Meiji
Latest
Kinect hack makes presentation slides work around you (video)
What's the scariest thing about presentations? Getting the perfect angle. You know, the point on stage where you can wave at your slides without blocking the projector bulb or your audience's view. Thankfully, Haruki Maeda from Meiji University is gonna show your text and graphics who's the boss. He's knocked up presentation software that can sense where you stand and orders the text into the visible space around you. Transitions are handled with gestures and you can even pinch-to-zoom live on stage. If you'd guessed there was some Kinect magic at the heart of it, well, thanks for reading the title. The modest Mr. Maeda says all it took was some C#, the Kinect SDK and an Excel spreadsheet to get this beauty working. You don't even need to do that if you're curious yourself -- just go and watch the video we've got after the break.
Pac-Man to appear on Japanese food pac-kages
In honor of Pac-Man's 30th anniversary, Namco Bandai has entered into a co-marketing partnership with Japan's Meiji food corporation to create some very cute packaging for snacks and beverages. Starting next month, cartons of Meiji's coffee and fruit drinks, as well as its line of puddings, will bear Pac-Man imagery. The enjoyment from these packages won't just be superficial. Each will come with a code allowing Japanese customers to download special Meiji/Pac-Man images for their cell phones. One on hand, we love this, but on the other hand, we can't help but think Namco Bandai's money would have been better spent on Pac-Man Battle Royale machines. For our office.
Tetris-like chocolates make our mouths water [update]
Okay, so this isn't true, blue Tetris (that would probably infringe on some copyrights), but these faux-Tetris-esque Meiji chocolates still look fun to us. If there's one thing we've learned from disobeying our parents, it's that playing with your food is fun. The goal in this case is to put all the pieces together so that you completely fill in the rectangle board.These Meiji chocolate bar puzzles come in different difficulties, too -- as the chocolate flavor gets more bitter (white, to milk, to dark), the piece placement gets harder. Of course, the hardest part would be the test in willpower. It's not easy to play the puzzle after you eat all the pieces, we're sure. These might stale by the time you import them, but if you'd like some anyway for the novelty they cost 730 JPY (about $7 USD) each at Strapya World, sans shipping. As of posting this, there were only four units in stock, so you might want to get on that quickly if you covet such treats.We just hope there's not too many zigzags.[Update: I just found out that the chocolate isn't actually edible! (Hear that? It's the sound of my heart breaking.) Sorry if I got any of your hopes up, too!][Via About:Blank]
