Scared Cat

BMW aggressively takes on the biomimicmarketing of Jaguar. Peculiar image of the week.

Via Infozaragoza. Related: The Naturalness of traveling with a Jeep, Facing Your Car, Steam Horse. Thanks iPeg.

Facing your Car

Do cars have a face? You would be inclined to say yes immediately. And you would be right as well, because they do. Study has confirmed through a complex statistical analysis that many people see human facial features in the front end of automobiles and ascribe various personality traits to cars—a modern experience driven by our prehistoric psyches.

Designers have realized this for a long time; a lot of thought goes into designing the face of the car. It’s an important element of the design process. As Chris Bangle—former design director of the BWM Group Munich—puts it in the recent documentary Objectified: ‘You, as a person, can have lots of different faces, but with a car, you can only have one face. When you put on that face, it’s there forever. It becomes the cars expression.’

And people are very picky when it comes to choosing a car they will be driving daily for the next couple of years. ‘Cars are kind of like avatars, they’re a representative of ourselves.’, says Bangle, ‘You know, I show myself to the outside world through this car.’

It’s no mere coincidence that the rounded Volkswagen Beetle looks so cute you want to hug it, or that the BMW headlights in your rear mirror are saying ‘Get out of the way or I’ll run you over.’ Cars’ faces tend to show the personality of the car. If it’s a performance car, it should look like that. If it’s a cheap ecological car, it’s appearance should reflect that as well. This is not only the skill of the designer, but also has a strong scientific base. Dennis Slice—an associate professor who was closely involved with the study of Cars’ faces—says: ‘The most unique aspect of the study was that we were able to quantitatively link the perception of cars to aspects of their physical structure in a way that allows us to generate a car that would project, say, aggression, anger or masculinity or the opposite traits.’

Will car customization take extreme forms in the (near) future? Will we end up sending along a picture of ourselves when ordering a car, so that the head- and taillights, as well as the logo and the license plates, can be modeled after our very own face? Why not, we already get to choose most of the cars appearance, so customizing it’s face only seems natural…

Not so horseless carriage

Sometimes next nature breaks down and things fall back on an older nature. Luckily, this guy still had a horse around. Peculiar image of the week.

Via Kottke. Related: Steam Horse,  Your grand-grand-parents new media, No Signal.

The naturalness of travelling with a Jeep

GPS is not the most easiest product to advertise. Jeep uses biomimicmarketing to bring the message across. In this advertising campaign an iconic arrow is comprised by images of animals herding. From birds flocking to elephants roaming. We lead you the way.

Read the rest of this entry »

No Signal

As technology evolves, people are more and more depending on it to function properly. But the nature of technology is that it needs networks, sources, software, batteries and signal. Once these conditions fail, horror scenarios unfold for those who depend…

Supercut video by fourfour.typepad.com | Related: Cellphone Minutes, the Next Currency, Crackberry Addicts, Handset gets taken to the grave.

Bacteria that turn CO2 into energy

We’ve written earlier about man–made bacteria that eat waste & shit petrol. How about a genetically modified bacteria that can eat CO2 and excrete methane that could power our cars and homes? Abundant carbon dioxide, which is considered a pollutant, could be a nearly unlimited source of fuel. Will you one day be driving your car to fight global warming?

At first you think it sounds too good be true and quickly categorize the idea in the hoax section along with the cheap solar panels made from human hairs. But once you hear Craig Venter – yes, that researcher that sequenced the human genome – is involved, you know you have to take things more seriously.

Dr. Venter with his new firm, Synthetic Genomics, has turned his attentions to creating synthetic biological organisms for environmental change. What is particularly interesting about the company’s approach is the digitizing of existing organisms, which are then remodeled to new ones that do things that serve us well, such as eating pollution and excreting fuel. It’s high science today, but could be a genetic Photoshop within our lifetime.

A leading candidate to be the desired ‘CO2 eating, energy excreting bacteria’ that changes the game of climate change is Methanococcus jannaschii – depicted at the top of this post –, an ancient, single-cell organism that is found in the seafloor in the vicinity of hydrothermal vents. The organism produces methane by combining carbon dioxide with hydrogen rising through the vents. Incorporated into the air pollution control systems of power plants, the organism could turn CO2 into methane.

Although it will be difficult to apply the technique on a large scale anytime soon, president Obama already decided to honor Craig Venter with the National Medal of Science for his life time achievements.

Sources: Lab News, Popular Mechanics. Related: Crash course on synthetic genomics, Bacteria that eat waste & shit petrol, Driving on Algue, Arnolds hybrid hummer, Green Blues.

GPS Parody

And you thought GPS was supposed to make life easier? Created by Sheepfilms.

Related: Find Brain, replace with GPS, GPS influence on street signage. Via Beyond the Beyond.

Digital Overruns Nature: Pixel Attack

Apparently, camouflaging oneself with digital patterns rather than nature-imitated patterns functions as a better camouflage within “old-nature” situations. So the digital patterns function as a better camouflage in the analogue world?

Hyperstealth Biotechnology Corp take a very different approach to creating military camouflage uniforms and accessories. Instead of realism, they employ the mathematics of fractals to design patterns. The company developed their patterns by running multiple fractals (graphics with feed back loops) and advanced algorithms through computers in a process they call Camouflage Designated Enhanced Fractal Geometry.

Does this mean that eventually the digital might look more natural than natural?

Via: www.aiga.org

Antenna Tree Mast Safari

This picture was taken in Zambia by Sarah Los (NL) while on wildlife safari. Every fairly trained “NextNature spotter” should be able to distinguish the cellphone-tree masts from old-nature trees. But that’s odd; there are three of them in a row and all different species!? Does every cellular network provider plant its own tree family? It surely looks like a competition. Future designs are expected to look better, taller and greener.

Let us do a quick jungle safari ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Augmented Phone Browsing

This video shows the first beta version of TwittARound – an augmented reality Twitter viewer on the iPhone 3Gs. It shows live tweets around your location on the horizon. Because of the video see-through effect you see where the tweet comes from and how far away it is.

The app does something similar as layar(.com) — launched in Amsterdam (NL) June 17th –, a phone interface that puts a content layer over the phone camera’s videoscreen to locate the nearest toilet, bar, supermarket, bank and other search categories.

Though we still trust our natural eyes and ears; with tools like these, we have but to reach in our pockets to look ahead and see what is coming. The apps are not predicting the future yet, but I am pretty sure we will have to get back on that soon.

via: i.document.m05.de (thanks @droombos) | Related: On the Road | Avatar Machine