This Spatial Sounds interactive audio installation could hurt if you get a little close! Thanks to Koen Coppens shot some video of it in action and sending it in.

“Spatial Sounds (100dB at 100km/h) is an interactive audio installation by Marnix de Nijs and Edwin van der Heide. In this engine-powered installation, a speaker is mounted onto a rotating arm that is several meters long. Like a watchdog, the machine scans the surrounding space for visitors. Closer investigation would be tempting fate, with the rotating arm swinging so powerfully round. You hear the impressive sound of the mighty motor revving up, turning faster and faster. You can feel the displacement of air as the speaker whizzes past you, and you had better step back, out of reach.”

Check out this new robotic car that has been developed in France by the team from IFSTTAR and the Embedded Electronic Systems Research Institute at ESIGELEC. The goal of the two groups is to develop an autonomous car which would help us be safer in our cars. Researchers can control the car speed and its trajectory through an on-board computer system. The researchers drives the car with the help of a joystick, the group modified a Renault Grand Espace by adding robotic driver sensors, camera and control bay on roof.

Via: ieee Spectrum

“There are three cameras to monitor the vehicle’s surroundings and one forward-facing used to track road lanes and markings. A LIDAR unit at the front detects other cars and pedestrians.”

Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab have developed an imaging system that can capture visual data at a rate of 1 TFPS. With such a speed of visual data acquision, the researchers were able to create virtual super-slow-motion videos of light particles traveling and scattering through space. The technique to create the videos relies on what’s called a streak camera.

The complete virtual slow-motion movies are created by stitching together each scan lines data comprising of several pulses of light.

“So what you are seeing is actually an average of many pulses, but because our camera and laser are synchronized very well, all the pulses look exactly the same,” Velten said. “That’s basically the trick.”

Check out the video below if you want more on this technology:

As most of you know I love LEDs! But even I can’t imagine working at a place like Light Energy Studio. This place has a showroom that would make non epileptics has a seizure from all the blinking goodness. I guess if you are looking to do some interior design in a night club (or my basement) this would be the place to go. They make some great looking disco floors out of 1/2 inch white acrylic, it looks like that stuff would hold up quite well but I would still cringe if it was my club and I saw people with shoes dancing on it…  The wall hanging stuff also looks great, you can see the 48 inch wall hanging light painting below the videos but I might have to start collecting pop cans to pay the $4100 for it.

Via: Interior Complex

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This Rave Rover is a cool build and it is very well documented so you can see all the details of the system and how it was done. They are using a ton of high power RGB LED modules that can be controlled via SPI. The control of the LEDs is being done with an Arduino. Thanks to a very sturdy frame, some pneumatics and a few wheel chair motors the entire thing can lift off the ground and drive to a new location! There is an onboard computer and sound system to keep then dance floor completely self sufficient! Be sure to watch the video below of it in action and see it driving around.

Read more at RaveRover.com

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You might remember the pictures and video I shot of muRata Boy and Girl at CES earlier this year.  If you liked those robots you will love the robot that Masahiko Yamaguchi built. This Bipedal Cycling Robot is quite small but when it comes to robotics small is usually more challenging. This tiny robot drives the bike just like a human does! Watch the video below to be blown away.

Thanks for the tip Erik.

“This robot system consists of a commercially available two-legged robot and a bicycle made by Yamaguchi. To detect how much the robot is tilting, the TAG201 gyro from Tamagawa Seiki is used. Based on the tilt data, a method called PID control is used to control the robot’s balancing motion.”

This is a cool 3D UV Laser Printer, you can see lots of other details over at the Rob Hopeless site. It uses a UV laser to print items in a container of liquid UV-curable photopolymer. There is a platform that moves the item being printed down as the laser beam traces to solidify each layer in the polymer. The printed items look a bit gooey but this is an interesting printing process.

Thanks for the tip Andy.

“I have wanted a 3D Printer for a while now and there are some very reasonably priced kits available like the Makerbot, Ultimaker and the RepRap project. I could have just bought a kit and started printing things but at the time I had not seen great resolution or print quality from those. I started looking around at the other 3D printing technologies and found SLA made some amazing quality prints, so I decided to try making my own.“