Whyfore

Design Inspiration for the Inventive Mind..

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Using Rock Band / Hero Games as Instrument Trainer

With the flood of dumbed-down instrument games like Guitar Hero that do wonders for your button pushing but don’t do much for your guitar skills, there has been a flood of innovators trying to rig controllers that will make real instruments work in the game.

In the above video, we see a simpler solution. Instead of focusing on the instrument, focus on the sound. By using the Rock Band mic, she is able to control the game via flute.

Obviously, this would be better if the game were designed for such, but I don’t see much chance of that coming from the big developers. What we need is a good open source program to do for the mic what StepMania did for the dance pad. If anyone out there knows of a good equivalent, let me know and I will update this post accordingly.

(via Neatorama)

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Inspiration Fail

Some ideas come in a sudden flash, as all of the pieces come together in your mind. This is great unless it happens at three in the morning waking up from a drunken stupor, as illustrated below:

Winkers Jeans. For those who would really like their butt to be the first thing people notice about them, and the last. This almost seemed like it had potential, but no, it’s just weird, and not in that good way.

glow in the dark-toilet paperl

Glowing toilet paper. Funny, but why not make something that isn’t a consumable glow, like the holder? It just seems like a good way to end up with people asking you why your butt is glowing.  (at amazon)

dog walking device

A scooter attached to your dog. There are so many accidents waiting to happen here I shudder to think of them all. (via Gizmodo)

sippin-seat_hide-a-drink

Ahh, the never ending battle between people trying to price gouge captive consumers on their beer, and crafty(ish) guzzlers trying to find sneaky ways of smuggling in cheap beer. There have been some interesting attempts over the years, this is not one of them. You fill the seat with beer and then you can sit on it while you drink it, resulting in a cold butt and warm beer, followed by a warm butt on a hard seat. What happens when some lard ass sits on one of these and explodes beer all over the nearby populace? (on Amazon)

iphone-live-view

This is a live-feed App for the IPhone called E-Mail and Walk. It turns your backgrond into a live view from the camera. This will be great to keep people from falling down manholes while texting. I think it will more often be used while driving. (Via I-Tunes)

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Persistence of vision app for the iphone

iphone_persistence-of-vision

Light Writer is an iphone app that displays flashing lights in order to create a persistence of vision effect. It allows you to write messages or images in the air with a wave of the hand. It sounds like a great way to quietly send a message to anyone in sight. I imagine it would only be effective in pretty dark conditions ,but I’m betting we haven’t seen the end of this app. It could be big. Available here via itunes.

(via crunchgear)

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Vanishing Point Navigation

This  laptop rides a Roomba around and looks for straight lines. By triangulating their convergence, the little droid is able to navigate endless hallways, blasting zombies with its on-board shotgun…well, maybe in the next model.

This may not be a likely standalone navigation system, but combined with those systems used by things like the robotic rats, and maybe some GPS, we could have these things zipping around our hallways doing errands and causing accidents in the very near future.

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HUD for Billiards

These are some top notch geeks. They built a setup to compute and project the trajectories of pool shots directly onto their table. It doesn’t work terribly well, but I think it is mostly a problem of low end hardware and strange setup. Why didn’t they put the webcam by the projector, pointed at the mirror?  By having it in the corner they make things immensely more difficult to compute.

I think once Surface goes mainstream, innovations like this will come in a flood.

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Data Visualization

Hans Rosling is a credit to geeks everywhere. He has a great data visualization product, and gives one hell of a speech. Our world currently suffers from being bigger than we can easily visualize, and a simple graph just doesn’t cut it for complex data. Google has bought the trendalyzer software and is in the process of integrating it into the reports on their Analytics service. You can use the motion chart software here.

Update: In order to use this software in Google Analytics, look for the Visualize button above many of the graphs.

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Virtual 3D Sketch Pad

This video shows a new interface for sketching on a touch screen called ILoveSketch. The software looks somewhat limited, but the interface is very well thought out and lends itself to quick intuitive sketching of three dimensional objects. I give it extra credit for being an innovative design for making innovative designs.