It’s Friday again, which means it’s time for our weekly look at the world of technology, where we pick the amazing and er, less impressive things that we’ve seen this week.
1: Corning Gorilla Glass
Gorilla Glass is currently used on smartphone screens and is known for being tough, but according to its makers in the future glass will play a huge part in our lives. The video A Day Made of Glass 2: Same Day Expanded, explores how it with Gorilla Glass, a wall becomes a huge interactive surface – whether for teaching children at school, or selecting cloths in a bedroom; a single tap can change glass from light to dark and tablets replace paper in our daily life, at home, school and hospital. It might not be too far in the future either – the majority of the technology in the video is around, it’s just too expensive to implement at the moment.
2: 3D World
Humans Invent discovered these amazing pictures from Wouter van Buuren, which provide a fresh and very distintive take on landscape photography. Described as a photographer and acrobat (which he needs to be to take these photographs) – he creates collages from above using stereographic projection photography, the pictures are mapped to project a sphere giving ‘the illusion of all-round world surveillance.’ His website is really worth checking out.
3: barackobama playlist
Revealed this week, this Spotify playlist isn’t strictly the soundtrack to the United States Supreme commander’s day, instead it’s described as ‘ picks by the campaign staff’ with ‘a few of President Obama’s favourites,’ The playlist ranges from the predictable – U2 and Bruce Springsteen (NOT Born in the USA), to Florence and the Machine, Arcade Fire and Noah and the Whale, via Ricky Martin and Darius Rucker. It’s a fairly interesting mix – although we wonder how many tracks are there for PR value.
4: Floats on water
$129 dollars can get you an amazing phone that floats – you know for those occasions when you need to use your phone in the bath.
Check out this stylish orange number on the right, it not only looks amazing, but it even sinks! Via
5: Samsung’s own goal
And our final spot goes to Samsung for its SuperBowl advert What can we say. In the Samsung Galaxy S2 advert, Apple fans were shown as lemmings in a queue, stating things like: ‘nine hours time and we’re almost in the door.’ Cue the next ad and Apple fans are still waiting in line, but this time it’s the Note that catches their attention. Then Justin Hawkins from The Darkness appear and it all turns into a MGM music style dance as everyone starts dancing in the street and frankly it all gets a bit bizarre.
What’s interesting is the prominence paid to the pen, leading to comments on Twitter: ‘Cannot believe a company would run a #SuperBowl ad showing off a new phone that uses a stylus. Yep Palm Pilot returns.’ and ‘That new Samsung reminds of my awesome palm pilot from 2001. I guess a pen is better than a finger?
One taste grounds alone, we don’t like the advert, but surely criticising your biggest opponent in an advert screams how worried you are. It’s also more than a little patronising to Apple – or should we say future Samsung – owners?
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