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.

We’ve all seen it before in movies: some technologically advanced person (usually a scientist or co-pilot) pulls a floating screen of data out of nowhere and starts crunching away. Typically reserved for science fiction, holograms like these are becoming more of a reality. The driving principle behind a holographic imaging, known as diffraction, is flawed in that the pixels that create a 3D image aren’t close enough in size to light waves. The technology to correct this isn’t capable or cost-effective enough.

One scientist has found a way around this. A crystal from a material called lithium niobate has layers that guide the light that passes through it. The channels the light passes through, called waveguides, contain electrodes that slightly alter the shape of the crystal. The three previous waveguides needed per pixel are reduced to one. This creates a more efficient scattering effect necessary for 3D holographic images. Eventually we’ll all feel like we’re all in Tony Stark’s lab.

The post New Material Makes Holographic Displays Less Expensive first appeared on Gajitz.

One of the most noticeable flaws of the ubiquitous touch screen is the ease of blocking the screen with the very fingers that operate the devices. This concept from researchers at the National University of Taiwan in Taipei might be the solution to that frustrating problem. The fingertip-mounted OLED displays are tiny enough to fit over your finger, but smart enough to see what is under your fingers on the screen. This eliminates shooting the wrong alien, harvesting the wrong crop, or whatever other tiny-scale “work” you have to do on your touch screen device.

Of course, for a device as futuristic as the NailDisplay, you would expect it to do a lot more than simply show you where your next Tetris piece is going. The research team has a ton of other utilization ideas, from fingertip translators to screen-free music players to thumb-and-pinkie phones.

The post Finger-Mounted OLED Screens Provide Another Display Layer first appeared on Gajitz.

3D displays are, let’s face it, sort of blah. We don’t love putting on dumb glasses just to get a headache from the mediocre 3D effects. The SplashDisplay created by University of Electro-Communications PhD candidate Yasushi Matoba is a much more exciting kind of 3D display. It incorporates a ton of lightweight white beads (think those obnoxious beads that go all over the place when you break up a piece of Styrofoam) to create “explosion”-type effects that jump right out at the viewer.

The display is set up on a small, low table. Beads fill the recessed top of the table and projectors beam images and colors from multiple directions. Blowers made from speakers sit below the surface of the table to create air bursts that send the beads flying up into the air. The colored explosions look a lot like fireworks bursting up into space.

The SplashDisplay is also interactive, allowing users to play with the moving images. The video shows viewers playing a game on the display, throwing small objects at an alien invader to destroy it. When the ammo hits the alien, there is an “explosion” of little beads and the display lights up like crazy. The SplashDisplay definitely isn’t your standard 3D viewing platform, and we think that’s pretty rad.

The post These Pictures Pop! 3D Display “Explodes” Into the Air first appeared on Gajitz.

Taking the concept of sharing music from a purely auditory experience to a visual one, these headphones from designers ChanHyun Park & SeJi Kim let wearers share their beats without removing their headphones.

The side of each earpiece has a small display screen that flashes graphics to sync up with whatever the wearer is listening to. The display is fully customizable so the listener can decide exactly what the rest of the world will see.

The graphics choices include sound graphs and synchronized flashes of colored lights. The concept seems completely doable with current technology and would definitely attract a lot of attention for those who can’t help but show off their music.

The post Visual Headphones Are Music on Inside, Graphics on Outside first appeared on Gajitz.