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A painting is no longer something always keeping still: Scott Garner’s “Still Life” is rightly a painting that can respond to real-world activity. Whenever you rotate the painting, you’ll see that the fruits and vases begin to tumble and finally change their positions. Why? Because the painting is actually made using the game developing program unity 3D, and inside the painting there is a flat-screen television screen with a spatial sensor built behind it to detect the tilt. So whenever somebody rotate its frame, the unity 3D scene can then respond and interact with the users.

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Jayne Vidheecharoen from the Art Center College of Design, California has invented a machine that converts your physical hands into virtual ones, so as to help you control the virtual world directly. Just as shown in the video, the prototype of the technology uses Google Streetview as its background, with various objects of the Streetview that are controlled by people’s hand. Though quite amazing, the prototype model is actually constructed with really cheap components such as a duct tape, a desk lamp, an end table, fabric scrap, a borrowed monitor and a cheapest possible webcam, as the designer listed on her blog.

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Stuffed animals used to be inanimate toys that can only get moved by the humans; but now they can successfully move on their own, with the aid of the Pinoky—a small, ring-like device that wirelessly brings stuffed animals to “life”. It uses a micro controller, a Zigbee input device and a servo motor system to move an animal’s hands and legs, also with a set of photo sensors designed to measure the angle at which it bends. Thus simply pin the Pinoky onto your stuffed animals, and you will then see them move and dance automatically. Really funny, huh? You can get it as a Christmas gift for your kids.

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Made of nanoscale ferromagnetic and fluid (usually an organic solvent or water), this is an interactive liquid toy that invites you to build beautifully-patterned sculptures. Just as shown in the video below, you can construct as delicate sculptures as you could ever imagine using a magnet or two magnets or more. So would you like a try too? Choose your favorite style, Ferrite or Ferro, and then move!

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Draw with the included UV Laser pen to create your special T-shirt that glows in the dark! The shirt is made of glowy material, which will get charged as the pen go through it and then light up to show unique patterns. Of course the tee only works without too much light, so you’d better wear it for a party rather than a picnic.

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Rest on a bench and play seesaw. The “Swingers” chair, an awesome piece of furniture designed for two people, allows people to move and play while they’re taking a break. By doing that, the designer aims to make people smile more and get closer to each other as much as possible. So will that really work? We believe it would. Still, if you meet such a bench one day, we hope you could sit down and play it with the others.

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Cleverly combining light and shadow together, the giant OLED mirror collaborated by rAndom International and Chris O’Shea would feel the human’s movement and thus to interact in the term of either light or mirrors. Stand still, and the panels act like mirrors, but when you’re on the move, the OLED pixels then light up. The other interacting type is totally different, as wherever you go would become mirrors with the left parts still act as light. It’s very magical, and now the You Fade to Light has been produced in a limited edition of just eight units, each is selling for €140,000. So if you don’t think it’s exciting enough to watch them in the video, you may consider getting home one such piece.

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As the best thing we’ve ever met until now for us to use the Kinect, Microsoft’s “Code Space” is a smart system that combines the Kinect gaming controller with laptops and cellphones, in order to bring people a totally different experience of meeting. It allows people to actively participate in the meeting, to upload or download meeting data directly with their gestures or cellphone. Check out the video below and you’ll know how wonderful the “Code Space” is.

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Disney is a wonderful place full of imaginations, in my mind, thus it’s quite amazing to see its research labs come up with the SideBySide handheld projectors for multiplayer games. Each unit combines a camera with a modified DLP projector that outputs a single color of visible light and also an invisible infrared image. The IR image can be detected by the camera built with second projector, which would then know clearly where the image output by the first projector is and what it is doing, and thus create another image to interact with the first one. That may sound a little complicated, but you’ll soon find out how it works with the video after the jump.

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Composed of gesture recognition software connected with a 3D depth sensor, a real time 3D video capture module using a 3D video camera and interactive graphic generation software based on a game engine, the 3D AR screen showcased by Aniframe can not only create 3D images but interact with the users. It can recognize and track the gesture of users, allowing them to “draw” images in 3D space. After showing the visual contents via a 3D TV, the system can help the users to browse its 3D contents using their own hand gestures such as tapping and scrolling.

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See What You Print (SWYP) is a sleek concept by Artefact, which is designed to give the printers a new great change. The SWYP combines with a simple stylish appearance and a fantastic user interface, which have made us think of products from Apple. Once wirelessly connected to your cameras or computers, the printer will then allow you to choose and edit your photos with its multi-touch screen. The image on the screen is exactly the photo you will finally get, and that’s also why the printer is named “See What You Print”.

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On the Good Design Expo in Tokyo, Japan-based Docomo company built a giant screen to introduce their latest Palette UI interface, something that would improve the navigation between each app on your cellphones by assorting your softwares. Still, the Palette UI is really fantastic, because it would attract butterflies, numbers, and other elements into a cellphone and changes then into colorful stripes. To understand how great the Palette UI is, please check out the video below for more information. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Zapparel Augmented Reality Clothes, which was launched at the International Fashion Expo, Magic in Las Vegas on August 22-24, is an amazing design that allows people to interact with it based on Augmented Reality technology. The following video shows how people can play games with the T-shirt: a space man with robot arms will appear and shoot UFOs soon after one person takes photos of the T-shirt, and then the users can touch the UFOs to play the game. There are 20 different T-shirts in the series, and we really couldn’t wait to see how surprising other 19 ones would be. [Read the rest of this entry...]

What will you do if you have a magic mirror as those you see in books or films? There maybe many answers to that question, but there’s at least one thing we’ll all want to do: to illustrate what we desire on it. Romy van den Broek’s ‘Through the Looking Glass’ is rightly an interactive mirror that features motion sensor technology to let users run into a different world. [Read the rest of this entry...]

The great development of technology has made everything possible. After we come with typewriters, cellphones, computers, etc, we now meet this Kiss Transmission Device. [Read the rest of this entry...]