Heads-up Pittsburgh residents and robot lovers across the universe: an all new exhibition is coming to the Steel City next year, and it's got high, high hopes. The $3.4 million display, which is slated to be "permanent," will be housed in the Carnegie Science Center and go by the not-at-all-puzzling title of "roboworld." The installation is expected to house an "array of mechanized devices," and given that it's being billed as the "largest and most comprehensive nationwide on robotics," we'd say it's got a lot to live up to. Of course, we'll be utterly shocked if it even compares to the now-closed Robot Museum in Nagoya, Japan, but we suppose we'll have to see for ourselves when the doors fling open in Spring 2009.

We've no idea if this here is actually the "world's largest" clock, but it's quite sizable, indeed. Recently spotted at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin, Germany, this art installation reportedly does an outstanding job of telling time, running on pneumatics and breaking the silence every minute with an eerie hiss. If we didn't know any better, we'd say Coldplay got ahold of this thing when it toured in 2005, but then again, we know better.

History buffs and cellphone aficionados, take note: a couple of wireless picturephone prototypes (circa 1993) have recently been acquired by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and should soon be available for all to gawk at. Reportedly, the institution joined with Daniel A. Henderson to get ahold of the two devices and related documentation, which were built to take advantage of a picture / video receiving technology known as Intellect. Notably, this ain't Mr. Henderson's first time donating wares with varying levels of historical significance, as he's also responsible for the Casio Z7000 and Atari Portfolio that are on display. Interested in checkin' the duo out for yourself? Go on and circle summer 2008 on your calender.

While today might not seem all that out of the ordinary, it's not everyday that we find not just one, but two cases of folks using RFID technology to enhance our lives and bring excitement to otherwise mundane exhibits. Following up on ET's playful garb, Mogens Jacobsen has crafted the Audiobar (Hørbar), which is a "physical bar-like social environment that enable visitors to interact with sounds via RFID tagged bottles." His was recently commissioned by The Museum for Contemporary Art Roskild to come up with a new and varied way to present the museum's "vast archive of sound-art," and is now garnering worldwide attention for his success. Each tagged RFID bottle responds to the reader installed in the table, and the housed computer channels the appropriate audio clips to correspond with the bottle movements. While it still might take a bit more pizazz to get a gang of second graders to listen to anything on a museum field trip, this is most certainly a step in the right direction, and can be checked out now if you're stopping through Denmark.

[Via Textually]