The typical amount of time a person spends in the bathtub in a day isn’t much, but it’s enough to make us miss our phones and laptops for a while. Thankfully, we have to suffer no more: the Aquatop is a system that involves a Kinect camera and a projector mounted above the tub; a pair of waterproof speakers and a PC round out the setup to create an immersive touchscreen out of the surface of your bath water. Bath salts have to be added to the tub to make the surface milky enough to project images onto.

Aquatop lets you play video games when you’re in the tub – something that would be ill-advised at best with traditional gaming systems. The waterproof speakers provide haptic feedback as you play, creating effects like water spouts. Your fingers act as the controllers when you touch the surface of the water, hold them above the water or poke them through the surface from under the water.

The PC attached to the system also allows you to use the surface of your bath water as a desktop computer. You can scoop up a piece of media that is projected on the water and drop it onto a media player, which will start the media playing. Projected images can be removed from the “screen” by making waves in the water that wash them away, or by simply reaching three fingers up from beneath the water and “pulling” the images under.

Letting your limbs float to the top of the water allows you to become a part of the display, melding human and technology in a novel way. Though we doubt we’ll ever see a setup like this on the commercial market, it is a brilliant example of what can be done with unconventional interfaces.

The post Water Surface Interface Puts a Computer in Your Bathtub first appeared on Gajitz.

Most people don’t see much else in pictures of those old, massive computers than giant, archaic messes of cables and boxes. It’s difficult to relate them to the pocket-sized computers we carry around today. Steeped in obscurity, one writer pulled a bunch of gigantic old computers out for a list dubbed “10 Colossal Old Computers That Changed History.”

Each computer on the list serves as a presentation of modern computer features. For example, one computer may have been the first to use RAM, another being the first to use a video display. They all, however, have one thing in common: they moved computer science ahead in ways that the people building and operating them could never have imagined.

Five of the 10 computers were ultimately used in militaristic capacities such as artillery routing and code breaking. The list probably won’t appeal to those who aren’t interested in the roles computers have played in our past. It is, however, humbling to look at those old, massive machines while using one no bigger than a newspaper.

The post Big Ol’ Computers: Huge Historic Precursors to Your Laptop first appeared on Gajitz.