There are at least two companies battling it out for the throwable camera market, which in its nascent stages consists of firefighters, emergency responders and the military, and which I believe will eventually expand into the construction, HVAC and building inspection industries. What's interesting is the very different form factors pursued by each company's design teams.

Massachusetts-based Bounce Imaging is going with a softball-sized sphere peppered with multiple cameras:

Meanwhile, Minneapolis-based competitor Recon Robotics has opted for a wheeled barbell-like design featuring a single camera:

Craftsman Eric Cashion is the one man shop known as Confederate Forge, and while I'm tempted to say he's got his work cut out for him, in actuality he cuts out his own work. Texas-based Cashion makes complete products in his hunting knives: He works the metal, carves the wood, fashions textiles for the grips and stitches up the leather sheathes.

A couple of things impressed me about the operation, one being Cashion's cross-material skills. Working metal is one thing, wood is another, and fabric is yet another entirely. On that latter front, while he'd previously figured out how to sew leather into sheathes...

...he only recently started monkeying with leather carving, and for an avowed novice the results are surprising:

"Started working leather a couple of months ago," he writes. "I figured I try something that was difficult and time heavy to work on my carving. Guys have asked for engraved sheaths so here is a start."

People invented elevators, which eventually led to skyscrapers. People invented cars, which led to highways and then suburbs. The full extent of the transformative power these objects contained was probably difficult to imagine when they were just trying to work out how to get a piano to the third floor, or how to get to the next town without saddling a horse. And it took decades for these objects to change our lives: The first successful instance of what we'd recognize as an elevator was installed in the 1850s, and we didn't get the Chrysler building unitl 1930; the first gas-powered automobile came around in the 1890s, and we didn't get highways and suburbs until after World War II.

I'm going to say the most transformative object of our era is the internet-connected smartphone. It's staggering to think the iPhone came out less than six years ago and it's already changed everything. And speaking of smartphones, here's a screencap from one. A few months ago there was an amusing question asked on Reddit, and one of the better answers has now gone viral:

GoPro-captured footage is awesome, allowing us non-extreme-athletes to witness POV footage from amazing perspectives we'd likely never otherwise see. It allows the recording athlete to document a thrilling act that they've accomplished, and share it with others in a way that provides some semblance of what they might have been experiencing at that moment. However, now another wearable camera is coming onto the market, one that seems easier to wear and use than a GoPro. And frankly, it makes me a little uneasy.

The MeCam is a small, simple, inexpensive ($50), friendly-looking HD camera that you can wear on your shirt like a button. While the intent behind it is benign—"to capture all of life's moments"—it is actually its ease of use that has me uneasy. Whereas a GoPro requires the preparation of rigging it up, and by virtue of its form factor announces its own presence, the MeCam is more subtle and lends itself to ubiquitous recording. If I'm around a dinner table with friends at a restaurant or tossing drinks back at a bar, I'll say and do things I'd never repeat in, say, an office setting; if we can imagine venues full of people wearing these things, I think we all might be a little more mindful of our behavior. (Then again, maybe that's not a bad thing.)

It is somewhat amusing that George Orwell supposed that Big Brother would be watching all of us, and that it may turn out that we ourselves are Big Brother. But my paranoia aside, the device itself is pretty cool:

The shape of a 3D printer is easy to envision: "Form follows function" dictates that they all have rigid parts aligned in the X-, Y- and Z-axes that the print head will travel along. But a fellow named Jon Wise is tinkering with an alternate design that uses radial arms rather than a grid-based Cartesian system of plotting, making his mock-up look less like a box and more like a drawing machine.

"Standard 3D printers require significant mechanical structure to provide movement on the three axes," writes Wise. "This alternative design uses radial arms with a minimum of mechanical engineering." If 3D printers were all designed this way, assuming the pieces had the appropriate rigidity, they could use less materials in their construction and, through clever design, be made more portable. Sure there'd be more calculations required for plotting, but Wise farms that out to the diminutive, inexpensive Raspberry Pi computer board:

This brains-over-brawn approach is intriguing. It would be neat if it not only folded up, but if there were little laser sensors hooked up to a processor that could constantly make microadjustments to the stepper motors to compensate for slop in the parts. If even a clumsy craftsperson could slap one of these together, and a computer brain did the heavy lifting in terms of calculations, it could open up a lot of possibilities for bringing precision production to areas where precision is in short supply.

