If you were lucky enough to be a kid in the 80s or 90s, you got to witness the golden age of 8-bit pixellated video games. Staring at those little squares on the screen could eat up entire days as long as Mom and Dad kept off of our backs. The Pixel Cartridge wallpaper can bring all of those early gaming memories flooding back.

Created by designer Masaaki Enami of Kyoto-based design team Edit Mode, the wall covering features adorable piexellated game cartridges all laid out in neat rows. For people who had shelves full of these cartridges as kids, the design is kind of a comforting sight.

From close-up, the cartridges look almost recognizable. The designer hints that the individual designs are modeled on actual game cartridges and asks how many of them you can identify. You’ll have to be pretty committed to the design in order to deck your house out in the Pixel Cartridge Wallpaper, though – it comes at around $50 per ten square foot section.

The post Old-School Style: Vintage 8-Bit Game Cartridge Wallpaper first appeared on Gajitz.

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.

If you’re especially worried about the security of your home wireless network, or if you’re the kind of person who wears tinfoil hats to avoid the effects of electromagnetic waves, this wallpaper could help ease your mind. The wallpaper is covered with silver crystals arranged in patterns that were specially designed to block certain frequencies. When ordering the wallpaper you can choose which frequencies to block and which to allow, so wi-fi signals can be stopped from leaving your residence while cell phone calls are allowed to go through. Neighbors won’t be able to steal your wi-fi, and exterior electromagnetic waves can be kept out.

The wallpaper won’t block radio or emergency signals, and if you don’t dig the silver snowflake motif you can paint over it or install your choice of other wallpaper over it without affecting its functionality. Of course, to maximize the efficiency of a product like this you would need to install it on all of your walls, your floors and ceilings, and your windows. Perhaps future home builders will start building barriers like this right into the walls of new structures so we won’t have to fiddle with installation later. Finnish company Ahlstrom is expected to release the wallpaper in 2013 at a price that is on par with regular, non-paranoid-people wallpaper.

The post Anti Wi-Fi Wallpaper Bedecks Your Home’s Walls in Security first appeared on Gajitz.

Technology design permeates so many areas of our lives, so why not integrate it into our wallpaper as well? The LED Wallpaper designed by Ingo Maurer for Architects paper is a cool high-tech take on traditional wall coverings.

The wallpaper is dotted with patterns of LEDs that either depict geometric shapes or – with the help of printed lines – look like circuit boards.

Depending on your home and the kind of atmosphere you want to create, you can turn the lights way down so they are subtle and their origin is hard to place, or turn them up to encourage a vibrant and energetic space.

The designers don’t go into detail about how the wallpaper is powered, but they do say that it looks just as good hung in small segments as it does covering an entire room.

The post Light-Up LED Wallpaper That Brings Rooms to Geeky Life first appeared on Gajitz.

Although electricity is all around us, it is an invisible commodity that many of us think about only rarely. What if we could actually see electricity? Would it influence how much of it we use and which gadgets we choose to give up? Celine Marcq explores the use of electricity and our relationship with it in her project “Inconspicuous Matter.”

In a nutshell, the project consists of wallpaper and wall stickers that visually show the flow of electricity from nearby outlets and light switches. Marcq uses electricity as an artistic medium, taking it from an invisible utility to a living character in a fascinating work of art.

The electro-reactive paper lights up in an elegantly beautiful way to show (somewhat stylistically) how energy flows when we switch on a light or plug in an appliance. Beginning at the outlet or switch and moving away, the wallpaper displays glowing segments that flow slowly outward, representing the way that energy is coming from the source and moving out into the world.

Marcq’s goal was to embark on a study of electricity as a material research subject. She does that admirably, using electricity and materials in a combination that is both attractive and thought-provoking. Whether it would encourage anyone to use less electricity is questionable, however, since the display is beautiful enough to encourage anyone to want to see it again.

The post Go With the Flow: Arty Wallpaper Shows Electricity Use first appeared on Gajitz.