Technabob » volume

Vol Speaker Combines Speaker and Dial

Range — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 13:13:05 +0000

This minimal speaker was designed by Hironao Tsuboi for Kent of British American Tobacco. While I have trouble understanding why a tobacco company would need a cool and funky speaker like this, it looks pretty darned good.

While it looks a lot like the Griffin PowerMate, the Vol differentiates itself by having a speaker built in. The Vol speaker is portable, so you can take it anywhere. It’s structured for intuitive use and the only way of controlling it is the giant dial on top. You use it to switch it on and off, while also using it to adjust the volume (obviously).

If produced, the USB rechargeable speaker will be made out of aluminum, measures just 2.2 inches in diameter and 1.4 inches in height. There’s no word on whether this will ever make it past the concept stage, or how much it will cost if it does.

[via designboom]

Hidden Radio: This Futuristic Mushroom Masks a Cool Radio

Karen M. — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 11:30:44 +0000

The Hidden Radio by John Van Den Nieuwenhuizen is designed to make the human-radio interaction more intuitive and less cluttered. Also, it’s designed to make your radio look more like a futuristic mushroom than a regular radio.

So how does it work? They say, “lifting the lid increases the volume proportionally with height” which means, of course, that moving the cap up makes it louder and moving the cap down makes it quieter. To change the station, you just rotate the cap. There is an LED light in the base that gets brighter and darker with tuning.

Of course, like so many cool gizmos this thing isn’t available yet, but you can visit their website, from which you can send them an e-mail and pester them to make it.

[via Core77]

Robots Controlled by Gestures

Technabob — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:40:59 +0000

Most robots are controlled using a joystick or other traditional input device, but this new system allows operators to issue commands to robots using simple hand and body gestures.

Developed by engineer Tsuyoshi Horo at Tokyo University, the system uses a circular array of cameras to detect human movements in the room, then convey them to a robot as directional commands.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The system produces a real time 3-dimension volumetric model of people or objects inside the circle of cameras, allowing for precise tracking of movements. Be sure to check out this cool video clip showing what the cameras “see” once run through Horo’s software:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Controlling robots is just one possible application for the gesture recognition software. Horo has also implemented several computer user interface prototypes using the same basic system. You can find more information on Horo’s research website (translated from Japanese) and more videos over on his YouTube page.