Renault and British designer Ross Lovegrove unveiled the Twin'Z, an all-electric cabon-fiber concept car at Milan's Triennale Design Museum last week. The electric motor on the Twin'Z is rear-mounted and the four 96-V lithium batteries are hidden in the floor of the car; according to Gizmag, "driving motivation to the rear wheels is done by 50kW (68hp) of power and 226 Nm of torque...[and] can achieve a top speed of 130 km/h (80.7 mph)." Reflective of Lovegrove's design language, the car's compact and organic form also draws from the French manufacturer's most emblematic models like the Renault 5 and Twingo.

The Twin'Z is designed for the city-driver in mind—the backseats are integrated into the floorplan and the dashboard is replaced by a smartphone connection to create more space in the cabin. Electric hinges on the front and back suicide doors eliminates the need for the central B-pillar allowing for further access for loading things and people in and out of the car.

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Introduction: A Brief Exercise in Empathy

What food did you hate as a kid, that you now love as a grown-up?

Mine was guacamole. I used to hate guacamole! My mom would make it fresh and serve it at parties, and I just thought it looked so gross.

Now, of course, guac is one of my favorite foods. I regret the years I spent missing out on all that awesome homemade goodness. Why didn't I just try it? It's so delicious! My point is that it's hard to remember what it's like to be a kid. Sure, we remember some of the major moments, but it's particularly hard to recall how we behaved in daily life. In the case study below, our main users were kids, and since we couldn't literally become kids again, we had to find other ways to understand them. As you read about the project, try to remember what it was like to not like [insert food you used to hate here].

Designing Everything but the Food

At Greater Good Studio, we use design methods to solve social problems. We work with foundations, nonprofits, government agencies and social businesses, often saying that our mission is to work with people on a mission. We take an asset-based approach to research and design, because in the social sector, unmet needs are almost too easy to find. Rather, we look for assets—the people, resources, behaviors, relationships and systems—that are already working well. Our designs leverage those assets to create more and better life.

We were recently awarded a grant to teach a class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (where my co-founder George is a professor). The project was to design an elementary school cafeteria, with a team of grad and undergrad students. I know what you're thinking: it's an architecture project, right? Well, we approached the challenge as designing the interactions between kids and food. While a cafeteria is literally a room with four walls, it's also a dance between lots of people and lots of things, most importantly, kids and food. To create a great cafeteria experience, kids and food have to interact in a way that is positive, healthy and fun.

Another way to frame it is that rather than designing the space, we are designing the behaviors within that space. If we can find ways to support new behaviors, and facilitate great interactions, we can create a user-centered experience without moving any walls...which we weren't allowed to do anyway.

Lesson 1: Don't know the answer until you know the question.

We started by framing our project around health. How can we design a cafeteria that encourages healthy eating? We were inspired by Dr. Brian Wansink, a behavioral economist from Cornell, who showed that simple cafeteria changes like placing the milk before the soda could have enormous impact on diners' choices. However, the healthfulness of school lunch is a subjective, politicized issue. And healthy food is no silver bullet: When Chicago Public Schools changed its menu to add healthy options, kids opted out! (And lunch ladies protested).

Most importantly, we are designers. We're not nutritionists, chefs, food scientists, farmers or supply chain managers. What can we bring to the table? We thought about our responsibilities as designers: to be action-oriented, to understand people on an individual level, and to think first about desirability, rather than feasibility or viability or "how this will do in opinion polls." Our expertise is in human experience, and so that's where our research began.

Observing lunchtime that first afternoon at Academy for Global Citizenship (AGC), the charter school where our project was based, we noticed one really glaring pattern: every adult in the room was trying to get kids to eat. They were playing eating games, "selling" the merits of various dishes, and straight-up pleading with kids to take one more bite. Our first reaction was, "They are working really hard at this!" And our second reaction was, "It's not even working." Kids were throwing out lots and lots of perfectly delicious food at every meal. We realized that rather than encouraging kids to eat healthier, the ideal cafeteria is one that simply encourages kids to eat—though, as any parent knows, that is no small feat.

The lesson here is to not assume the answer until you know the right question. There's a common criticism of design in the social sector—it's called "missionary design." Missionaries go to foreign cultures already knowing the "answers" to people's troubles. Rather than being missionaries, let's remember that the answers are in that place. So don't assume you know what to fix, until you know what is broken.

A research report on the dynamics of crowd-sourcing music at the frog SXSW Interactive Opening Party, by Bonnie Reese, Mike Herdzina and Shaina Donovan—see Parts 1&2 for more information.

