A zombie survival game called Apocalypse Rising doesn’t sound like a story that should have a happy ending. For game developers Ethan Witt and Gus Dubetz, this doomsday is not about plagues, oceans of blood or even the walking dead.
This apocalypse pays for college.
Anatol Josephwitz passed the time in a Siberian prison camp and ignored the bitter cold by imagining an automated photography machine he had not yet invented.
Nearly 95 years later, the photo booth is as tough a survivor as its inventor.
Photo booth adventurers across many generations have described a magic that takes place when the curtain is drawn and the camera is awakened by placing a few coins in a slot. Inhibitions fall and an authentic inner self emerges on a strip of four photos. Best friends smash their faces together, a girl on a boy’s lap gives him his first kiss, and a wide-eyed college kid proudly mugs for a shot that will get pasted into a first passport.
Many of the so-called dip-and-dunk chemical machines, the kind found in arcades, amusement parks and bus stations, are disappearing, but replacing them are booths with digital cameras and dye-sublimation printers.
To best honor the man beloved for playing Mr. Spock, Phi Vu did what comes most logical to him. He used his talents as a 3D artist to create a bust of the late Leonard Nimoy.
The result is a bronze-colored likeness of the regal Starfleet first officer that rivals anything that could be created on the Enterprise’s holodeck.
The 1/3 scale bust has the high cheekbones, a brow lifted by severely angled eyebrows, and those signature Vulcan ears.
Flying saucers from Mars is the stuff of science fiction. But a flying saucer from Earth is part of the mission to get astronauts to the Martian surface.
NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory completed a successful spin test of a saucer-shaped experimental craft in front of a live web audience Tuesday. The saucer will next lift off by balloon from Hawaii, where from 120,000 feet it will be dropped to test a new kind of parachute and an inflatable Kevlar ring to add drag for a slower descent.
Gene Simmons has a show-stopping demonic tongue wag. But it’s nothing compared to the tongue action of a panther chameleon.
BBC Earth’s web series Earth Unplugged put the quirky chameleon in its slow-motion studio, shooting him at meal time at 1,500 frames per second, then playing it back 60 times slower than real time.
This chameleon’s tongue can shoot out of its mouth at a speed that’s four times faster than the highest acceleration of a fighter jet. The slow-mo treatment allows the viewer to appreciate the artistry of both the filmmakers and their hungry star.
Humankind is not depending on me to cure some terrible epidemic. That takes the pressure off and lets me have a little fun as I try a device that turns my iPhone into a fairly powerful microscope.
With a clip-on aspheric lens and transmitted light base that weighs only a few ounces, the makers of uHandy Microscope boast of it having a resolution comparable to a traditional microscope that weighs down a lab table in a classroom.
Samples can be magnified and viewed in the field using your smartphone’s camera app to record the image and, of course, an instant ability to share the image with colleagues in other places.
Your Uber account is handy for catching a ride. It may also be handy for someone else to get around town on your dime.
Stolen Uber customer accounts have turned up for sale on the dark web for as little as $1, according to a report by the website Motherboard.
One seller claims to have “thousands” of user logins for sale.
Who knew the Plague of Blood could be so fun.
Students at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology created a Rube Goldberg machine that covers the highlights of the Passover story, complete with falling Matzo crackers as part of the chain reaction.
Rube Goldberg machines are fun, over-engineered contraptions designed to complete a simple task, but the Passover story, by no means, is simple. There are plagues, a burning bush, a baby Moses in a basket and the parting of the sea.
About the only thing you can’t print on a 3-D printer is a time machine. However, the creators at Formlabs have managed to bring forward a staple from many 1950s living rooms.
OK, so 3-D printing a miniaturized replica of a Philco Predicta television isn’t exactly time travel, but you can ignore that when you realize the TV actually works.
If you search long enough, you can find anything on eBay and Craigslist. That includes lost, expensive military equipment that helps soldiers find roadside bombs.
The Intercept, an investigative reporting website founded by Glenn Greenwald, obtained a Navy intelligence document detailing thermal-optic-imaging and night-vision devices that wound up on a number of websites for sale, including eBay, Craigslist, texasguntalk.com and sportsfisherman.com.
A game like Real Racing has sophisticated graphics that, combined with the motion sensors of an iPad, give you the sensation of being behind the wheel.
The only thing missing is the actual wheel.
Ivaylo Kalburdzhiev wants iPad users to have a more comfortable drive when they play anyone of the more than 450 tilt games.
The CEO of KOLOS, slavic for colossus, has developed a gaming wheel for the iPad that launches on Kickstarter today.
Aaron Muderick is grateful to the anonymous pioneering office worker who thought to populate his or her desk with toys.
Muderick was a software engineer when his go-to desk toy, Silly Putty, gave him a whole new career when the tech bubble burst in the late 1990s and the company that employed him went under.
The story behind the unique beginnings of “Crazy Aaron’s Thinking Putty” is even crazier than the chemistry that creates the luminescent and magnetic properties of his product.
