Yes, it’s a colouring book. And yes, it has raised more than A$400,000 ($310,750) so far on Kickstarter. To be fair to its illustrator, however, it’s certainly a little more stunning than, say, Ikea’s colouring pages. Rafael Araujo, a Venezuelan architect and illustrator, has created the Golden Ratio Coloring Book along with a team in Sydney, Australia. The Kickstarter campaign to publish the book, which ends Apr. 29, has already left its original $27,000 ($20,975) goal well behind. READ MORE: A mathematical colouring book on Kickstarter has raised more than $400,000 | Mashable
The Calgary Public Library Foundation has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a makerspace called IdeaLab. IdeaLab will reside in Calgary’s New Central Library scheduled to open in 2018. The public space will be dedicated to increasing the digital and creative skills of Calgary’s citizens and provide the opportunity to explore technology and engage in hands-on learning.
The Calgary Public Library Foundation needs your help Calgarians! Of the $100,000 pledged goal for the project, only ~$19,000 has been raised with just a few days left in the campaign. Please fund this project so our New Central Library includes a space where people of all ages have access to innovative technologies.
On one page, you’ll see an illustration of kid scientists assembling multi-eyed orange creatures. On another, an amicable blue furry creature leads a march of kids and an alien. At first glance, these look like pages from a normal children’s fantasy book. Look again and you’ll realize these are all characters on a journey decorated with HTML tags. The Wonderful World of Creatures & Code (WWoCC) is an A-Z style book with the purpose of introducing kids to code. But it’s not available for purchase just yet. It’s currently on Kickstarter until Oct. 31 with a goal of $25,000. READ MORE: Colorful children’s book introduces kids to the basics of code | Mashable
Ms. McKean started a campaign last month on Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site, to unearth one million “missing” English words — words that are not currently found in traditional dictionaries. To locate the underdocumented expressions, she has engaged a pair of data scientists to scrape and analyze language used in online publications. Ms. McKean said she planned to incorporate the found words in Wordnik.com, an online dictionary of which she is a co-founder…Before her analytics project gets underway next month, Ms. McKean is crowdsourcing a list of missing words for possible inclusion in Wordnik.
Beyond Wearables: New Frontiers in Interactive Tech | WIRED
IN THE FINAL months of 2014, wearable technology sparked significant media and consumer attention – not least thanks to the announcement of the Apple Watch. But as wearables move from the margins into the mainstream, it’s time to consider the next wave of interactive technology.
Programmable Clothes Are Going Commercial | Co.Design
Clothes speak volumes about us, conveying messages about wealth, taste, and personal beliefs. So in this age of ubiquitous screens and social sharing, it’s no surprise that textiles have become another platform for electronic communication. But two new efforts are commercializing the technology, creating consumer fashions that allow the wearer to project any electronic text or image she desires.
Somehow Teen Girls Get the Coolest Wearable Out There | WIRED
JEWELBOTS ARE BRACELETS with programmable plastic flowers made for middle-school girls. They’re also the most interesting wearable I’ve seen this year. Their creators describe them as “friendships bracelets that teach girls to code.”
This Jacket Is a Dream Come True and I Need It Now | Jezebel
The BauBax jacket—which CNN quite accurately refers to as “the Swiss Army knife of
travel wear”—which debuted on Kickstarter last week with a goal of raising $20,000. They have since raised over $600,000 because it is a stunningly good idea. The jacket contains 15 pockets and a slew of built-in doodads.
These Strange Clothes Came Out of a Regular Old 3-D Printer | WIRED
Paired with new cellular structures being devised by 3-D printing re
searchers, the material allowed Peleg to create “lace-like textiles” that she could work with
“just like cloth.” She printed them using a Witbox—a $1,800 machine. [Image: Danit Peleg]
These Mathematical Scarves Are Designed By a Computer Algorithm | Gizmodo It’s still summer, but these mathematical merino scarves designed with a computer algorithm are getting us in the mood for colder temps. They’re called KnitYak: black-and-white merino scarves that each have a snowflake-unique design that’s generated by a computer algorithm.
A Paper-Thin Solar Panel Can Charge Your Phone on the Go | Lifehacker
Solar panels keep getting lighter and tinier—good news for rugged on-the-go types who can charge their devices on the trail with sun-fueled chargers. And this particular solar charger on Kickstarter is so thin, you can slip it in your Lonely Planet while it feeds your phone battery.
Disney’s $1 Billion Bet on a Magical Wristband | WIRED
The MagicBands look like simple, stylish rubber wristbands offered in cheery shades of grey, blue, green, pink, yellow, orange and red. Inside each is an RFID chip and a radio like those in a 2.4-GHz cordless phone. The wristband has enough battery to last two years. It may look unpretentious, but the band connects you to a vast and powerful system of sensors within the park.
