Being admitted to the hospital for an operation is a scary experience for anyone, but for children it can be especially frightening. Great Ormond Street Hospital in London has installed a unique large-scale project to help distract and soothe children as they are being taken to the operating theater.

The interactive installation is called “The Nature Trail” and was designed by Jason Bruges Studio exclusively for the hospital. It is both a huge piece of art and an interactive game, all meant to provide young patients with something to focus on other than their impending medical procedures.

The work includes 70 huge LED panels and custom-made graphic wallpaper along a 50-meter stretch of hallway. Motion sensors detect patients passing through, causing LED forest animals to appear. As the patient moves down the hallway, the pixellated LED animals pop up and move around, darting through trees and foliage.

For the hospital’s patients, who are all ages 16 and under, this welcome distraction can help make the long trip from their room to the anesthesia room much less stressful. The Nature Trail has proven so popular already that the hospital is planning to expand it to the rest of its walls in the near future.

The post Hospital Wallpaper Puts On an Interactive Light Show for Kids first appeared on Gajitz.

You know how annoying it is when you get up from your favorite TV show to make a quick snack, only to get sidetracked and miss a really good part? A team of developers is annoyed enough by this scenario that they’ve developed PredictGaze, a technology that can “see” when you’re sitting on the sofa watching TV – and when you get up to leave the room, pauses your show. It works in a pretty simple way: an inexpensive webcam mounted on your TV detects faces in the room; if everyone in the room gets up and leaves, the system pauses the show.

PredictGaze has other big plans for their technology, too. One of the most useful is an app that recognizes an iPad owner’s face. When the camera detects a face other than the owner’s, it blocks certain personal info (and prevents the stranger from accessing the owner’s Facebook account, which would benefit a whole lot of folks). The technology could possibly detect the ages of people in the room and block certain content for young viewers, although there seems to be a lot of room for error there. And just to ease the minds of those worried about privacy, the company says that all image processing is done locally and no user info is sent from the device.

The post TV Technology Pauses the Show When You Leave the Room first appeared on Gajitz.

Eye-mounted or eye-embedded heads-up displays are no longer in the realm of science fiction. They’re getting closer all the time, and eventually they’ll be just as commonplace as our regular contact lenses of today. That’s the premise of Sight, a short film from Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo. The futuristic plot puts us into a day in the life of Patrick, a creepy, somewhat maladjusted software engineer who both works on and uses Sight, a very popular HUD system embedded in the eyes.

The film shows us what our future could look like, with most entertainment, decorative objects, and even social interactions being either supplied or augmented by an always-on computer system. Would that world feel any less real than the one in which we live now? This outstanding sci-fi vision is so exciting and so chilling precisely because it could easily become a reality in our lifetime.

The post Short Sci-Fi Film Gives a Chilling Glimpse of Our Tech Future first appeared on Gajitz.

Traveling on a subway can be a somewhat disconcerting task. Because you are traveling underground and not seeing any landmarks or distance passing by, your brain has a harder time registering that you are, indeed, moving. Besides this, the cars tend to be rather dark and depressing.

A group of British design students has collaborated to create a digital “sunroof” for subway cars that would reconnect travelers with their surroundings. The screens would display animations of passing landmarks along with weather information for the outside world. A computer on board the train would store the vital information and update it via wi-fi.

As pictures scroll by on the “sunroof,” unobtrusive ads with scannable QR codes are displayed against the artificial skyline. Advertisers would get a completely new way to reach commuters, while commuters would get a welcome distraction from the questionable smells and worrying sounds typically encountered on the subway.

The post Overhead Digital Screens Bring Sunshine to Subway Rides first appeared on Gajitz.

Throughout the years, almost as far back as the history of television itself, companies have been trying to introduce the element of scent into TV shows. Not surprisingly, the attempts have all failed miserably – it seems that no one really wants to experience Conan’s aftershave or the smell of Dexter’s kill room. But a French company called Olf-Action is giving the whole smell-o-vision thing yet another try with a device they’ve helpfully named SMELLIT.

The SMELLIT is being developed more for gaming and movies than for television, but the concept already boasts an impressive library of scents: dentist’s office atmosphere, smell of horse, and smell of polluted cities are among the highlights. The scents are released through chambers that look a little like tiny airplane engines. The next time you’re playing Grand Theft Auto you might just be able to smell the burning rubber and spilled gasoline.

Although SMELLIT is little more than a concept at this point, it may eventually prove to be the one scent-driven accessory that becomes a household item. Then again, it could go the route of every other smell-o-vision gadget in the history of television and simply fade into the forgotten history of things that never quite took off.

The post Dawn of Smell-O-Vision? Gaming Gizmo Lets You Smell Mario first appeared on Gajitz.