Gearfuse

Normally, we don’t like to post about every new cellphone in the world. There’s simply too many to count and besides, that leaves us with room to post the really cool ones. This time around, Samsung has finally announced the long-awaited Jet. Photos of this phone have been floating around for over a year if I recall, so it’s nice to see it out in the open.

So on to the details: This fucker packs a 3.1-inch AMOLED touchscreen, a crazy 3-D interface that is controlled via that wacky cube at the bottom of the phone, a 5-megapixel digicam with flash and autofocus, 2GB of built-in memory, audio jack, WiFi, DivX and Xvid codecs and to top it off, an 800 MHz processor. Can you believe these specs? Talk about a serious contender to the iPhone, especially with Xvid playback and a processor that’s faster than the desktop I owned several years ago.

No word on a release date or who’s going to carry it.

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Have $26? Want to get your kid a present that’s both educational and incredibly badass? Pick up this anatomically correct model of a shark. I believe it’s a Great White. It has 20 removable body parts that you can remove and put back similar to a puzzle. Cheesy violin sounds not included.

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PSFK posted this fantastic motion graphics video from Kyle Downes. It depicts the history of video games from the Odyssey all the way up to today’s next-gen consoles. The 3-D work he did and the typography in the video are top notch. The production style is engaging and the fake British narrator really completes the look. Be sure to give it a peep. It’s only a few minutes long and is quite interesting.

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After reading the description of this maze, I’m still not sure I entirely understand it:

Have puzzles gone passé? With the advent and subsequent mainstreaming of videogames caused physical toys to go by the wayside? What do you get when you multiply six by nine? The answer to the first two questions is “No,” and the last, “42.”

What? I’m pretty sure that whoever created this puzzle was on drugs and had it in for other people on drugs. They might as well call this the “drugs puzzle” because the only way you’re solving it is on a boatload of, well, drugs. Glad we have an understanding.

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Doesn’t this photo sculpture by Canadian artist Susy Olivera look a lot like the papercrafts you can make yourself? It’s all polygonal as if it’s straight out of the Playstation One. Susy fashions these 3-D models together using photos and foam.

The one shown above is called “Time is Never Wasted.” To me, it bears a resemblance to Alec Trevelyan of Goldeneye after the confrontation with Ourumov. If only he had three more minutes.

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We haven’t covered much cloaking technology and that’s a shame because it’s starting to come into its own. Stefan Enoch at the Fresnel Institute in Marseille, France says that established cloaking principles, such as steering microwave light around an object, could be applied to ocean waves. Because cloaking technology is still in its infancy, scientists are still working on tackling 3-D objects, but we’ve got 2-D down. This works in our favor because waves are essentially 2-D.

To put this theory to the test, researchers built a prototype. The image above is the said prototype which is tested in a wave pool. Acting like a whirlpool, the device produces forces which pull the water along the concentric corridors as a result of the waves repelling off the pillars. This causes all the water to go everywhere except the center of the cloak. Think of the possibilities.

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Found in France, design studio Boucherie Moderne has created some killer three-dimensional tattoos. While some claim they look “animated,” I feel that these are just standard 3-D images on skin. Slap on a pair of glasses and it’ll look like it’s popping out at you. I’d love to get one on my fist. That way, when I punch someone, I can claim they wanted to check out my tattoo.

Whatever you get, make sure it’s something you won’t regret later.

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When Wolfenstein 3-D and Flickr wanted to get married, I gave them my best wishes. Just kidding, software and photo sharing sites can’t get married, silly. They can, however, be fused. Thanks to some anonymous geek with Javascript skills, this mashup of the popular FPS shooter game and photo sharing site takes the best from both and allows users to see their pictures hanging in the galleries of the Third Reich. That’s actually kind of creepy, now that I think about it.

It’s simple to use: just enter your Flickr username and let the app collect your photos. It then maps them on to the walls of a 3-D maze resembling Castle Wolfenstein. Awesome concept but it performs rather sluggishly when high res photos are taken into account, or if you just have a slow computer. Hey, it beats having Nazi propaganda on the walls.

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This table lamp designed by Alexander Lervik might look like just an ordinary lamp modeled after the human brain, but it’s so much more to Mr. Lervik. It’s called MYBrain and interestingly enough, it is Alexander Lervik’s brain. OK, it’s not his actual brain but it’s as close as it ever will be while propped on a stand, having light illuminating from it.

The lamp is based on the artist’s real brain after an MRI scanning and processing through a 3-D printer. He’s lucky that 3-D printer didn’t turn his brain into a Little Lamp, otherwise all his colleagues would be poking fun.

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Microsoft might make shitty operating systems but the company continues to innovate in other areas of the technology world. I haven’t heard of any Photosynth news for probably a year and now I wake up and Microsoft has pushed it out to the entire world. Photosynth works by taking batches of photographs and stitching them into a 3-D environment. You can then get a virtual tour of an area using photos. To be fair, you really have to watch the above video to get a feel for it.

Currently, Microsoft is offering a 20GB of storage for people to upload their photos and synths. The ability to add mobile phone photos has also been added as a new feature. Why are you still reading this? Give it a go!

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