New Process Can Print Stretchy Electronics Onto Your Clothes | TechCrunch
Researchers at the University of Tokyo have created a single-step process to print conductive material on cloth, allowing manufacturers to build stretchable wearables that can test vital signs like heart rate and muscle contraction.
Google’s Project Jacquard Aims To Make “Activewear” A Reality | ReadWriteWeb
What’s really fascinating about Project Jacquard…the clothing itself ought to be an interactive thing. It ought to provide us an opportunity to interact with devices around us. That’s the breakthrough that Project Jacquard is really talking about—now, instead of just passive data collection, your clothing is an opportunity for you to interact with devices.
Sensory Fiction | Felix | VIMEO
Sensory fiction is about new ways of experiencing and creating stories. Traditionally, fiction creates and induces emotions and empathy through words and images. By using a combination of networked sensors and actuators, the Sensory Fiction author is provided with new means of conveying plot, mood, and emotion while still allowing space for the reader’s imagination.
How to Print a Super-Thin Touchscreen Display on Just About Anything | Gizmodo
[T]his award-winning paper is perhaps the coolest we’ve seen: It lays out a new technique for printing cheap, simple touchscreen displays with conventional printers. It’s called PrintScreen, and it’s a system that allows the user to print on nearly a
ny material.
From The Designers Of Fitbit, A Digital Tattoo Implanted Under Your Skin | Co.Design
We asked NewDealDesign, the design consultancy behind projects like the Fitbit line of activity trackers, and Google’s modular Project Ara smartphone, what things might look like when technology and fashion reach beyond the wrist. In response, they created Project Underskin. It’s a concept for a smart digital tattoo which would be implanted in your hand and interact with everything you touch. It can unlock your front door, trade data with a handshake, or even tell you if you have low blood sugar.
DON COOLIDGE AND JP Benini are bringing cognitive smarts to the world of children’s toys. Coolidge and Benini just launched a Kickstarter for a toy dinosaur toy driven by IBM Watson, the machine learning service based on the company’s Jeopardy-playing cognitive system.
Developed under the aegis of a company called Elemental Path and a project called CogniToys, this tiny plastic dinosaur uses speech recognition techniques to carry on conversations with kids, and according to Coolidge and Benini, it even develops a kind of smart personality based on likes and dislikes listed by each child.
The toy is another example of online machine learning pushing even further into our everyday lives. This is made possible not only by an improvement in AI techniques, but also by the ability to readily deliver these techniques across the net. READ MORE: A Toy Dinosaur Powered by IBM’s Watson Supercomputer | WIRED.
You’ve got your warm bath, your bubbles, your glass of cheap wine and your book club book. Was there ever a better recipe for relaxation? That is, until — plunk! No thanks to slippery fingers and that glass of cheap wine, your just-purchased novel has taken a dive.
While the stress of keeping hold of a book with pruney fingers may fit the tone of, say, a heart-pounding thriller, it doesn’t exactly allow a reader to nestle into the worlds crafted by writers like Twain and Yeats. To provide a solution to the eternal book-bath struggle, Amsterdam-based couple Jasper Jansen and Wing Weng set to work to found Bibliobath, a company in its nascent stages that aims to publish waterproof works of classic literature.
Launched on Kickstarter this morning, Holus is a tabletop device that converts digital content into a 3D hologram. Created by H+ Technologies out of Vancouver, the campaign has nearly doubled its goal of $40,000 in its first 2 hours.
Don’t expect to use this to summon Obiwan with a seven-inch image of Princess Leia. Objects aren’t 3D in any sense we’re used to. Instead, the device is a square tabletop platform which encases a glass pyramid upon which media is projected from below. The result is an ostensibly 3D image which can be viewed from 360 degrees around the machine.
If you thought the $35 Raspberry Pi 2 was a small and cheap computer, think again. Next Thing Co.’s open-source C.H.I.P. is an even smaller barebones microcomputer that only costs $9.
Like the Raspberry Pi, C.H.I.P. can be used in a variety of ways. Connect the necessary parts — a keyboard, mouse, and a display — to it and it becomes a personal computer. Otherwise, you can hack it into a retro games emulator, or robot, or whatever you can dream up. Next Thing Co. encourages users to learn how to code and make things with C.H.I.P.
Next Thing Co. is currently crowdfunding C.H.I.P. through a Kickstarter campaign. At the time of this writing, the project has successfully reached its $50,000 funding goal with 29 days to go. The first C.H.I.P computers are expected to start shipping in December.
ve seen: It lays out a new technique for printing cheap, simple touchscreen displays with conventional printers. It’s called PrintScreen, and it’s a system that allows the user to print on nearly a
infophile 