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By Mia from Popgadget

I know, I know, I’m a virtual pet murderer (that’s a murderer of “virtual pets“, not someone who strangles hamsters or something sick like that) but I kind of want a NowaNowa. Nowa is a very shy little fairy and she only speaks French. She startles easily so she won’t come out unless you speak to her very gently and quietly. If she hears you, she may start moving around in her box but will only dart her head out for a moment and then hide again. Once you’ve earned her trust, she’ll pop out of the box and the lid will stay open. She will speak to you until she senses you’re not paying attention (sound detector) and then she’ll say “bonne nuit” and go inside her box to sleep. So cute, but somewhat high maintenance, I think.

By philliptorrone on DIY Projects

Is there anything LEGOs can’t do? The idea of building a working Rubik Cube has always appealed. Here the challenge is to create a mechanical device that has a number of degrees of freedom about a central point. It’s not easy! The cube consists of 12 edge pieces, 8 corner pieces and one central piece. All of these have to be interlocking, yet still be able to rotate about any axis at any time in any direction. Link.

NotPron

Riddle game, can take hours/days to figure out some levels. Varying levels can require anything from google searches, checking page source code, image manipulation through other programs and other geek oriented fun. Strange riddles yet very thought provoking.

The Khronos Projector is an interactive-art installation allowing people to explore pre-recorded movie content in an entirely new way. A classic video-tape allows a simple control of the reproducing process (stop, backward, forward, and elementary control on the reproduction speed). Modern digital players add little more than the possibility to perform random temporal jumps between image frames. The goal of the Khronos Projector is to go beyond these forms of exclusive temporal control, by giving the user an entirely new dimension to play with: by touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time. By actually touching a deformable projection screen, shaking it or curling it, separate “islands of time” as well as “temporal waves” are created within the visible frame. This is done by interactively reshaping a two-dimensional spatio-temporal surface that “cuts” the spatio-temporal volume of data generated by a movie.

Read More about the Khronos Projector (text taken from there site)

Erez Kikin-Gil ’s Eco Pod

is a TUI-controlled system that mimics the growth of a plant and allows
children to keep track of their class garden and learn how the
different natural elements influence it, and each other, over time.

One pod represents the wind, another the sun’s heat, a third one the
light and the last one represents the rain. Each pod can be manipulated
with a movement or action characteristic of the natural element it
represents. If you blow on the “wind” pod, you’ll see on the computer
screen the effect wind can have on a flower, if you pour water onto the
“rain” pod, the flower will be watered as well, etc.

The Eco Pod keeps track of daily changes in the plant environment,
by employing environmental sensors, they monitor the water level in the
soil, the amount of light, the temperature, and the wind. The system
also captures daily images of the plant.

Every now and then, the child can take the Eco-Pods to the
information retrieval system and transfer the data to the “plant diary”
software. This way, the kid can see the changes of the different
elements over time, draw conclusions about their impact on the growth
of the plant, but also internalize Systems Thinking concepts, such as
feedback loops, stocks and flows, and changes over time.

[Via we-make-money-not-art]

We recently got a PSP as a present for one of the Tokyopia crew
(yea, hard to believe he didn’t already have one).  As part of the
gift, one of our more talented members put this together to make sure
the recipient knew what to do.

Unforunately we can’t handle the bandwidth for this at Tokyopia so we’ve setup a torrent for it. Here is the PSP version
which is the recommened way to view it. Download it and copy the folder
to your PSP’s video folder and watch it on your PSP. If you are a
PSLoser and don’t have a PSP then here is an AVI version.

We have no problem if you want to host this somewhere else but

[Via tokyopia]

From Bandai comes a new iteration of the ever-popular “Tamagotchi”
virtual pets, called the “Chibi Tamagotchi.” They take after the
original Tamagotchis (from 1996) in form factor and characters. But
beware of the size — “chibi” is Japanese for something small and cute.
Indeed, the Chibi Tamagotchis are 66% the size of the original
Tamagotchis.

Official Homepage [Bandai]

[Via gizmodo]