An installation prototype Emily Gobeille and  Theo Watson put together with the libfreenect Kinect drivers and ofxKinect.  The system is doing skeleton tracking on the arm and determining where the shoulder, elbow, and wrist is, using it to control the movement and posture of the giant funky bird!  Imagine all of the creative applications in entertainment and education.   Amazing  work Theo and Emily,  please pitch the concept to games makers.  If Jim Henson’s Muppets become available in a game, I’ll be the first one to buy it.

Speed project – made in a day using openFrameworks and libFreenect.
Concept and Production by design-io.com

How would other global industries like Technology, finance & manufacturing change if they operated like the fashion industry?  Clearly this is completely hypothetical, but thinking about it does bring up some very interesting talking points.

Apple is back in the news today after announcing their plans to hold a Mac event on October 20^th.  We don’t have a lot of details except that it is focused on Mac and the big logo they created makes us think that a new Mac OS is in the works.

The most recent Mac OS, 10.6 is known as Snow Leopard.  OS X 10.7 would be the next in line.  The logo appears to have a picture of a Lion front and center.  We have very few additional details at this time, but expect to get the entire scoop on the 20^th.

On Wednesday, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, introduced three new Facebook features starting with Groups, which he says will give members more control over who sees what when they post content.

Months back, Facebook introduced a feature called lists which was suppose to give you some additional control over who could see your posts, but today Facebook revealed that less than 5% of members actually use the feature.  It seems that this is due in part to the fact that lists is hard to get set up and use.  So now, Facebook is replacing lists with Groups, which is supposed to be easier to manage and should give you better control of which friends can see what you post and when.

The face of TV as we know it is about to change, just ask Google. The search engine giant, and master of just about all things digital is jumping into the TV bizz as we announced on May 23rd of this year. The big difference is that Google has found a way to merge the TV and the Internet into one machine and make them work together in what I think are some really cool ways.

We live in the age of mobile devices and as such, there are a ton of options out there. You can choose between smartphones, messaging phones, feature phones, or phones meant only for making calls.

Keeping track of all your options is difficult, and comparing the phones you like best can be tough too. This is especially true when the phones you like best come from different carriers. It isn’t easy to compare the top phones at Verizon and AT&T when neither carrier will let you leave the building with a phone you haven’t bought.

On Monday, September 27th, RIM made an announcement that we had been expecting for some time. They unveiled their new tablet. We had speculated a couple months ago that this was coming and had thought we might see them name it the BlackPad. Fortunately, they went another direction, naming it the PlayBook.

I have to admit, I was surprised at what I saw with the device. RIM seems to have fallen a little behind the times of late with their hardware and lagging OS, but the PlayBook seems like a pretty nice leap ahead for them. The OS is not your typical BlackBerry operating system. This device will employ the BlackBerry Tablet OS designed and created by QNX which was recently acquired by RIM.

Being a tech geek frequently goes hand in hand with being a big fan of Sci-Fi.  Sci-Fi fans are often Star Wars fanatics.  Today, Star Wars fanatics have reason to rejoice.  On Tuesday, Lucasfilm Ltd. announced that Star Wars is coming back to Theaters in 2012, but this time with a little twist.