Piper - Pipe into your home from outside !!

Piper is a home security and automation device that monitors and interacts with your home via a smartphone or tablet.

The device has a wide-angle camera, motion detector, a speaker, microphone, siren, Wi-Fi, Z-Wave controller and sensors for humidity, temperature, sound and ambient light. It can be mounted on a wall or simply placed on a flat surface, and an accompanying app allows users to interact with, and control it. Up to five users can be manage it through the app. It provides a video feed that users can remote monitor the home via the app. A 180° fish-eye lens aims to provide a full-view of a room in one shot, and users can also pan and zoom as required. The device also monitors temperature, humidity, ambient light and sound levels. Perhaps the device's most useful functionality is its home automation feature. It can be programmed to perform actions such as send notifications when it senses certain things and communicate with other Z-Wave devices allowing users to control things like lighting or heating.

Piper, which was named a Design and Engineering Awards Honoree at CES 2014, is available now in the US, retailing from US $239.

Source: Piper

Spyder 3 Arctic Laser - A Supervillianous Thing !!

This post was posted on a special request by my friend,so here it is. Do you think your laser pointer is not cool or unworthy? Then try the new Spyder III Pro Arctic Series. The looks may make it look like a sweet light saber, but it is seriously not a toy to play with. Wicked Lasers brings the most powerful laser pointer in the world with the latest high definition blue laser diode technology. 

The diodes in Casio's new mercury-free Green Slim projectors apparently allow for unprecedentedly powerful portable lasers, and the company has gleefully harvested them for the 1 Watt Spyder III. Comparing it to the $2000 Sonar, the Spyder III laser is 2000 times brighter to the human eye, and, at $200, 1/10th the price. You can’t obviously use it to blast up your school or your enemy’s house but this bad boy laser would surely burn or blind you if precautions aren’t followed. This is what the company warning says:

Warning: Extremely dangerous is an understatement to the power of 1W of laser power. It will blind permanently and instantly and set fire quickly to skin and other body parts, use with extreme caution and only when using the included eye protection. Customers will be required to completely read and agree to our Class IV Laser Hazard Acknowledgment Form.

In other words, don’t screw around with it and if you think you can handle one, go grab it for $197.97 from the company’s official website. A perfect gift for the SuperVillian !!

Source: WickedLasers

Spike - Measure Anything !!

A device that is a boon for Architects and Engineers just recently launched. It measures distances and heights of any object over air through laser technology, and that’s not it. The best part is that this technology is filled in your smartphone - the researchers have developed an app too for it.

The device needs to be attached to the back of a smartphone and then can be used as a laser range finder after which the user can just take a photo of the object they wish to measure through the Spike companion app on their smartphone. The hardware then measures key metrics, such as distance, direction and volume and communicates this data to the smartphone via Bluetooth, displaying the augmented results on the screen. Users can then share this data, or use it to produce 3D models with what the company says is laser accuracy. According to it's successful Kickstarter campaign page, the company will allow third party app developers access to an API (application programming interface), enabling the embedding of specialist ikeTools into applications in anticipation of augmented reality and location based services apps. Spike is also compatible with 3D modeling software SketchUp. This means that rather than importing measurements manually, users can take an image with Spike to reproduce a scalable model of the object or building and 3D-print it as required. The entire device weighs approximately 100 g (3.5 oz) and measures 90 x 50 x 20 mm (3.5 x 2 x .8 in).

Spike is powered by an internal Li-ion cell battery recharged via a Micro USB connector, with each charge lasting two days of typical use, according to the company. You can pre-order it on the official website for US$559 with shipping estimated for May 2014.

Source: ikeGPS

Glyph Headphone - Get an Immersive Experience !!

What better way to have adventures or play reality games than a head-mounted display? Unless you happen to be dressed as Geordi La Forge at a Star Trek convention though, wearing such technology does kind of label you a bit of a geek. So here’s the new Glyph headsets - which are a bit different, rather than looking at an LCD or OLED display through lenses, Glyph users have the video and game images projected directly on their retinas courtesy of a combination of special optics and millions of tiny mirrors. The first pre-production prototypes are currently being assembled for a display.

"We stare at things like computer screens all day, and as you know, if you look into that screen for half an hour, you get really tired," Tang (CEO) told CBS Detroit last week. "But if you look at the real world, you don’t. He set about trying to solve that, trying to recreate that really vivid, natural image. He created a virtual retinal display that replicates how we see things in the natural world, by reflected light. Glyph is said to offer users the equivalent of an 80-inch screen from 8 ft (2.4 m) away, currently giving users about a 45-degree field of view out front. Users can hook up the Glyph to an Xbox or Playstation, a PC or Mac, and iOS or Android device, or an optical media player via an HDMI/MHL input.

The current prototypes have proved successful in head-tracking testing, so there's potential for immersive gaming, and reported system benefits include high resolution 2D or 3D viewing, absence of a screen-door effect and low latency. "The image is very clear and refreshes at up to 120 Hz with minimal motion blur and we are working on new techniques to remove any residual color break-up that can occur with field-sequential displays, but so far no problems are there." Banks (CSO) tells CBS Detroit. The final specs relating to the built-in batteries have yet not been confirmed, but the developers are aiming for 2-3 hours of battery life before needing to recharge via micro-USB. The company is also in the process of testing various materials to make long haul use as comfortable as possible. "The spring tension of the band on the ears will help hold up the Glyph," says Banks. "The rest of the weight will fall lightly on the users nose on a padded nose bridge."

More details will be available when the beta version of the Glyph launches on Kickstarter on January 22 costing around US$499.

Source: Avegant

Silic Shirt - Never Get Wet !!

How it feels when you go well dressed for a party and before you reach there unluckily something spills on your T-shirt !! The whole mood is spoiled and so is the T-Shirt, but no longer. A young entrepreneur Aamir Patel has developed the Silic Shirt which is made from a hydrophobic fabric that repels liquids away from it like a force field.

The shirt is no different than others; it is a simple form-fitting Tee that you’d find in any clothing store. The shirt’s soft polyster fabric is layered with microscopic silica particles that bond to the fibres and create a tiny barrier of air around it preventing any liquid to stain it. One more advantage of this shirt is that since the material is anti-microbial so it doesn't need to be washed as often. Patel and his collaborators recently launched a Kickstarter campaign that cleared its $20,000 funding goal in less than a day and has raised more than quadruple that amount at the time of writing. The inventor says that the fabric used in the Silic shirt is expensive, which is why just one shirt will cost around US$48. Anyone who pre-orders will have a choice between black and white colors along with S, M, L, XL, and XXL sizes. If all goes as planned, the first batch of shirts will be shipped out in May 2014.

So if you are clumsy, constantly falling food over yourself or are just lazy to wash clothes this is the perfect choice as it seems that the person’s body would retain more water than the Silic Shirt !!

Source: Silic Shirts