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Lighty paints real lighting Photoshop-style, minus the overdone lens flare (video)
It's not hard to find smart lightbulbs that bow to our every whim. Creating a well-coordinated light scheme can be difficult without tweaking elements one by one, however, which makes the Japan Science and Technology Agency's Lighty project that much more elegant. The approach lets would-be interior coordinators paint degrees of light and shadow through an app, much as they would create a magnum opus in Photoshop or a similar image editor. Its robotic lighting system sorts out the rest: a GPU-assisted computer steers a grid of gimbal-mounted lightbulbs until their positions and intensity match the effect produced on the screen. While Lighty currently exists just as a scale model, the developers plan to work with life-sized rooms, and potentially large halls, from now on. We're all for the newfound creativity in our lighting, as long as we can't mess it up with a Gaussian Blur filter.
Self-aware headphones switch channels depending on which ear they're in (video)
Life is fraught: social interaction, inflation and fashion all conspire to ruin your day. Even the simple act of firing up your PMP can send you to the floor in tears if you discover your earbuds are in the wrong way, forever ruining the beautiful stereo trickery of The White Album. Fortunately, Japan's Science and Technology Agency has beavered away at this most first-world of problems with its Universal Earphones Project. One earpiece holds a proximity sensor, which if it's pointing at your ear, pumps out the left-channel, if it's facing away from you, it pumps out the right channel (pictured). It's also capable of working out if you've shared your sounds with a friend and will push out a mono mix to both headphones -- so neither of you miss out on the other half. Amazing to think all of the money and manpower that went into a solution to save you having to read the letters "L" and "R" and making a decision for yourself. After the break we've got a video explaining it, just be warned that the narrator is synthesized, it's not a serial killer.
Cooky robots will make soup for you, won't clean up afterwards
Cooking robots aren't exactly anything new (even if they haven't yet been perfected), but they generally come in the form of humanoid robots or, at the very least, robotic arms in order to be more adept in the kitchen. JST's ERATO research division has taken a decidedly different approach with these so-called Cooky robots, however, which are tiny, wheeled bots that scurry about your countertop and work as a team to make miso soup for you. As you might have guessed from the image above though, they aren't quite entirely autonomous, and require that you both label all the necessary ingredients with special cards, and pre-program things like cooking time and temperature. They'll take things over from there on out though and, as you can see in the video after the break, the results do at least appear to be edible.
