IKEA introduces UPPLEVA, a completely new range that integrates smart TV and sound system with furniture. UPPLEVA brings beauty and functionality to the living room, solving the problem of cable clutter and miss-match between TV and furniture.

You will find UPPLEVA in Stockholm, Milan, Paris, Gdansk and Berlin in June 2012. During autumn 2012 UPPLEVA is available in all of the stores in Sweden, Italy, France, Poland, Denmark, Spain, Norway and Portugal , and during spring 2013 in even more countries.

The basic idea of the project is built upon the consideration of creating a moving sculpture from the recorded motion data of a real person. For our work we asked a dancer to visualize a musical piece (Kreukeltape by Machinenfabriek) as closely as possible by movements of her body. She was recorded by three depth cameras (Kinect), in which the intersection of the images was later put together to a three-dimensional volume (3d point cloud), so we were able to use the collected data throughout the further process. The three-dimensional image allowed us a completely free handling of the digital camera, without limitations of the perspective.

Cool Kinect project via Samin, Bashford.

This puts wars, minor 3rd world country debts and the frigging financial crisis into nice perspective.

By the age of fourteen, he had already registered a dozen patents in a wide range of fields from biotech to robotics, but it would be his dynamic break-throughs in generating synthetic atmosphere above the polar ice cap that gained him worldwide recognition and spawned an empire.

— Prometheus trailer and background on Voidobjects.com

OF course it was and still is also a very high image quality still camera.

But it also had few flaws. For example the autofocus system was just copied from ages old 5D (MK1). And even though it had Full HD video, Canon engineers never really asked any video people what features they needed, really. For example being able to set the sound input level, or listen to the sound yourself while filming was simply not given as an option. But people hacked around many of these issues with external hardware and even custom camera software.

In this video you’ll hear Philip Bloom explaining all the benefits and problems with DSRL video and how it all started.

It’s 4 years since 2008, and the industry has been waiting for the 5 MK III to arrive and catch up with latest Nikons, like D800, that was just wiping the floor with MK II.

So finally it’s here and MK III’s features seems quite boring initially. It’s finally got the autofocus system and frame rate that it should have had already in MK2. Both of which have since already been available in 7D and 1D X. The original sound issues have been fixed and many other small things.

But when comparing Canon 5D MK III to Nikon D800, its biggest current rival, it’s evident the features are really neck-and-neck.

Except the main thing — uncompressed video output. Nikon has that via HDMI, but Canon doesn’t! How did Canon let this slip past? Well, probably because MKIII was so long in the pipeline already when Nikon released D4 and D800 just literally weeks ago with HDMI video output. Dang, Canon should have seen this coming. They are the leader in this new video industry, for now, and one of the main remaining complaints is the in-camare compressed video quality. You can skip that by storing the uncompressed signal from Nikon to a hard disk and compressing it much later on a computer, but on Canon you’re still stuck with the in-camera compression. Although it’s level is/might be adjustable, but it’s still not same as uncompressed.

— [top video] Canon 5D Mark III Hands-on First Impression by DigitalRevTV
— Canon announces EOS 5D Mark III 22MP full-frame DSLR on DPReview.com
— Nikon D800 vs Canon 5D Mark III
— 5 D MK III on Facebook
— Canon 5D Mk III – täynnä maltillisia uudistuksia (Finnish)
— The EOS 5D Mark III. Creativity, redefined. (Official Video)

“We’re trying to … imagine the future of email,” Adams said. “We think that email has sort of stagnated and got into these set patterns of people using it and it’s not being pushed forward any more.”

It’s got an instant-action take on messages, and features a “stream” of messages and other goodies. I can’t help but to compare it to the Gmail app Sparrow for OS X, which features a similar stream and Gmail style direct reply functionality.

But Fluent seems to have a very nice and visual way to handle attachments, photos, and searches. In fact, these are all features we at Nordkapp suggested to our client few years back. Sadly they didn’t implement them, and now there’s all sorts of startups doing the same things..

Image from smh.com.au

Fluent is a web service that still seems to do attachments better than the desktop app Sparrow, which is interesting. And they seem to have cool visualizations and things which beat Sparrow. Hopefully there’s more spots in the Beta program soon again!

— Try it now on fluent.io
— Article about it: Aussies’ fix for ‘stagnated’ email

Ouch ouch ouch.

This is so awesome, a actually functioning miniature scale model of the Knuffingen Airport. It may be the smallest airport, but it must also be the biggest scale model airport.

The world’s smallest airport has a size of 150m² and is the newest section of the Miniatur Wunderland. After six years and 150.000 working hours, the Knuffingen Airport has been in operation for a few weeks now.
… Sit back, relax and enjoy the breathtaking view.

More about it:
— World’s largest model airport the Knuffingen goes on show on news.com.au
— Making-of video in German