Channel Of Awesome

Airjelly

A jelly fish that flies through the air. Just one of many robotics innovations from German tech company Festo.

• Company: Festo
• Videos: FestoHQ YouTube Channel
• Tech Info: Blog

Hyper-Matrix

Thousands of physical pixels in a 180° vertical landscape.

• Tech Info: creativeapplications.net

PaperTab

Revolutionary paper tablet reveals future tablets to be thin and flexible as paper.

• Company: Human Media Lab

Transparent Display

Samsung has new transparent LCD technology that allows you to overlay information on top of products you're displaying.

• Article: Samsung Transparent Displays

3D Projection Mapping

Architectural projection mapping is here and ready to boggle your mind. The idea is that you project a 3D object onto a 2D surface, like the facade of a building.

Interactive Sphere Display

Attending the recent InfoComm trade show in Las Vegas, Pufferfish showed the world their latest multi-touch interactive display allowing visitors to explore a digital globe, triggering touch points and calling up relevant information on the sphere, adding a new dimension to the medium.

• Website: Pufferfish
• More Info: PufferSphere XXL

Quantum Levitation

This levitation effect is explained by the Meissner effect, which describes how, when a material makes the transition from its normal to its superconducting state, it actively excludes magnetic fields from its interior, leaving only a thin layer on its surface.

• Website: quantumlevitation.com
• Tech Info: The Physics

Project Icarus

Icarus is a Free Flight Simulator, the Kinect transforms the postion of your arms to servo positions. The end product has a 55" LCD mounted in front of you where you can see the 3D world you fly trough. Still in development.

• More Info: Kinect Hacks

Botanicus Interacticus

The latest project created at Disney Research by Ivan Poupyrev in collaboration with Philipp Schoessler, Jonas Loh/Studio NAND, and Munehiko Sato. The project is concerned with developing technology for designing “highly expressive interactive plants”, both living and artificial. Driven by the rapid fusion of computing and living spaces, the team take interaction from computing devices and places it in the physical world using livings plants as an interactive medium.

• Website: Disney Research
• Tech Info: pdf

Sound Machines

From The Product, a Berlin-based design studio with a focus on objects, a custom-built instrument for performing electronic music by DJing visual patterns on record-sized discs.

• Website: the-product.org/soundmachines
• More Info: creativeapplications.net

Kreek

Kreek is a Kinect controlled interface which extends a 2D multi-touch environment by the perception of depth. This allows the user to literally reach into the interface and gives applications the possibility to interprete parameters like pressure or solid distance.

• Website: Lukas Hoeh

Leap

Leap represents an entirely new way to interact with your computers. It’s more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard and more sensitive than a touchscreen.

• Website: Leap Motion

Social Immersive Media

A collection of installations work from Snibbe Interactive. They offer a variety of tech products for interactive exhibits.

• Company: Snibbe Interactive
• More Info: SocialScreen

Spatial Operating Environment

The SOE made its public debut in the film Minority Report, whose bellwether interface one of Oblong's founders designed.

• Website: Oblong Industries
• Tech Info: SOE Platform

Rubens’ Tube

A Rubens’ tube, also known as a standing wave flame tube, or simply flame tube, is an antique physics apparatus for demonstrating acoustic standing waves in a tube.

• More Info: Wikipedia

Microsoft PixelSense

Microsoft® PixelSense™ technology enables the Samsung SUR40 to recognize fingers, hands and objects placed on the screen, enabling vision-based interaction without the use of cameras.

• Product: Microsoft PixelSense

Propeller Displays

A propeller display like this one relies on a phenomenon called Persistence of Vision, or POV. If the display is rotating fast enough (at least 25 rotations per second), the circuitry can turn on and off certain LEDs at certain times throughout the rotation to produce a static picture.

• Company: Ohm Projects

Spoke POV

A form of propeller display, a SpokePOV is a 'stick' of LEDs with a magnetic (hall effect) sensor on the outer end. When a magnet passes by, the microcontroller takes note. By counting how long it takes between magnet passes, SpokePOV can tell how fast its rotating and quickly blink the LEDS to present an image.

