Monthly Archives: February 2014

Sharp and Pointy Things

I’ll be honest. I’m kind of a huge nerd. All these movies and video games have awesome non-realistic bladed weapons that you’d never actually expect someone to make in real life. However, Swordsmith Tony Swatton has handmade over 30 battle-ready versions of weapons from movies, video games, and TV shows, including Game of Thrones, Final Fantasy, and Avatar. Swatton has made weapons for over 200 movies, and each of them looks deadly.

These videos have been posted to the AWE me Youtube channel, and it doesn’t look like they’re anywhere near finished.

What Sparks Our Fire: Realistically forging the weapons of our fantasies.

What would you like to see them create next?

Starry Nights

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If, in your cultured city life, you ever missed the simplicity and natural beauty of sleeping beneath the rural stars, here’s an expensive high-end technology that allows you to replicate the feeling without the actual outdoors.

The Cosmos Bed not only recreates the night sky, it also replicates sounds and even smells of the great outdoors. It’s the brainchild of Russian designer Natalia Rumyantseva, who created it in Saint Petersburg from white fiberglass. The bed is shaped kind of like an irregular oval or an egg, and is adjustable for angle. The rounded canopy covers about half the bed and kind of reminds me of when I was seven and had those little glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling above my bunk bed. The smells of the great outdoors are replicated via a therapeutic aroma dispenser. No word on whether or not it replicates the actual smells of the outdoors, like cow poop, stagnate water, and wet dog.

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What Sparks Our Fire: Many of us rely on technology like white noise and sleep aids to help us get some rest, but maybe this bed is the sign of things to come.

Would you want one of these Cosmos Beds?

You May Have Missed This

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I don’t think I know anyone who has ever used it, but since 2010 Facebook has supported an email service that comes free with your Profile and Account. Unsurprisingly, Facebook recently decided to shelve the service due to low user numbers. The way they’re doing this, however, is slightly odd. Any email sent to your Facebook.com address will be routed to your original login email, so in essence, anyone who can find your Facebook can send an email to you.

According to representatives of Facebook, this will be less of a problem than it seems. According to Mashable, “We limit the number of messages a person can receive in their inbox from people they’re not connected to. We also have systems in place to detect spam, and will not forward messages that we think are spam. The external email provider will also do their own spam checks. People also have the ability to turn off forwarding once we roll this out in a few weeks.”

It remains to be seen if this is going to be a beneficial messaging change or a tidal wave of spam messages, but for the time being it’s good to know who is sending you any random messages you may receive.

What Sparks Our Fire: Knowledge is power.

Does this change worry you?

iFitness

So you may have to wait on that iWatch for a while.

Apple seems to be focusing the efforts of its’ wearables on the fertile health and wellness markets. Over the past few years, Apple has hired health and wellness experts, and currently is seeking fitness app and hardware developers. In conjunction with reports that the new iPhone will support biometric readings, the next iteration of Apple products seem to be headed in a healthy direction. For instance, a design for a headphones embedded with biometric sensors was recently patented, and are able to track heart rate and body temperature.

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Therefore, it only stands to reason that Apple is going to keep the iPhone as the center of it’s mobile universe and create gadgets and accessories that enhance and specialize the existing functions of the phone.

What Sparks Our Fire:  No one needs a Google Glass yet, but everyone needs to enhance their iPhone. This may be the smartest strategy in the mobile gadget game.

What kind of fitness apps or tools would you like to see from Apple?

TouchCar

Industry leaders are slowly finding touchscreens in new-model cars to be very distracting and can cause a loss of focus on the road. My car still has a cassette player, so this obviously doesn’t apply to me, but the minute controls and over-filled screens on many touchscreen-enabled cars can be a lot more frustrating than my current “two knobs and a button” setup. Therefore, a problem needs to be solved: how do you create a touchscreen interface that can be operated hands free?

Designer Matthaeus Krenn is testing an interface that may just solve this problem. In his words: “I propose a new mode that can be invoked at any time: It clears the entire screen of those tiny, intangible control elements and makes way for big, forgiving gestures that can be performed anywhere. In place of the lost tactile feedback, the interface leverages the driver’s muscle memory to ensure their ability to control crucial features without taking their eyes off the road.”

What Sparks Our Fire: Not following a trend, but rather native-izing an existing technology to the needs and constraints of drivers.

Do you think this is a useful concept, or would you prefer the old-school version?