Mechanical

Not that long ago I wrote an article discussing what it would be like, realistically, if you were to accidentally travel back in time to the Victorian era. At the end of that article, I mentioned that the best thing you could bring with you on a time-traveling adventure is a K ...more

Jonathan Guberman of Site 3 coLaboratory hackerspace in Toronto has created an Arduino-controlled mechanical typewriter that can type on its own, detect what is being typed on it, and run text-based interactive fiction games such as the classic (and to most, all but forgotten) ...more

Joseph L. Griffiths, an Australian artist who resides in Paris, has created a DIY bicycle-powered drawing machine. I'd like to see a video of the piece in action. Says Griffiths: "My drawings and mechanical installations seek to transcribe the living relationship between man ...more

Goodbye, point-and-click; hello, point-and-splash! This water-based touch screen by Japanese designer Taichi Inoue is more than just clever and ergonomic, it's downright summery. In his artist statement, Inoue writes, "It is difficult to say that the interface of mechanical m ...more

A group of researchers from Stanford University and Princeton University has put together the largest RGB-D video dataset to date with over 1,500 scans of over 700 different locations across the world, for a total of 2.5 million views. This dataset, called ScanNet, has been s ...more

Have you ever wanted to control a swarm of robots? Well, now you can! Robotics researchers at New York University (NYU) have created an app which controls 'bots from your smartphone, using augmented reality. This AR app would certainly come in handy when you want to make a cof ...more

Most augmented reality experiences are purely visual, with spatial audio gaining in popularity to make visual experiences more realistic. However, leveraging the sense of touch may be the next frontier for AR experiences. This week, researchers at the School of Engineering an ...more

Boozing it up at work might have been okay back in the days of Mad Men, but today, employers prefer that their workers stay sober. What you and your bosses probably don't know is that a little drinking on the job can actually increase your creative capacity and problem-solving ...more

While at work, you notice your gloves changing color, and you know immediately that you've come in contact with dangerous chemicals. Bandages on a patient signal the presence of unseen, drug-resistant microbes. These are ideas that might have once seemed futuristic but are bec ...more

Hey there, reader! In this tutorial we are going to explain how values are stored in variables as either signed or unsigned. Try to not get lost! Everything is made up of bits in the computing world, like the atom makes up the basic building blocks of everyday materials such ...more

Fall is my favorite time of year, yet I cringe every time it begins. Why? Because it seems like every business is in a frenzy to start the Christmas shopping season the day after Halloween ends. For those of us who are fans of pumpkins, that's a buzzkill. It used to be that y ...more

Rumors that Apple is honing its automated car technology have skyrocketed. Thanks, now, in no small part to some enterprising members of the media who leaked the names of Apple's self-driving car team to the public. Driverless previously reported that Apple received a permit ...more

Royal College of the Arts student Merel Karhof has come up with an innovative way to harness natural resources: a wind knitting factory. Merel's device is a mechanical wind-powered knitting machine that sustainably produces long tubes of knitted material. Nice. I'd let the win ...more

Life is too chaotic to be organized all the time, but little steps in the right direction make things easier overall. File folders keep paperwork from spiraling out of control. Spice jars take the clutter out of cabinets. Storage totes keep basements neat and tidy. But to find ...more

The large, dome-shaped LiDARs that have become a fixture on driverless car prototypes are expensive and notably ugly. And yet, these unsightly devices should remain planted on driverless cars, even when they become available in commercial fleet services across the country in a ...more

The promise of augmented reality when it comes to gaming is the conversion of the player's real-world environment into a virtual playground. Army of Robots, available for $1.99 in the App Store for ARKit-compatible devices, gives us a tangible example on how the promise could ...more

In Bhopal, India, a place nestled in between the royally pink city of Jaipur and the dry (i.e., alcohol forbidden) state of Gujarat, is a team of developers determined to make a fully driverless car suitable to the complexities of Indian traffic. An algorithm elaborate enough ...more

BangShift forum member John Cerone posts an incredibly exhaustive step-by-step guide to rebuilding an American V-8 carburetor. "This shows that anyone with some mechanical aptitude, a set of basic hand tools, and a rebuilt kit can rebuild a carb on the cheap. There are certai ...more

Google has a few hidden tools you might not have discovered yet, and they work in Google Search, in the Google app, and with Google Assistant — on both iPhone and Android phones. We all know smartphones do much more than make phone calls. They serve as cameras, GPS navigators ...more

Thomas Willeford runs Brute Force Leather and is responsible for a lot of really cool steampunk things, like the mechanical arm that Nathan Fillion wore in the TV show Castle. He got together with the people from the TV show Face Off and was turned into an amazing steampunk f ...more

In order for software developers to do their jobs as new hardware reaches the market, they will need the right tools to get their projects off the ground and into augmented and mixed reality devices. There have been completely new approaches to development when it comes to AR ...more

Water makes up about 60% of your body weight. Whether you like it plain, flavored, bubbly, or in beverages or food, we all need water daily to avoid dehydration and stay healthy. For communities in need of clean drinking water, new research using bacteria may offer a simplifie ...more

I love cats (dogs too - but that's a subject for a different article...;o)). There are few things more enjoyable than welcoming an adorable little kitten into one's house; watching them inspect their mysterious new surroundings - timidly at first - and then quickly make it the ...more

The fatal crash of Air France Flight 447 is one of the most tragic accidents in avionic history — while it also serves as a stark reminder of what can go wrong when humans rely too much on driverless vehicles. The tragic 2009 plane crash off the coast of Brazil involved an Ai ...more

Quanergy CEO and founder Louay Eldada is, by any standard of measure, a pioneer in the development of LiDARs for driverless vehicles. Eldada's involvement with designing and engineering optical sensors dates back to his research work on LiDAR (light detection and ranging sens ...more

Despite funding difficulties that forced Meta to place employees on temporary leave in September, the augmented reality headset maker is reminding enterprise companies that it remains a viable option for visualizing and working with 3D design models. Earlier this month, Amar ...more

Nik Ramage creates low tech, absurd mechanical objects that perform mundane every-day tasks (from blowing out candles to walking down the street to drumming your fingers out of boredom). Click through to Ramage's site to see more of his work. Five of his pieces below: Fingers. ...more

University of Tokyo and MIT join forces to create a high speed, three fingered, robot pitcher. From Pink Tentacle: "To demonstrate the latest advances in high-speed industrial robot technology, researchers at the University of Tokyo have pitted a baseball-pitching robotic arm ...more

The game wizards at Insomniac take pride in diving deep when it comes to world-building, and the same is true for the studio's latest title for Magic Leap One called Seedling. Revealed on Wednesday at the L.E.A.P. conference in Los Angeles, the Magic Leap One-based title is l ...more

I'm drawing venom. I had the urge to draw venom after seeing the new spiderman movie. I hope they put venom in a movie properly one day. Venom is one of the easy things to draw. he is on so many drawing sites. no sound on this video, trying that out. Let me know if you think i ...more

BioShock: Infinite just came out today, and some people will no doubt play the game all of the way through with the object of beating the game. Others, though, will not only want to beat the game, but will want to earn every single achievement (or trophy) possible—and the A Re ...more