Tag: Japan
VIDEO: Japanese exoskeleton suit called "HAL".
There’s a long comic book tradition of people going slightly doo-lally, building massive robot suits in their garage, and then stomping all over their enemies. Well, the Japanese just did it. They’ve built HAL, who looks like he’ll stomp all over you in an instant.
HAL is worn over your arms and legs, and uses eight motors to attached to your shoulders, elbows, knees and waist to control your movements. Let just hope that whoever’s controlling it has the same ideas about what you want to do as you do. Still, longer term, this could be an incredible help for the disabled.
(via WeirdAsiaNews)
UK set to overtake Japan as the CENTRE of the gaming UNIVERSE this year
Poor old Japan is about to fall behind the UK in the global video game charts, with us lot finally spending more of our remaining cash on gaming than the Japanese – making the UK second only to the USA in how much cash we blow on various Halos and Mario Karts.
Figures released by UK sales-counter Chart-Track show that for the first five weeks of 2009 sales of games were up 37% in the UK, as kids spent their Christmas money on novelty Wii games like never before…
New app lets you turn your iPhone into a web server. Why?
I’ve nothing against setting up a personal web server so that you can share files across the Internet, but I would recommend that you don’t try and turn your iPhone into one.
Yes, there’s a new application called ServersMan@iPhone that will do just that. Assuming your iPhone is on, and is running that particular app, then anyone on the Internet can upload and download files to their heart’s content…
Canon lets Japanese employees go home early twice a week to make babies
Japan’s birthrate is 1.34, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, and that’s too low. It needs to be 2.0 for the population to maintain itself. As a result, 22% of the population is 65 or older – the highest proportion in the world. All this is primarily due to the country’s common 12-hour workday, which doesn’t exactly assist procreation.
Well, to try and rectify the balance, Keidanren, a business group of 1300 major international corporations, has asked its members to let workers go home early to “spend time with their families”, meaning ‘have lots and lots of dirty sex’.
Canon’s part of the group and will be letting its employees go home early at 5.30pm twice a week for that very reason. As well as helping the country’s demographic problems, it also means that the company spends less on overtime payments, and employees are happier. Everyone wins.
(via Crunchgear)
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Fake heart rate monitor wristwatch taunts your time-telling skills
Just when you’d got the hang of telling the time on a variety of Tokyo Flash watches, along comes the EIN Cyber Heartbeat LED watch which enables you to make a fool of yourself in front of complete strangers who ask you the time as you try to decipher the heart monitor-like display…
Japan launches 'smell map' website
You’ve got to love the Japanese. They’ve created a website which maps smells across the globe. 200 so-called ‘smellists’ have joined the “Nioi-bu”, or Smell Club, and registered scents on a Google map.
The scents listed range from “A toasty odour of cow dung” to “used socks in the summer”. It’s unclear whether any of the smells are actually pleasant. If you speak Japanese, then go check it out and let us know in the comments.
Nioi-bu (via AP)
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YouTube Video of the Week: Insane Japanese Water Jetpack
Whoa – this is awesome. Supersize a simple bottle rocket, and strap it to a terrified-looking Japanese bloke. The most impressive thing? The science involved, neatly summarised by PopSci. In short, this bloke leaves the launchpad at over 200MPH, experiencing acceleration of approx 10gs! Don’t try this at home, kids.
PopSci (via Digg)
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Panasonic to launch first fully paperless fax machine
Hey faxers, don’t get too excited, but Panasonic will be releasing a paperless fax machine before the end of January. The bad news? For the moment, it’s Japan-only. I’m actually quite surprised that it’s taken the human race this long to develop a machine that sends faxes without actually having to feed in paper.
To send, you can type messages mobile-phone-keypad-style on the big built-in buttons, or alternatively you can send Word docs, as well as docs saved in ‘other formats’. Presumably PDF will be among them. Fax messages can be read on the device’s screen and, sadly, printed out if you absolutely have to.
Panasonic Paperless Fax (via CrunchGear)
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DEADLY GADGETS: Foot massager
The innocent-looking foot massager above is no ordinary foot massager. It’s a killer. Manufacturer Matoba Electric has the deaths of three people on its conscience, after each tried to use the Shape-up Roller 2 on their neck or shoulders.
It’s a bit confusing, but the victims seem to have removed the device’s cloth cover, but then got their collar stuck in the machine as it continued to rotate, putting pressure on their windpipe and leading to death from asphyxiation. The company has since issued an official warning and told people to RTFM, which clearly states not to remove the cover.
Matoba Electric (via Crunchgear)
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LG crams 4G LTE tech on a mobile phone chip
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the future. While you were in bed this morning, dreaming of Konnie Huq running in slow motion in the snow, LG were hard at work in Japan (where it’s midday when it’s 3am here) putting ridiculously futuristic technology on a mobile phone chip.
The tech is called LTE, which (doesn’t really) stand for “the Long Term Evolution of 3GPP”. It’s basically the plans that the 3rd Generation Partnership Project has for the future of 3G and cellular broadband in general. Some people refer to it as 4G.
