Hatsune Miku – Japanese 3D Hologram Pop Star comes to Reality

If you watched some Japanese anime movies and series from the 90’s you may know Macross Plus in which (among other stuff) Sharon Apple, a virtual holographic idol singer was giving huge concerts for a totally crazed audience.

Like many other things that were imagined in those mangas or anime (if you’re a UberGeeek reader you may have seen some crazy robots already), they did it! Yes, the japanese have this amazing ability to take anything straight out from a manga writer or an anime screenwriter’s head and make it happen.

Its (her?) name is Hatsune Miku and “she” is a real j-pop star, selling out concerts with real people buying real tickets to watch and to listen to a 100% synthetic “artist”. Real time generated 3D projected on a real stage using a holographic display setup, even “her” voice is generated using Yamaha’s Vocaloid voice synthesizer software. 

Awesome, amazing and scary at the same time…

Watch out, Lady Gaga! You may lose your job sooner than expected!

via youtube.com

Plan.b a digital street plan for blind people concept device

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Plan.b is a brilliant concept device of a digital street plan for blind people. It “prints” a palpable image of their immediate surroundings.

The surface of the device is made of dots, just like braille displays, but at a bigger scale. User’s position is indicated by a small arrow at the center. The “printed” map represent a zoomed area of map, where the streets are represented by the black (flat) areas.

The user can feel the buildings and have a better appreciation of distances, architecture proportions and a more global view of the surroundings.

By pressing the dots the user could get additionnal audible informations about buildings and streets (using speech synthesys, I guess).

Such device could help blind people to freely and independently navigate in foreign places and environment. 

Concept by Robert Richter – Oriko Design Büro.