We turned up our noses at the first digital pictures because they didn’t look as good as film. The camera added to the Nintendo Game Boy in 1998 certainly didn’t make the case for a digital future.
The bulbous attachment recorded a fuzzy, postage-stamp-size, black-and-white image. That’s black and white with no gray shades in between.
If you wanted to share your photo, you could purchase a separate printing device that plugged into the Game Boy and spit out a tiny print. The printer took a little roll of paper and looked like one of those small credit-card-processing machines that spit out a receipt.
Today, several megapixels later, the look of the Game Boy camera is refreshingly vintage.
Standing in front of a classic turntable, you might not expect to be impressed by the brick work
But it’s the first thing that comes to mind when beholding the sci-fi hi-fi created by Korean Lego artist Hayarobi.
No detail is overlooked on Hayarobi’s record player, which he called The Planet. It consists of more than 2,400 pieces and is powered by a Lego Power Functions Battery Box and LEGO Power Functions M-Motor, according to Huh Magazine.
Video games let us experience murderous rampages, violent carjackings and the horrors of war. But should virtual entertainment take us through a real-life tragedy with depictions of the actual people who lost their lives?
The developers of Titanic: Honor and Glory are prepared to answer that question as they build out a game based on the 1912 sinking of the luxury liner that claimed more than 1,500 lives.
The Instagram faithful churns out 70 million photos daily. But if you weren’t able to share your meal or tell the story of your quirky cat in a single picture, you had to post multiple photos.
That changed Monday. Instagram introduced Layout, a new free app that lets you combine images into a single post. The news was announced on the Instagram blog.
Users can open Layout and drag and drop photos from their camera roll to any of the custom templates. Flip, rotate, resize and create mirror effects in your layouts.
One company suggests you could use their product to keep the neighbors on edge while the competition promises “endless possibilities of entertainment.”
Gosh, they’re both right. I need a flamethrower.
Two companies with very different designs are working to meet the needs of a public clamoring to clear brush or light their bonfires from a distance with devices that look like like the tool soldiers once used to clear jungles and machine gun nests during times of war.
Did you roll your eyes when you saw the latest MacBook had a new kind of USB port?
So did the website College Humor, which went to work satirizing Apple’s pride in its product design.
Under the headline Why Every New MacBook Needs a Different Goddam Charger, College Humor released a new video that pokes fun at the latest Apple laptop.
We grew up in homes with robust photo albums, reels of 8 mm home movies and stacks of VHS tapes. These represent the branches and blossoms of our growing family trees.
In the digital age, we’ve filled out the branches, capturing millions of pictures and video clips almost out of concern we will miss something.
And we rarely look at any of it.
Mok Oh wants to change that with Moju, an iPhone app that distills the essence of a life moment by taking a sequence of photos and creating seamless motion in a file that comes to life with a simple twist of your phone.
It figures that the city known for generating the most Instagram selfles would open a museum to attract selfie shooters.
Art in Island, an interactive art museum in a suburban Manila, Philippines, has installations designed for visitors to incorporate themselves into master 3-D copies of some classic works.
We have Apple products atop our desks, in our pockets and, soon, on our wrists. As if there aren’t enough Apples in our airspace, one man is nudging his favorite company to design a quadrocopter. He’s even taken a stab at designing his dream Apple drone — and was careful to remain faithful to the Jony Ive aesthetic.
Eric Huisman presents his Apple drone concept like a classic Apple ad, with the product photographed on a seamless white background, perfectly lit, with a subtle shadow.
There was a time when a device that had more than one function was something to behold.
It took a real feat of engineering to make a machine that could do several things without taking up a good chunk of your living room.
I don’t know if the Answer ATR-102 Triplecorder can be considered such a marvel of technology, but it is awfully cool to look at.
Cameras and sensors assist us with backing up, parallel parking and eliminating blind spots, but technology that makes sure drivers don’t nod off still hasn’t found traction.
Australian company Seeing Machines wants to change that with its dashboard device that pays rapt attention to a driver’s head movements, blinking patterns and eyeball rotations, then alerts the motorist if a dangerous “microsleep event” is imminent.
“Unless you are a soldier, driving is the most dangerous thing we do day-to-day,” Rama Myers, business development manager for Seeing Machines, told Cult of Mac.
What’s good for endangered birds of prey might actually prey on GoPro’s hold on the point-of-view camera market.
Sony’s 2-ounce Action Cam Mini has been flying high since its release in September, thanks to an organization that has been strapping the tiny HD video camera on the backs of eagles to raise awareness about threatened species.
Darshan, an imperial eagle, flew Saturday from the world’s talent building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. As he sought his handler, he gave BBC viewers a breathtaking five-minute live view before making a quick drop, following a signal to land.
If you’ve ever walked into a flagship Apple Store unconvinced of the magic of Cupertino’s products, a wondrous curvy, glass staircase might have softened your psyche.
Apple’s retail outlets are almost as well known for award-winning architecture and eye-catching staircases as for the MacBooks, iPads and iPhones on sale. But Apple Stores aren’t the only places to make vertical trips seem like a magical journey.