London-based photographer Luca di Filippo created an awesome photo series, entitled Daily Contaminations, which depicts insects made of components from discarded electronics skulking about our homes and investigating our lives.

“We never thought about what’s going on in our houses when we are out. They exist, they born from all the trashed electronic gadgets we used for years and years. Little “electronic creatures”, very smart, harmless but curious, very curious. They roam around looking for informations about our habits. Nobody knows why. Someone thinks they sell data to the highest bidder. And any kind of pesticide can’t stop them.”

Click here to view the entire Daily Contaminations series.

[via Girls are Geeks]

Artist Florian Baron recently contacted us about not one, but two awesome creations, both called the Kaleidoclock. First there was an interactive video installation at the 2012 Ashigara Art Festival in Japan. It used video delay to create mesmerizing kaleidoscopic patterns of the viewers as they stood in front of the device. Click here to watch a short video of the Kaleidoclock in action.

Now there is a Kaleidoclock app for both iPhone and iPad that uses the same principle, only now the user’s phone or tablet is Kaleidoclock, which means you can transform whatever you see into a kaleidoscopic image that can then be downloaded and shared:

“KALEIDOCLOCK uses a circular screen that is divided into segments, similar to the face of a clock. The segments are showing footage of a camera facing the viewer. However, only one of them is in real time, and each successive segment has a time delay to the previous one. This setup lets the viewers playfully create infinite styles of visuals through combining - in one image - their present and their recent past.”

Visit the Kaleidoclock website to learn more.

(Have you created something awesome? Share it with us.)

These cute little sculpture versions of children’s drawings are the work of a company called Crayon Creatures. Pictured here are a Giraffied Llama and a Hamster on a Speed Boat, both of which are completely awesome.

The service is available to purchase online. After uploading a scanned image of your child’s drawing you’ll receive a 3D sandstone sculpture depicting the artwork by mail.

“Children drawings are weird and beautiful. Kids produce an immense amount of drawings that populate fridges, living rooms and workspaces of parents, family & friends. Those drawings are amazing, We love them. We will bring to life the kid’s artwork by modeling a digital sculpture and turning it into a real object using 3D Printing technology.”

[via Laughing Squid]

Toast and smiles are both awesome, so we love the Smile Cooking Toaster, designed by Xu Yan Xiang. From the elegant, transparent design to the cheerful faces and, of course, the delicious toast you get to eat, just knowing that someone designed this gadget makes us happier. 

[via Yanko Design]

Is the world melting? Are these stills from an upcoming science fiction movie? Afraid not. It’s Google Earth experiencing an image-mapping glitch, thus creating some entertaining visual hiccups.

Rhizome’s Clement Valla, who collects images of Google Earth glitches, explains what’s happening in these images:

3D Images like those in Google Earth are generated through a process called texture mapping. Texture mapping is a technology developed by Ed Catmull in the 1970’s. In 3D modeling, a texture map is a flat image that gets applied to the surface of a 3D model, like a label on a can or a bottle of soda. Textures typically represent a flat expanse with very little depth of field, meant to mimic surface properties of an object. Textures are more like a scan than a photograph. The surface represented in a texture coincides with the surface of the picture plane, unlike a photograph that represents a space beyond the picture plane. This difference might be summed up another way: we see through a photograph, we look at a texture. This is an important distinction in 3D modeling, because textures are stretched across the surface of a 3D model, in essence becoming the skin for the model.

Google Earth’s textures however, are not shallow or flat. They are photographs that we look through into a space represented beyond-a space our brain interprets as having three dimensions and depth. We see space in the aerial photographs because of light and shadows and because of our prior knowledge of experienced space. When these photographs get distorted and stretched across the 3D topography of the earth, we are both looking at the distorted picture plane, and through the same picture plane at the space depicted in the texture. In other words, we are looking at two spaces simultaneously. Most of the time this doubling of spaces in Google Earth goes unnoticed, but sometimes the two spaces are so different, that things look strange, vertiginous, or plain wrong. But they’re not wrong. They reveal Google’s system used to map the earth -The Universal Texture.

[via io9]

A Canadian company called Hyperstealth Biotechnology Corp claims to have developed a ‘Quantum Stealth’ invisibility cloak for use by US and Canadian military and counter terrorism personnel. They go on to state that the cloak works so well and is so top secret that they can’t release actual images of it in use, and instead created the Photoshop mockups you see here. 

“Guy Cramer, CEO of Hyperstealth Biotechnology Corp, says he does not care that some observers remain sceptical as to his company’s claims since ‘the people that need to know that it works have seen it’.

‘Two separate command groups within the U.S. Military and two separate Canadian Military groups as well as Federal Emergency Response Team (Counter Terrorism) have seen the actual material so they could verify that I was not just manipulating video or photo results,’ Mr Cramer said.

‘These groups now know that it works and does so without cameras, batteries, lights or mirrors…It is lightweight and quite inexpensive. Both the U.S. and Canadian military have confirmed that it also works against military IR scopes and Thermal Optics.’”

Military use is pretty predictable, but what about all of us Harry Potter fans? Will we get a crack at it too? That would be, yes, completely awesome.

[via Geekologie]

California-based videogame developer turned professional inventor Simon Hallam has created one of the coolest coffee tables we’ve ever seen (and successfully funded its production thanks to Kickstarter). If you lack the outdoor space for an actual zen garden, Hallam’s Zen Table looks like an awesome alternative. The table’s glass-covered surface is filled with silicone beads. A sculpting head creates shapes, patterns or images using the beads based on templates or instructions delivered in real-time.

“The Zen Table has two sizes – a coffee table measuring 56″ x 39″ x 19.5″ and a smaller desktop version measuring 13″ x 9.5″ x 2 1/2″. Both are made of bamboo and equipped with an SD card slot and a USB cable. The SD card slot is for the bundled SD card which will have several programs that instruct the table’s electronics to create patterns, but you can also send commands from a computer to the table via USB.

In addition, the coffee table version can also be equipped with a 3G modem that will allow it to receive new designs, as well as allow the user to control the table from an Android or iOS app that Hallam is currently developing. That means you can have the Zen Table write messages to people at the table or have it draw naughty images when your parents have a visitor. The possibilities are frightening.”

Click here to watch a demo of the Zen Table. Then head over to Hallam’s YouTube channel for more videos of the Zen Table in action.

[via Technabob]