight devices inexpensive enough to take on Chromebooks. The HP Stream 11 is among the first of these so-called Chromebook killers: an 11.6-inch laptop running full Windows and priced at just $200. For the money, it looks and performs like a netbook, with a colorful plastic shell and an Intel Celeron processor chugging away under the hood. Then again, though, you also have the option of installing traditional desktop apps, which you can’t do on a Chromebook, and Microsoft is further sweetening the deal by throwing in a terabyte of OneDrive storage and a yearlong subscription to Office 365. So is this just netbooks, redux? Or does an aggressive price make all the difference?
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