Crowdsourcing Gives Everyone a Voice

The overall response to the Crowd Sourced DJ was overwhelmingly positive. It was described as "novel" and people loved that it allowed them to participate in the music selection. When we probed further about what made it attractive, party-goers were enthusiastic about the philosophy of crowdsourcing, noting that it is a vehicle that gives everyone a voice. We were struck by the passionate tone and language of the participants. Some of the comments included:

- "It's for the community by the community,"
- "It's democratic,"
- "You have a chance to have a say"

However, while people embraced the spirit of crowdsourcing, many openly acknowledged that it compromised the quality of the output. We heard comments like:

- "The masses have bad taste"
- "I don't trust the public"

And yet those interviewed did not perceive the conflict between crowd selections and individual taste as an inherent negative. One music-savvy partygoer intimated that while the music being played did not align with his preferences, it still "fell within his range of acceptability." In the context of a large social experience, like a party, the spirit of empowering the crowd reigns supreme. Many people acknowledged the party context and noted that there's a time and place for everything. So while crowdsourcing is okay in one moment and social environment, it may not be appropriate for every situation.

Crowdsourcing Makes Everyone Think Like a DJ

So what were the biggest influencers when individuals had to make a music selection? First of all, people took into account the audience for the music as well as the party context. "Party music" was referenced almost as its own genre (although based on the range of musical styles we heard, we doubt that everyone would agree what the key characteristics of "party music" are). While many used the word "upbeat" to define "party music", we didn't see further alignment in the music played. One partygoer commented "What am I in the mood for? Something that will create the right environment. What will make the right environment? Upbeat music."

Overall, the music that was selected could be described as more "upbeat" on the music scale. (Click to view full-size infographic)

People also mentioned that they overrode their own preferences to choose music for the crowd, noting music as a "shared experience." One party-goer said, "I avoided a few songs that I wanted to play because I wanted to choose for the crowd," while another person noted "I think it is more important that the crowd has fun." People mentioned avoiding songs they liked that might bring "down" the mood. They continually referenced music's role in creating the right social environment: "The music affects the vibe—it drives conversations and relationships." These comments acknowledge the importance of music's role in shaping the experience for individuals and the crowd as whole. They also point to a party environment as a scenario within which the greater good should come before personal preference.

It was also interesting that when asked to state their opinion about the quality of the music (on our scale from "it sucks" to "awesome"), a number of people said that "it's like voting for myself," showing an identification with the crowd. This leap from crowdsourcing to an identity alignment with the crowd was very interesting. Crowdsourcing went beyond simply being a method to create a shared playlist to creating a dynamic of communal identification. One person even said, "It's democratic, so people will like the music," voicing an assumption that music chosen by the crowd will automatically be embraced by the people within that crowd. It's worth noting that there were no overall trends in perceptions about quality of the music from the data we gathered at our Music Perceptions Wall; where people placed their dots on the scale truly ran the gamut (and some partygoers just wanted to be clever about where they put their dot regardless of what they thought of the music).

UPDATE: Streetsblog has more from today's press conference with Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson and DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.

After all of the drama with the delayed launch last year, I could hardly believe it when I spotted a Citibike crew installing a bicycle share station around the corner from my house last weekend, and it seems that fellow transit enthusiasts also noticed the shiny new fixtures. Brooklyn Spoke posted their initial thoughts on the signage (with plenty of photos), while Streetsblog notes that "at the rate of eight station installations a day, it would take a little more than five weeks to put in the 293 stations that will form the first phase of the bike-share network."

I'm also interested to see that this area is considered Bed-Stuy; image via Brooklyn Spoke

Over this past weekend, I've been seeing the telltale solar arrays throughout Fort Greene / Clinton Hill, each a beacon for a row of pylons, roughly the length of a bus stop, that will soon be home to squadrons of public bicycles. In fact, on my morning commute today, another crew was installing a station near on ramp of the Manhattan Bridge, at the corner of Sands St and Gold St—a major cycling thoroughfare where I happen upon cars and trucks idling in the bike lane at least once a week.

The station map, for better or for worse, looks like a yellow cloud over the entirety of Manhattan below 60th St and a veritable pizza slice of Brooklyn.

Traffic patterns aside, I'm curious as to how they arrived at the pricing structure—specifically, I'm concerned about the lack of a single ride option. The pricing starts at $9.95 for a 24-hour pass with unlimited 30-minute rides, adding incentive for residents to spring for the far more economical $95 annual pass, but the cost-benefit analysis for a single trip inevitably favors alternatives: subway, bus or foot, which come in at a fraction of the price even for a round-trip journey. I suppose the logic is that the annual pass will pay for itself even for moderate and/or seasonal users (i.e. $95 = ten days, or four weeks at $25/per), but only time will tell.

