Sunday, January 6, 2008
CES 2008: Iqua Bluetooth Snake whispers in your ear as you drive
Sent to you by Joe Manning via Google Reader:
Filed under: Aftermarket, Gadgets, CES
One of the big problems with aftermarket, in-car Bluetooth devices is sound. Most of them plug up in your car's auxiliary power plug (that's a cigarette lighter to those of use born before 1990), and unless you drive a Miata, that's not where your ears are.
Iqua says their Bluetooth Snake fixes the problem by moving the sound closer to your head. The Snake fits onto your car's headrest and sits right at your right cheek to better pick up your voice as well as put the sound where it's needed.
It still gets its power from where you once lit your smokes, so theres some cableage to run. And despite the photo above, the Iqua's CES rep assures us the Snake doesn't obstruct your vision or distract your attention from the road ahead.
More hi-res photos of the Iquas Bluetooth Snake in our gallery.
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Syd Mead is the only designer with a convincing grasp of the future
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Imagining the future is hard, but industrial designer and "visual futurist" Syd Mead manages to convincingly pull it off time and again. Though made way back in 1982, Blade Runner is currently lauded for the fact that it still looks futuristic 25 years later, due in no small part to Mead's thoroughly imagined environments, objects and vehicles.
But what about the movies that got it wrong? Check out a rather hysterical article (with excellent photos) called 2001 to Timecop: 8 Movie Futures Already Proven Wrong, which analyzes said movies in the categories of Premise, Predictions, and Overall Accuracy. Excerpts:
- The cars in Timecop are able to navigate by themselves, with a voice activation system so advanced it can understand Jean-Claude Van Damme....
- [Robocop is set in] an indeterminate "near future," but a careful analysis of the fashions, haircuts, vehicles, and computers seen in this 1987 movie lead us to believe it took place no later than 1988.
- Ability To Record Experiences [in the movie Strange Days]: Using special "SQUID" headgear, people's sensory data can be recorded to a disc and re-experienced by anybody, literally putting them in the shoes of others. The only thing we have that's even remotely similar to this is the ability to read whiny LiveJournal entries, but this only puts us in the shoes of angsty social outcasts.
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Bug Labs Open Source Do-It-Yourself Gadget Gets a Hacking Module, Pricing [G...
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Those Bug Labs open source modular gadgets—the ones that you can buy in pieces and build your own gadget with—have just gotten pricing and availability details. They're also announcing a Von Hippel module, which allows an I/O interface so you can "further" hack your BUG. If you buy the modules in the first 60 days, you'll get a discount off of the already fairly reasonable prices.
• BUGbase - $349 ($299 w/discount) • LCD module - $119 ($99 w/discount) • GPS module - $99 ($79 w/discount) • Camera module - $79 ($69 w/discount) • Motion detector / Accelerometer - $59 ($49 w/discount)
All these will be shipping in Q1 2008, and be served in a first come basis. No pricing yet on the Von Hippel unit (named after the MIT professor and author Eric Von Hippel).
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