Marathon runners typically want to lighten the load they carry through a race, but this particular runner added an 18-pound buddy to his back when he ran the Tokyo Marathon.

The piggy-backing robot is called Petit-Tomaton, and it was designed and built by Japanese tomato company Kagome. The grinning humanoid ‘bot feeds the runner tomatoes as he runs to keep his energy steady and hydration levels up.

Kagome says that tomatoes are an excellent source of nutrition and can help runners stay energized during a long race. It’s way messier than a water bottle, but how could you resist those cold, glowing eyes and the inexplicably opening-and-closing mouth?

As cute (and weird) as it is, Kagome doesn’t plan to make the Petit-Tomaton into an actual product – it was built as a publicity item for the 2015 Tokyo Marathon. The above video is appropriately quirky, but be warned that it’s a bit suggestive in the beginning.

The post Goofy Robot Rides on Your Shoulders to Fuel a Marathon first appeared on Gajitz.

Tokyo’s Sunshine Aquarium had the feeling that potential visitors were either getting lost or simply getting distracted when on their way to the aquarium. They approached ad agency Hakuhodo to help them develop a way to guide visitors to their gates. The firm came up with a unique solution: an augmented reality app that lets penguins lead the way.

The closest mass transit station to Sunshine Aquarium is approximately one kilometer away. In the station, signs encourage passengers to download the app, called Penguin NAVI, via a QR code. Penguins then appear on the screen, walking in the direction of the aquarium. To get there, users simply have to follow the penguins. We can’t think of a cuter way to get around in the city.

The post Penguin Parade: App Guides You Using Walking Penguins first appeared on Gajitz.

The old, low-tech way of judging consumers’ interest in products was to put them in a focus group and ask them questions. However, some studies on the focus group method have uncovered a rather inconvenient fact: focus group participants often try to please the testers by saying what they think the testers want to hear. So how do you measure interest without asking for opinions? Some companies are relying on three-dimensional computer simulations of virtual stores full of virtual products, then tracking where consumers’ eyes are drawn.

Using special computer hardware and software that tracks a virtual shopper’s gaze, companies can create a sort of heat map indicating where the eyes were drawn and how long the gaze was held at each point. Some systems even use devices that measure involuntary facial expressions to gauge true emotional response to whatever the subject is looking at. The result of all of this technology is that companies are able to test out different packaging, logos, product placement and other important aspects of retail without wasting millions on prototypes and ineffectual focus groups.

The post The Eyes Have It: Marketing Tech Parses Gazes for Info first appeared on Gajitz.

Plenty of students, office workers, artists and nervous people chew on the ends of their pencils, and it’s usually really gross. A Brazilian chewing gum company called Gang used that tendency in order to promote their gum flavors.

The company made up 5000 pencils with gum in place of the erasers. The pencils were handed out in schools during end-of-year exams to give students something tastier and less yucky to chew on while they contemplated their test answers.

The post Chewable Pencils Give Nervous Students a Tasty Surprise first appeared on Gajitz.

As more and more of our lives are lived out online, it has become common to see our meatspace interactions intersecting with our cyberspace ones. Delivering location updates via FourSquare, tweeting real-time reviews of restaurants and movies, posting pictures of your activities to Facebook via mobile phone while the action is happening – these are all things we consider normal. At the AutoRAI 2011 in the Netherlands, a new method for connecting real life and online life was introduced.

Visitors were given RFID cards that they connected to their Facebook accounts. After checking out a Renault car that they liked, they could then swipe the card across a special pillar to “like” the car on Facebook. A picture and short description of the car were posted to the user’s wall along with their approving thumbs-up.

The clever marketing technique used by Renault to share details about their cars could easily be expanded to include other offline objects. Imagine “like” buttons appearing on bars, movie theaters, parks, or book stores. Instead of filling out comment cards, patrons would instantly share an opinion with all of their friends. Plenty of businesses already plead with their customers to “like us on Facebook!” So why not make it simpler to do that? As an added bonus, since customers would be posting to their own Facebook wall and not using some anonymous comment system, the meaningless flames might be kept to a minimum.

The post Cyberspace + Meatspace Collide: Real Life “Like” Button first appeared on Gajitz.