New Gadgets and Gizmos

Apparently Japanese performance artist built this scary ass crawling robot to make a statement about the impending Asian economic crash. Something about how Japanese salarymen are really gonna be crawling along the sidewalk while people stand around and gawk. Honestly I have no idea, which is why I’m not an art critic. I stood in a museum staring at a bunch of squiggly lines for like ten minutes when this woman came up beside me and remaked to her partner, “This is a really profound statement about the technological innovations of the past half century.” I turned to them and, confused, asked, “It’s not a giant cooch?” Needless to say, the statement Momoyo is making with this robot is beyond me. If I had to guess though, it’d have less to do the plight of the Japanese salaryman because of an economic crash and more to do the plight of a Japanese salaryman with wonky legs whose wheelchair was stolen.

Crawling Businessman Robot Is a Critique On Japanese Salarymen [gizmodo]

Tired of staring at the same damn group of garden gnomes in your flowerbed? Well how about (un)livening things up a bit with a Garden Zombie? Garden Zombies cost $90 and the 32″W x 20″D x 8″H sculptures look like they’re climbing out of the ground and ready to gnaw on some headfruit.

Not for the faint of heart, the life-sized, gray-toned zombie will claw his way out of your garden plot or family room corner, pleading for assistance with the most lifelike eyes you’ve ever seen. His macabre expression is captured in such great detail in quality designer resin and finished so realistically that you’ll swear you can hear him breathing!

Garden? Maybe. Inside the apartment? Fuck no. The last thing I need to see while stumbling my way to a midnight snack is a zombie climbing out of the floor. I’d decimate my tighty-offwhities (if I was wearing any) and cry like a baby. Eventually I’d come to, grab one of my zombie-survival kits, and proceed to kill the poor sap that lives in the apartment below mine.

Replace That Old Gnome With A Garden Zombie [ohgizmo]

DreamWorks Animation and Intel have formed a strategic alliance to revolutionize 3-D filmmaking. The move is expected to further DreamWorks’ goal of rendering all its films in stereoscopic 3-D, beginning next year.

The trailblazing animation studio says it plans to employ Intel’s visual computing products and tools for content creation, beginning with the film Monsters versus Aliens, slated for release next March.

“Technology plays a significant role in enabling our artists to tell great stories,” said DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg. “By utilizing Intel’s industry-leading computing products, we will create a new and innovative way for moviegoers to experience our films in 3-D.”

Tera-Scale Performance

Under the agreement, Intel’s software engineers will optimize DreamWorks’ applications to run on the chipmaker’s advanced multicore processors. DreamWorks will need thousands of such chips to create and modify high-quality images.

“When Hollywood does special effects, they have far more computing power at their disposal than what can be found in the most extreme editions of today’s personal computers,” said Jeffrey Howard, a technology strategist at Intel’s Microprocessor Technology Labs. “Quad cores are actually pretty quaint when compared to render farms filled with hundreds of cores.”

To bring that kind of computing into a personal computer, one has to think a lot bigger in scale, to the point where trillions of operations can be computed per second, Howard explained in a recent blog. “In Intel’s Microprocessor Technology Labs, we call that Tera-Scale,” he said.

Intel’s future chips for 3-D applications will be based on a new processor architecture for visual computing that is expressly designed to achieve Tera-Scale performance. Code-named Larrabee, the new architecture will integrate a high-performance, vector processing unit (VPU) with acceleration enhancements. Intel plans to offer its first public demos of Larrabee later this year.

Meanwhile, the work continues on Intel’s next-generation 3-D technology for home theater,…

Look around. See any flames? Take a whiff. Does it smell like smoke? Take your iPod’s earbuds out. Is there a fire-alarm blaring? If so, strap on the Wizard safety pack, attach the end of the lifeline to something sturdy (no, not your computer monitor) and then dive out a window. Now sit back and piss your dress pants while the Wizard’s 250-meter cable lowers you safely to the ground. Designed by HJC Design, the promises an “automated public safety solution with up to 250-meters of reciprocating lifeline technology.” You just better hope a co-worker wants your attach point and disconnects your line before you hit ground level (lest you hit ground level at a break-neck velocity). That’s why I’m sticking to plan A: my trusty hang glider. Sure it takes up the entire men’s bathroom, but seriously, would you rather be safe in the event of an emergency or urinate in your coworker’s desk drawers? Ahhhhhhhhhh, exactly. *zip*

Wizard escape pack: too late for MacGyver, too conceptual for Bauer [engadget]

Thanks Julian, I’m thinking we’ll use these to escape the strip club without paying our tab

From our “Money Can’t Buy Classiness” department here at Geekologie comes this gold covered Porsche. Some moron with more money than taste has added almost 50 lbs of gold to his 911 convertible. So now it’s 50 pounds heavier, and 50% less cool. I swear, what is it with rich people’s fascination with shiny things? It’s ridiculous. You know what other demographic loves shiny objects? Babies. Coincidence? I think not.

Hit the jump for several close-ups of the gaudiness.