With the recent debut of its online App Store, Apple has opened the door to allow the iPhone to truly become an “everything-in-one” handheld device. With a few quick clicks you can check the weather in Berlin, watch highlights from the Giants-Patriots game from the night before and even get turn-by-turn directions to the new sushi place across town. But what about the person who wants to relive his or her childhood? Yes, there’s an application for that, too.

Coming soon from developer touchGrove is the LED Football App. For a single dollar you can transform your iPhone into the simplistic electronic football game that three decades ago provided parents a nifty way of keeping their kids occupied on long car trips.

What the game lacks in depth it more than makes up for in nostalgia. Plus, those who appreciate irony can enjoy turning one of the most technologically advanced handheld devices into one of the most primitive gadgets from days gone by.

Latte artists beware.  OnLatte, Inc.’s latte foam printer blows handmade artisan foam designs out of the water.  The latte foam printer repurposes your standard inkjet printer to use edible caramel-colored food coloring instead of ink.

 

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Move over Agyness Deyn and Kate Moss, England’s got two new top models (and ones that are more easily manageable).

Popular claymation cohorts, Wallace and Gromit, are featured in adverts for the chic Harvey Nichols department store.

Cheddar-hoarding Wallace looks sharp in an Alexander McQueen suit and Dolce and Gabbana shirt.  His trusty pooch pal, Gromit sports Ray Ban sunglasses and a posh Paul Smith scarf.  Wallace’s paramour, Lady Campanula Tottington beautifully models a floor-brushing Alexander McQueen dress and Christian Louboutin stilettos.

According to an interview with BBC News, Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park is pleased with the transformation. “[Wallace] isn’t exactly known for his up-to-the-minute fashion sense but I know he’s feeling pleased with himself,” he said.  “It’s great to see him looking so chic and stylish.”

Wallace and Gromit is a popular British short film series. Their films include A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave – which were first shown on BBC in the late 80s and early 90s. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) is Wallace and Gromit’s most recent film venture.

Multi-talented David Byrne has added something new to his resume: bicycle rack designer.

New York City’s Department of Transportation along with the PaceWildenstein art gallery has brought nine David Byrne designed bike racks to various parts of the city. Eight of the red, black or silver racks are in Manhattan and one is Brooklyn.

The racks are considered a temporary art installation but the goal is to promote bicycling as a mode of transportation in the city.

According to the New York Times City Room blog:

“It was important to me that these new racks be the same thickness and material as the existing racks—to help identify them as practical bike racks and not just modern art,” Mr. Byrne said. “The locations [are] about as perfect as one could imagine — Wall Street for the dollar sign and Bergdorf’s for the giant high heel!”

My personal favorite is the guitar shaped rack. It’s in Williamsburg, of course.

And they’re off! Over the weekend six teams, representing colleges and tech companies from the U.K., U.S.A., Belgium, Spain and The Netherlands participated in the “world’s first international hydrogen-powered motorsport race” in Rotterdam, the Formula Zero championship.

The six teams each created their own version of a high performance go-kart that is powered by a fuel cell that produces electricity from hydrogen and produces zero emissions. In fact, and in accordance with the zero emissions ideal, the winning teams (there were several races) did not come in first place, but were shooting for the top honor of the day, zeroth place. The idea behind Formula Zero being that today’s go-kart is tomorrow’s Formula One race car whipping through the streets of Monaco fueled only by electricity and hydrogen, and then one day perhaps, even the car you drive.

Even the international governing body of motorsports, Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, recognizes the Formula Zero races with the hope that this technology will eventually come to replace standard combustion engines.

“In 10 years if the motorsport industry as a whole hasn’t engaged in zero or low emission principles, it probably won’t be around,” said Greg Offer, who headed up the Imperial team. “Teams that embrace this new technology early on will succeed, and those that don’t will fall by the wayside.”

Racing excitement won’t suffer, though; Dr. Offer says that fuel-cell powered vehicles don’t represent a compromise in performance over traditional petrol-fuelled engines.

“With a combustion engine, you have to reach three or four thousand rev[olutions per minute] to get your peak power,” he says. “With an electric vehicle, it’s all there from standing, and they’re more efficient.”

[via BBC News]

Leave it to Portland to be the first U.S. city with a “green” gym. This Friday, an eco-friendly gym in northeast Portland will open, using energy generated by people working out to help power the facility.

The Green Microgym will get some of its energy from people using spin bikes and other cardio machines that can generate as much as 750 watts an hour. But gym owner Adam Boesel isn’t stopping there. Solar panels are also being utilized and there’s an overall eco-conscious theme at the gym with more energy efficient treadmills, ceiling fans and TVs, in addition to recycled rubber and cork flooring.

Most gyms are energy hogs, with sweeping floor space, high heating costs and hot showers always steaming in the locker rooms. Boesel doesn’t know how much energy the solar arrays and human-powered equipment will produce, but he expects his fitness center to use about half the energy of most gyms its size by providing as much as 40% of its energy needs. His goal is to have the gym run solely on the energy it generates.