We'll find out soon enough: As of this morning, Citi Bike is open for registration, with additional perks for "Founding Members." Sign up here—by some estimates, new members are signing up at a rate of three per minute.

UPDATE: No word on launch date, but it's slated for May.

Got a tiny kitchen with no room for paper, plastic and trash cans? The Qualy Block stacking cans are a clever way to combine rubbish and recycling collection in a small footprint. A cove molded into the corner of each piece provides access to the bin below, while a retaining ring nested beneath the lid keeps the bags in place. Simple, neat, and sleek.

While your average American family would likely find the capacity too small, it seems a perfect solution for singles, city dwellers and others in space-tight situations where trash is taken out daily.

We previously looked at Qualy Design's work here, and while we love their stuff, we wish the design of their site mirrored the design quality of their work! The Qualy Block has been in existence since at least 2012, but it's absent from their site and we could only locate it at this Japanese e-retailer's page.

Ian Murchison and Rohan Thakar are the industrial designers behind FDRL, a/k/a The Federal, an Ottawa-based design consultancy. Their forthcoming line of kitchen knives definitely demonstrate some outside-of-the-box thinking: As the name implies, the Maple Set knives are made predominantly from maple wood, with a dimunitive sliver of metal for the blade.

With this project we wanted to explore an alternative emotion to the standard kitchen knives you see every day. The focus is drawn to the high polished blade, while the rest of the knife's Maple wood body sits warmly in the hand and blends in to its surroundings. The wood is sealed and food safe to allow for easy cleanup. The knife gives the appearance of being lightweight; however their weight is balanced to ensure that they can be used by any level of chef.

There's no question that they're beautiful, but a valid question is whether they're practical. What say you hardcore chefs? Would the added thickness of the wooden blades complicate fine slicing? They mention the wood is sealed, but wouldn't you still need to periodically oil these, as with a cutting board? And hard though maple might be, would you feel comfortable hacking away with a wooden cleaver?

Alessandro Mendini reflects the playfulness of Alessi in a miniature town set on a backdrop of futurist painter Gerardo Dottori's work.

In this year's deep-dive into Italian design history, Milan's Triennale Design Museum staged The Syndrome of Influence a three-part exhibition asking contemporary designers to reflect and interpret the work of historic Italian designers and brands. Progressing from post-war Italian designers to the continued work of current Italian manufacturers, the exhibition's emphasis was more on exhibition design rather than the showcase of specific objects.

ZANUSO stamped aluminum plates litter the gallery floor.

Beginning with the period immediately following the second World War, curator Silvana Annicchiarico tapped and impressive roster of young Italian designers to create homages to the giants of post-war Italian design. Of the ten installations, which also included work by Martino Gamper/Gio Ponti, Italo Rota/Joe Colombo and Studio Formafantasma/Robert Sambonet, my favorite was from Blumerandfriends. In their installation for the editor, designer and architect Marco Zanuso, they ask attendees to push a button, a trigger that starts a short video loop on a television—soon a countdown clock starts up and the strange industrial box mounted on the wall lights up. An explosion of compressed air accompanies the expulsion of a thin sheet of stamped aluminum with the word ZANUSO. As aluminum plates mound on the floor of the exhibition, the critique is clear: although Zanuso and his contemporaries were huge proponents of industrial production as a means for creating a better world, the limits of this perspective are now quite clear.

In Alessandro Scandurra's ode to Ettore Sottsass, Scandurra wallpapers a room with the boldness of Indian iconography. Focusing on Sottsass' transformational experience in India, Sottsass projects a flash of totemic inspiration between stills of Sottsass' work.

Matilde Cassni and Francesco Librizzi's tribute to Bruno Munari's Useless Machines was a crowd favorite—attendees would traverse the room, hanging on rods, and becoming part of the installation.

Paolo Ulian interprets the work of Vico Magistretti. The shadows on the wall assume the, "threadlike appearance" of Magistretti's work.

Studio Formafantasma's tribute Roberto Sambonet's tableware and kitchenware.

wants a Global Head of Design
in Slough, United Kingdom

Mars is a £24billion, family-owned company responsible for globally renowned brands including Snickers, Galaxy, Maltesers, Uncle Ben's, Dolmio, Flavia and Whiskas. How would you like to be in charge of embedding leading edge practices based on 'Design Thinking' into their global teams?

