Ideas - inspirations experiments & notes

I've been using citymapper.co.uk quite a lot recently - a pretty handy little web site for finding and comparing transport routes across London.

All it needs now is a mobile app and a call-me-a-taxi button.

Google Earth has some competition - beautifully modelled and textured 3d navigable views of major cities at 10cm resolution. The video embedded above shows the technology working well on tablets so mobile applications are key - Google Streetview is going to look old pretty fast once this stuff goes mainstream.

The company behind it, C3 technologies, has allegedly been bought by Apple, so presumably Google's mapping tech is getting the heave ho from iOS...

Via core77

Highly impractical and potentially dangerous but cute nonetheless; the urban beehive concept from Philips is a smoked glass observation hive that can be fitted to an external wall or window.

Spotted this Sankyo flip clock alarm amongst the various nostalgic gems for sale at Nanovo

When I heard about a family friend's new home-made geodesic greenhouse, I was sorely tempted to have a play around and make one myself. Some complex maths and a quick play in Sketchup revealed I'd really better get a garden first.

During my digging around I also found some compelling reasons not to live in a dome.

Image from www.johnzerning.com

Want one!

Jonas Pfeil has come up with a brilliant new way of capturing spherical panorama photographs, using an array of small cameras embedded into a ball. When the ball is thrown into the air, an internal accelerometer detects the highest point of its arc, and simultaneously captures 36 images from the cameras distributed across the surface of the ball, which can then be stitched together to produce a full spherical image.

I just hope he's made it robust enough because people will inevitably drop it.

It reminds me of the light sabre training sphere in Star Wars...

Via core77.com