• Article: Ladyada.net

Robot Soccer

‘Robot Soccer World Cup’ (aka RoboCup) is an international robotics competition. The aim is to promote robotics and AI research, and have a winning RoboCup team play human World Cup victors in a competitive game by 2050.

• Website: Robocup.org
• Article: Slate

PO-MOtion Interactive Floors

A simple to use software package for wall and floor projections that utilizes the Kinect’s motion-tracking technology in conjunction with a projector.

• Website: PO_MOtion

littlebits

An opensource library of electronic modules that snap together with tiny magnets for prototyping and play.

• Website: littlebits.cc

SmartBird

• Company: Festo

HRP-4C Miim

AIST has succeeded in making the HRP-4C Miim robot walk like a human being.

• Company: AIST

Amazing Anamorphic Illusions!

A distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image.

• More Info: Wikipedia

MaKey MaKey

Make a piano out of bananas, play Mario on Play-Doh, let your kitty take a picture of herself. This is a simple invention kit for beginners, experts, and everything inbetween.

• Company: MaKey MaKey

How To Ride Kuratas

• Company: Suidobashi

Slow Motion Light

MIT researchers have created a camera which can take images so fast - one trillion of them in just a second - that it can capture light as it travels across objects.

• Tech Info: TED Talk

Interactive Lasercutting

Constructable is an interactive drafting table that produces precise physical output in every step. Users interact by drafting on the workpiece using a hand-held laser pointer.

• Tech Info: Constructable

Pet-Proto

To maneuver over and around the obstacles, the robot exercises capabilities including autonomous decision-making, dismounted mobility and dexterity.

• More Info: DARPA Robotics Challenge

Snake-Bot

HiBot snake like robot ACM-R5

• Company: HiBot

Lumiblade OLEDs

For the first time in the history of lighting consumers can enjoy an entirely new form of light.

• Website: Lumiblade Experience
• Buy: Lumiblade Shop

LS3 Folow Tight

Working with the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory (MCWL), researchers from DARPA's LS3 program demonstrated new advances in the robot's control, stability and maneuverability, including ‘Leader Follow’ decision making, enhanced roll recovery, exact foot placement over rough terrain, the ability to maneuver in an urban environment, and verbal command capability.

• More Info: DARPA

LIFX

LIFX is a WIFI enabled, energy efficient, multi-colored bulb that you control with your iPhone or Android..

• Company: LIFX

Redneck Spider Mech

I have no idea who these guys are, but they managed to build an 8-legged, gas-powered spider mech in their spare time.

• More Info: Mondospider

LuminAR

LuminAR is a new compact and kinetic projected augmented reality interface.

• Website: Fluid Interfaces Group

Beatsurfing

The Organic MIDI Controller Builder

• Website: beatsurfing.net/

This is Lamp

Customized computer code and electronic circuit design imbues Lamp with the ability to be aware of its environment, especially people, and to expresses a dynamic range of behaviour.

• More Info: Behance

Human-Powered Helicopter

A working four-rotor helicopter that spans 100 feet and only weighs 80 pounds.

• Article: NPR

Displair

A screen made of vapor.

• Website: displair.com

Cubepix

Fully interactive and real-time 4D projection mapping package.

• Website: Xavi’s Lab

Marionettebot

Using a Kinect, the marionette robots mimic whatever movements passerbys make.

• Article: geekologie.com

PoolLiveAid

Digital projector helps your pool game.

• Article: Mashable

Water & Sound Experiment

Create an illusion of water floating in air.

Sand Flea Jumping Robot

Sand Flea is a robot that drives around like an RC car, but when it needs to it can jump 30 feet into the air.

• Company: Boston Dynamics

Seamless Data Transfer

Touchscreen interface for seamless data transfer between the real and virtual worlds.

• Article: DigInfo TV