While the Neocube (fancy name!) are really just magnetic balls, they aren’t any ol’ magnetic balls. They are VERY-magnetic balls. Formed of 216 high-energy rare-earth magnets, their very strong magnetic field gives rise to very interesting behaviors as you fiddle with it, creating multitudes of shapes, planes and volumes.
If you’re interested, the online shop’s here.
Someone toyed with Google Suggest (Google Suggest guesses what you’re typing and offers suggestions in real time) with some rather interesting (and sometimes funny) results. If you’re feeling like it, have a go yourself! You never know what profound insights you might get from an innocent question.
I’ve been a great fan of Improv Everywhere (Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places – they ‘spontaneously’ do something out-of-the-blue in a public space to bring a short, abrupt but memorable twist to a day in life). But I think they really outdid themselves in their latest mission – the Frozen Grand Central:
On a cold Saturday in New York City, the world’s largest train station came to a sudden halt. Over 200 Improv Everywhere Agents froze in place at the exact same second for five minutes in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station. Over 500,000 people rush through Grand Central every day, but today, things slowed down just a bit as commuters and tourists alike stopped to notice what was happening around them. Enjoy the video first and then go behind the scenes with our mission report and photos.
Amazingly fun! I just wished they have it everywhere in the world!
This is a pretty cool spoof poster!
There’s certainly more than meets the eyes in this Spot the Difference Flash game developed by Ivoryboy. One of the reasons would be the excellently executed artwork that gives it a much more poetic feel while playing – it’s almost like you’re strolling through the scenes. And as you play, you might go – wait a minute, did that guy move? Ha – that’s the brilliance of it!
Play it and you’d know what I mean!
Like some creative outlets for your videomaking talents? Google has launched a rather interesting video campaign inviting people worldwide to join in imagining how interesting can an ‘M-velope’ (Gmail’s icon) be, when it is passed from the left to the right of the screen in 10 seconds:
Help us imagine how an email message travels around the world. Take a look at the collaborative video we started, and then film what happens next. We’ll rotate a selection of the clips we receive on this page, and add the best ones to the video. The final video will be featured on the Gmail homepage and seen by users worldwide.
All it takes is a video camera, the Gmail M-velope (
), and some creativity.
Submit your clip by August 13th, 2007 to be considered for the final collaborative video.
I certainly foresee all the bizarre and the interesting: perhaps we’d see the M-velope crossing Antarctica, passed by pet otters, or other wild adventures along the line. It’s definitely a great marketing trick by Google, utilizing Youtube (which they own) – it’s engaging and it’s great publicity for their brands. Clever!
The game is simple. You have one click to ‘explode’ a ball. As the ball explodes, those near it will also explode in a chain reaction as well. The idea is also simple. Progress through the many levels by meeting the increasingly higher number of target balls to detonate. With a nice background music too!
And, perhaps weirdly, I find myself looking at this game as an analogy to bringing a successful product/innovation in the marketplace. At the higher levels, you’d realize that chances are, if you click when there are a large number of balls already converged and congregated, you wouldn’t meet your target. Instead, you have to somewhat project your mental picture forward in time, to anticipate and spot a converging trend before it happens. That way, the chain-link gets to be more sustainable.
Maybe I’m just thinking too much?
I know the title doesn’t make sense, but really, someone should implement this in ALL cinemas – how often do you see people so excited about this usually-boring time? That’s probably an even more engaging experience than the movie itself!
I remember a few years ago, in the admission aptitude test for the industrial design course, there were questions that tested our spatial visualization abilities. A few 3D perspective views of some blocks were given, and we were supposed to construct the top, front and side views. I didn’t remember it being too much of a challenge then.
This game is slightly different – instead of giving you the 3d perspective to construct the elevation views, it does the reverse – and requires you to construct the blocks in 3D instead, with an additional requirement in terms of the total number of cubes used (as little as possible).
There are a total of 10 puzzles (figuur 1 to 10). A green dot beside the puzzle name indicates that the 3 views are correct, but the number of cubes are not. The goal is to achieve the yellow dot. Try it!
[PS: if you want to make it more challenging, try not to use the “Fill up” button!]
