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Pingmag has this brilliant interview on Japa's modern day Leonardo, Dr. Nakamats! The floppy disc, sampling, PyonPyon flying shoes (shown above as worn by Dr. Nakamats himself), the Nostradmvs Engine II which runs on water and even a sex aid spray, Love Jet, are all the inventions of the brilliant and incredibly eccentric Dr. Yoshiro Nakamats.

His inventions are altogether wild and wonderful, some incredibly funny but a lot of amazingly useful ones you never knew were invented by this man. He dabbles in everything from food nutrition to non pollutive future engines and music. His current invention count runs past the 3000 mark, which is 3 times more prolific than Edison! He even has his own cute little song which Pingmag has linked to as well! (Essentially, it repeats his name over a sort of Euro vibe)

Dr. Nakamats also really believes in sharing how he gets his creative juices. His theories include the 5 tiered pagoda of creativity, which puts spirit, body, study, experience and trigger from bottom to top, each one leading to the next step. Fundamentally, he breaks invention down into 3 parts; theory (strong spirit, body, study, experience) , flash (trigger) and production. His own triggers (DON'T try this at home kids!) involve inducing a lack of oxygen by submerging himself underwater. At about 0.5 secs before he drowns to death, he experiences a flash which will trigger his creative juices. His other, much safer method of getting his juices flowing involves using calm rooms. His golden toilet apparently shuts out all manner of waves and stuff so he can think clearly. He also has a dynamic room to stimulate his mind once his ideas have started rolling.

But beneath all the weirdness, there is the core basis of why he does what he does and according to him, its called love. He basically started inventing because he wanted to make his mother's life easier. This belies the spirit that is his firm foundation. He makes inventions because he believes he will make people's lives better or at the very least, a lot more interesting.

This guy is just too cool. 

Phillips has come out with this new techonology so your clothes can display pictures or messages. Kinda like a Messenger for the street. Although you could also flash your favourite little graphic/video or advertise for some company or surf the web on it maybe amongst various other fashiony applications. Light emitting clothes. Because your face doesn't say enough. Via PSFK.

This is the BumpTop Prototype by Anand Agarawala and Ravin Balakrishnan. Its basically an interactive interface that takes on attributes you'd find in the real world. Watch the videos on their website and you'll get a better explanation. Just watching the first couple of minutes and you'll get a good feel of things. Essentially, real world desks are piled with stuff, documents and files that are in a mess but orderly according to the user. The computer desktops don't have quite the same feel at all and there's this loss of a certained ordered chaos. Often, the most creative minds also tend to be rather messy people. So its possible that interfaces like this might encourage a way of working which has a human touch and hence promote a more creative outlook. I know I'd use this.

Off Josh Spear.

Gizmodo reports on fighting robots. Going against the grain, robots and their makers show their violent sides. Check out this youtube video. Impressive how the robots can get up over and over again.

Apple has come up with a new patent which embeds many many tiny cameras within the pixels on the screen. Which basically translates into a minimalist camera interface. Perfect for the eogtripping camwhore/bauhaus enthusiast. Of course, I suppose you could apply the entire thing to handphones and other communication devices, which answers all designers' worries about where to place the damn cam. And since, the cam is the screen, you probably don't have to adjust it at all!

Oh wonder of wonders! Does that mean we won't be seeing any more horribly shot sex videos ala Tammy NYP?

Not unlike Tonia Welter's keyboard I mentioned before, this new virtual keyboard doesn't give a hoot about typing ergonomics and carpal tunnel syndrome. Instead, it eschews the need for an actual physical keyboard by just having a projector display the entire full size qwerty keyboard on a flat surface. Apparently, it even reaches typing speeds with a real keyboard. Now, whilst I find that this sounds like a great idea for a travel keyboard at first, I realise how wrong I am. Since you'lll most probably be travelling with a laptop. this keyboard will probably only come into use if you either hate laptop keyboards and much prefer flat projected ones or you hate real life keyboards and would much rather plug in a glowing red virtual one to your desktop instead. Sounds to me like this keyboard is more virtual than it thinks.

The best suggested use for this baby is with PDAs. But surely the non laptop toting PDA evangelists with zero access to desktops but full access to flat surfaces in areas with low lighting must be a rare breed. 

Still, its promising to note that we can do away with physical objects in this manner and perhaps developments along this line could lead to new interfaces that might actually be more useful.

Sometime in 2002, I got together with two mates and we went off to the IdN Fresh Conference, held at the Singapore Expo. Included in that event were speeches by several luminaries in the field of graphic design and webdesign. We saw Josh Davis explain something about oranges bouncing off his table being related to how he got inspired to do his work, Yugo Nakamura showing off some stuff, the Devil Robots goofing off on stage, Futurefarmers talking about their book, Buro Destruct doing the font thing and Stefan Sagmeister's name being shouted by several desperate SPGs, who also wondered who "KIOK" was.

There were also these exhibits by Tomato Interactive and I believe one shared exhibit together with one Graham Plumb. Mentioned by Core77 again, Plumb's Reactive Cube is this interactive piece of work/art that creates a 3-Dimensional image using a water bath and various different types of input. Check out the videos as a hand strokes over the surface or when sound creates different imagery etc.