As Global Head of Design for Mars, you'll travel the world, head up the Mars Chocolate design function, lead a team of global and regional associates in their Slough design hub and liaise with global brand directors and regional marketing heads. This opportunity requires a robust track record in design leadership and practice within a corporate and/or consulting environment, as well as highly developed business accumen and the ability to both lead teams and implement strategically poised design initiatives on a global scale.

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This is the second half of a case study by Chicago's Greater Good Studio, who recently set out to redesign school lunch. See the first part, including Lessons 1–4, here.

Lesson 5: Ask what you can make and measure.

One concept we'd like to highlight is called "Courses," and it eliminates the lunch line completely. Kids go straight to their tables, where the food is served to them by LRAs, one course at a time. Rather than getting one quick moment to choose a whole tray, the Courses system gives kids four moments to choose their dishes: carrots or broccoli, salad with dressing or without, chicken or tofu, apple or orange. And each moment of choice lasts as long as they need—there's no one waiting in line behind them. They can see what their friends are eating and feel supported when trying something new. Plus, each new dish brings a small rush of anticipation, greatly increasing the focus on food. The process allows adults to decide the order of the courses, so if they want kids to eat more salad, they can just put the salad first. (I've never seen kids get so excited about salad as they did with our prototypes!)

What's great about the Courses system is that it bears striking resemblance to something we're all familiar with: a restaurant. We simply had to apply that service to a new context. However, all services require people, and the people who needed to change their behavior the most were the LRAs. So we listened closely to make sure we were supporting their desired behaviors too. We heard that the LRAs' favorite part of their job was interacting with kids. They'd rather be chatting with a child than dishing food onto a tray. While the current system gives them one interaction point at the big serving station, the Courses system gives them four. They can be closer to the kids, and therefore more helpful, when they are out among the tables.

When we prototyped the concept with real kids and real food at AGC, we heard lots of positive feedback from students. They liked that the bowls were lighter and smaller than trays, giving them confidence when carrying them to the trash. They liked that the bowls gave them more elbow room at the tables. And they even liked that when they inevitably spilled their milk, it didn't spill into the tray and make their meal soggy.

But the most encouraging result of our behavioral prototyping came from something the kids couldn't tell us—something we observed in their eating behavior. It was an increase in eating balanced meals. Kids with trays often ate one, maybe two of the four food items. Kids with Courses sampled all four. Not only did they eat more and waste less, they ate more balanced meals—a metric that the public school system would actually care about, because it sounds suspiciously like health.

So the lesson for designers is to ask not only what you can make, but what you can measure. The only way this concept will be replicated at other schools is if we can prove quantitatively that kids eat more balanced meals, and that balance affects health. Measuring this is tricky, but we've just completed our study of balance pre-Courses. We intend to study balance with a trial of Courses very soon, and we're optimistic about the results.

Lesson 6: Design for every last barrier.

The physical elements of Courses are a collection of plates and bowls, long trays to hold them and a cart to bring them around the room. Sounds fine when you're talking about one table, but when you realize that you need 600 bowls, you start to discover the unintended consequences of this change. One thing that came up right away: how are
we going to do all these dishes?

The current trays are washed in 15 dishwasher cycles, which takes about an hour and a half. When we loaded our prototype bowls into the dishwasher trays and did the math, they would take 20 cycles, adding an extra half hour of dishwashing onto someone's job. We knew that this small issue might actually be the difference between the whole system working or coming crashing down. The final bowls and trays are designed to be shorter and flatter, making them more compatible with the current dishwashing system.

The lesson here is to go willingly toward every last barrier, and not stop until they've all been uncovered. After all, the reason that most social problems aren't solved is because there are barriers in place. Often really little, really stupid barriers. Decision-makers go for the big picture but forget the nuanced details. It's our responsibility to challenge those barriers head-on with our designs. Find them, understand what's really going on, and see if compromises can be made. Because we can't afford to sacrifice time and money and food and health because our bowls don't fit in the dishwasher.

Most of us are losing our hearing for some reason or another, either to poorly distributed sound from cheap earbuds or old age. Millennials seem to be destined to be shouting to hear each other in just a few short decades (if they aren't already). While most of us are interested in noise cancelling headwear for the airplane or subway, advancements in customized audio tech could improve a number of different markets from field equipment for military personnel to custom headphones.