[Via the LA Times]

This weekend’s Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in San Francisco is hoping to do more than just bring a concert to the Bay Area. Entrepreneur John Battelle has joined forces with the festival to create CrowdFire, which will bring together various types of content from festival-goers.

Music fans have long been taking concert photos and video from their mobile phones and posting comments to Twitter. Battelle is trying to capitalize on that, he explains.

“People are doing this,” he said of all the media. “The question is, can you do something cool with it?”

From a CrowdFire hub with plasma screens and computers, people will be able to upload mobile media they’ve created during the three-day event. And people not physically at the festival will be able to check out a stream of the consumer generated material as well.

“We want to get a cloud of media to become something fungible that people can see and work with to create new things,” he said. “I want the performance to go from one-to-many to many-to-many.”

[Via AdAge]

It has always been a struggle for bands to get their music heard, but with each generation, it has gotten a little easier. The advent of the cassette tape enabled artists to share their music at a low cost. This was followed by the Compact Disc—which expanded on the capabilities of the cassette—and finally, by the biggest breakthrough of them all, the internet. For the first time, bands could get their music to the masses, no matter which corner of the globe they were on.

But a problem still existed. Now that the playing field was level, how could a band without the backing of a record label or a famous face to exploit get people to pay attention to them? At the end of the day the answer was simple: Content and fan interaction.

Perfectly illustrating this point is Your Favorite Enemies, a Montreal-based band that have taken advantage of all the tools of the digital age. Their Myspace page is a one-stop shop for band-related content, and they produce a weekly web-based show that not only highlights their music, but also their personalities and their fans. They have studio diaries, band member blogs, photos of themselves interacting with their fans and, of course, music videos.

But content alone isn’t enough. What is so unique about Your Favorite Enemies is that they strive to build genuine relationships with their fans. This is actually how I came to find out about this band. When I was recovering from knee surgery over the Christmas holiday, Your Favorite Enemies guitar player Jeff Beaulieu sent me an email via Myspace. But unlike the vast majority of emails I get from bands that simply say, “Hey, why don’t you check out our music?” this was an actual, personal email in which Beaulieu asked how my recovery was going (I had written about my surgery in my personal blog). It was because of this personal touch that I checked out their music, and it was also what led to my becoming a fan.

And that personal touch seems to be working on others as well. Your Favorite Enemies have had more than 1.5 million visitors to their Myspace page, and an amazing 5 million song plays (which is significant, because on average, each visitor listens to three songs).  They have also sold more than 30,000 copies of their debut EP, made inroads on Canadian music video television and have even toured the Far East.

It took the music industry decades just to see a slight change in the typical band business model. Given all the changes that have come about recently, it is very likely that another new model will be created in just a fraction of that time.

South Korean artist Hyungkoo Lee has created an exhibition entitled Animatus, showcasing sculpted skeletons of familiar Disney and Looney Tunes characters.

The skeletons are constructed using real animal bones along with synthetic materials.  On his personal website, Lee says the series began with the “intention to analyze anatomical structures and physical forms of animation characters, within the hypothesis to visualize their possible anatomical foundation.”

The exhibition is now showing at the Natural History Museum in Basel, Switzerland through August 31.

Click here for a photo slideshow via the U.K.’s Telegraph.

The Emily Project from Image Metrics - who create the animation for Grand Theft Auto - is another big step in lifelike computer animation. In the above video, Emily, is a photo-realistic animation, until the end of the video when you see the real actress. For years computer animators have been trying to leap what is called the “uncanny valley” - which means that the closer to lifelike an animation gets the more unreal it seems to look. The problem was the amount of computational power of the chips being used to power these programs wasn’t enough. With the continual upgrade and release of more powerful chips, the closer animators, filmmakers, artists and gamers can get to making things look “real.”

Advance Micro Devices (AMD) released a new chip last week, the Radeon HD 4870 X2, that they claim is the fastest processing chip available today. Because of its incredibly fast processing power, animators can now really push the limits of their craft. Recreating facial movement has always been a major hurdle for animators because of all the subtle movements created by the face and the eyes. “Ninety per cent of the work is convincing people that the eyes are real,” Mike Starkenburg, chief operating officer of Image Metrics, said.

It was so difficult, that animators purposefully make their creations look less than real so gamers will know immediately that the characters they see are not real.

Raja Koduri, chief technlology officer in graphics at AMD, the chip-maker said that the line between what was real and what was rendered would not be blurred completely until 2020.

This is still good news for animators, gamers, digital artists and filmmakers, who now have the means to create incredibly lifelike photo-realistic faces in a way that previously escaped them. Image Metrics new software approaches facial rendering in a whole new way:

Previous methods for animating faces have involved putting dots on a face and observing the way the dots move, but Image Metrics analyses facial movements at the level of individual pixels in a video, meaning that the subtlest variations - such as the way the skin creases around the eyes, can be tracked.

Actors beware. This may put you out of a job one day.
[via Presurfer]