Link About It: This Week’s Picks
The Weeknd revealed, a personal beer factory and brain-controlled computing in this week’s look at the web
1. Stripe Spotter
With an innovative use of pattern recognition software, Stripe Spotter has the ability to identify animals based on snapshots of their patterns (like the unique identifying marks on a zebra, as pictured). Developed at the Computational Population Biology laboratory at the University of Illinois, and the Equid Research and Conservation laboratory at Princeton, it will be unveiled at the International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval in Italy next week.
2. Who is The Weeknd?
Complex attempts to clear up a few questions about the latest young, gifted and black music artist to come up on the Internet with a brand of crossover music. The University of Toronto student Abel Tesfaye, assumed to be 20 years old, is rumored to have worked with Drake, among other Canadian music biz heavies.
3. WilliamsWarn Personal Brewery
New Zealand-based personal brewmasters WilliamsWarn has released a complete miniaturized beer brewing system, which does all the work from fermenting to sterilizing to carbonating, while you sit back, relax and enjoy the brew. The all-in-one system has you covered from adding in the ingredients to a quick turn of the switch that achieves the perfect temperature for a freshly-dispensed artisan homebrew.
4. Æsir’s Stone Age Printing
Denmark’s luxury mobile phone brand Æsir recently tapped Tom Hingston Studio to create promotional prints as part of a branded publication called Tænker. Hingston turned to the facilities at Edition Copenhagen lithographic workshop to produce the six vibrant prints, requiring a new stone for each color for an intensive process that produces gorgeously-hued results.
5. Jetsetter for iPad
Taking advantage of the gyroscopic sensors in the iPad2, Jetsetter’s newly launched iPad app offers beautifully smooth 360-degree room views on top of their already rich destination content.
6. Tesla Showroom
With only one model for sale, the Tesla showroom needed a little more excitement. The carmaker asked former Apple retail guru George Blankenship to design a new display for their Roadster that would be “clean, approachable, comfortable and exciting.”
7. Brutal Knitting
Artist Tracy Widdess shows the alternative side of knitting with her Sci-Fi-inspired masks, perfect for nefarious cold-weather activity, that sell for $150 a pop.
8. Dialing With Your Thoughts
You can finally force your phone to read your mind. Researcher Tzyy-Ping Jung has developed an interface based on electroencephalogram electrodes where people can ‘dial numbers’ without their hands. The system relies on the intensity of brain frequencies when concentrating on different numbers and allows users to to dial on the keyboard just using brain power.