Born out of the labs at MIT, Lantos Technologies formed in 2009 and developed a way to 3D map the ear canal. We've seen a lot of 3D scanning equipment recently, but in contrast to projects like the Photon that are fuzzy on the actual application, the ability to visualize the ear canal is an innovation likely to be a huge leap not only for audiologists, but designers of audio gear and medical equipment alike.

The world's first Intra-Aural 3D scan system uses the "intensity measurement of two different wavelength bands of fluorescent light as they travel through an absorbing medium, capturing images and stictching them together with elegant algorithms, the system generates a highly accurate 3D map."

Essentially, the hand-held device has a probe that goes into the ear canal, fills with a liquid and then takes a series of photos that are combined to create the 3D model—all in less than 60 seconds. The ear scan raises a few thoughts: first, its sort of ugly in there, second, this could be huge for customized audio equipment. You also have to wonder, if modeling the interior of the ear canal is now possible, advancements in 3D mapping must have a myriad of other medical applications. Lantos recently received its clearance from the FDA to market the scanning system later this year in the United States.

Check out the video after the jump:

Our friends at Herman Miller have recently launched "Everywhere in Your Day," an online trivia / scavenger hunt contest for a chance to win an Eames Lounge & Ottoman or one of four other prizes. The contest launched last week with the first pair of bi-weekly clues; six more will be posted over the course of the next three weeks.

Check out the stop-motion video for the contest, which holds the answer to today's bit of George Nelson trivia, as well as the first clue (you'll have to view it in their embedded player to submit your answer):

And even if you haven't heard of Irving Harper, the unsung MCM designer whose work we explored at some length in an article on George Nelson Associates, the second clue should be easy enough.

Tonight! Core77's Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club enthusiastically presents theoretical physicist Ethan Siegel of Starts with a Bang!

Tonight's talk starts at 6pm at Core77's Hand-Eye Supply store in Portland, OR. Come early and check out our space or check in with us online for the live broadcast!

Ethan Siegel: Starts with a Bang
"What Makes Up The Universe?"
Hand-Eye Supply
23 NW 4th Ave
Portland, OR 97209
Tuesday, April 16th, 6PM PST

We normally think of the Universe as being made up of the same things our Solar System is made up of: protons, neutrons, electrons and light. But when we look out at the Universe on the largest scales, it tells us a different story. In this talk, I'll talk about three key observations in the study of the large-scale Universe—distant supernovae, the Cosmic Microwave Background, and the clustering of galaxies—to show how we arrived at a Universe where the normal matter that makes up everything we know is less that 5% of what's out there. Dark matter and dark energy also play a heavy role in our Universe, and a discussion of that will ensue.

Fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (observed).

During the end of their lifetimes as useful interfaces, no one threw a party for the rotary dial, the skeleton key or the crank people once used to manually start their Model T's. But Amsterdam-based design firm Studio Moniker, certain that we're "nearing the end of the humble computer cursor" presumably due to touchscreens, is celebrating the little left-leaning arrow with an interactive video project.

This is a little tricky to describe, but what they're doing is creating a crowdsourced interactive experience. You click on a link and are presented with a screen featuring not only your cursor, but the cursors of users all around the world that have been recently recorded by them doing exactly what you are—which is following a series of onscreen prompts to guide your cursor in specific directions.

It's a lot more fun than it sounds like, and we highly recommend you try it out by clicking here. Your cursor's movements will then be recorded and integrated into future iterations of the video that new people will click on and experience.

The website Creative Applications has more info on the project here.

As Google Glass gets closer to its launch date, the search giant has released specs on what users can expect from the production models. The onboard camera will record 720p video and be able to shoot 5MP stills; audio will be piped into your dome via bone conduction; it will have Bluetooth and 802.11b/g WiFi; you'll have 12GB of storage; and the battery will reportedly last for "one full day of typical use." The 640×360 resolution of the video is claimed to be "the equivalent of a 25 inch high definition screen from eight feet away," but we'll need to see that in action.

Which we will, if we head out to San Francisco or Los Angeles. Word on the street (and by "street," we mean Buzzfeed) is that Google will be opening up their own retail stores, starting with California's big city. The physical storefronts will be meant to push not only Glass, but Android- and Chromebook-related products as well. There's no word on what the stores will look like or who will be designing them, but given that Apple's got the likes of Norman Foster on their stores/HQ and Facebook's got Gehry on "Facebook West," we'd be surprised if Google didn't go with a big-ticket architect/designer for the prestige.