Bring your colourful clay creations to life with Play Doh Touch!

I remember countless hours playing with Play Doh as a kid, making monsters, strange hybrid animals, and yummy food (presumably for my brother and I to share with our monsters and animals).

The pure joy of building things with my bare hands is something that sure has continued throughout my life, and it's exciting to find out that __kids now have another way to explore their physical Play Doh creations - in the virtual world!

The Play Doh Touch Shape to Life Studio kit is a new offering in the 'app-enabled' toy space which allows __kids to bring their Play Doh masterpieces into an app and interact with it.

Using an iPad, you can scan the Play Doh creatures and objects created with the kit, and these can then be used within the Touch app; your clay creatures can run and jump and move about, and you can decorate the environment with other clay creations.

What I think is especially useful is that on top of the fine motor skills and imaginative play that Play Doh enables and encourages, the Shape to Life kit also helps introduce digital skills that no doubt will be required as children grow older; using a touch screen, using a digital camera/scanner, and navigating a virtual environment. There's even a kind of 'design process' if you care to think about it in that way: exploring and making a physical prototype, capturing and creating a virtual model, and then finally, using this model to complete tasks.

Could this toy be a perfect start for the next generation of engineers and designers? At the very least, it looks like a whole lot of fun!

The Play Doh Touch Shape to Life Studio is available at the Apple Store

See the future of wearable technology with these smart glasses

If you know someone who loves their glasses, or you’re a stylish and bespectacled guy or gal yourself, you may want to gather ‘round and take a closer look at this latest development in eyewear.

Feast your long- and/or short-sighted eyes on these smart new glasses!

Vue | Your Everyday Smart Glasses from Antony Bui on Vimeo.

Are my eyes deceiving me? The Vue smart glasses look like a dream come true! It allows you to answer calls, listen to music, track your fitness activity, listen to navigation instructions, charge wirelessly when you’re asleep, connect to other smart devices… and most importantly, correct your vision with prescription lenses.

The gesture control for the various functions might make you look like you’ve got some strange compulsive behaviours, but at least you’d look cool doing so; they come in two styles - Classic and Trendy - in a few colours with a few trims (plain chocolate brown for me, thanks!)

The feature I’m most excited about (other than being able to see clearly) would have to be the ‘bone conduction’ speakers, a different sound transmission method, removing the need for earphones or headphones entirely. I wonder how it would sound? And if you could have it remove unwanted noises.

By kickstarting a revolution in smart eyewear (they’re not the first, but they’re certainly quite functional, fashionable and visually normal-looking), the day is nearing when we could be walking around with Heads-Up Displays on our glasses, making us feel a bit like Tony Stark, wearing fashionable versions of Scouters from Dragon Ball Z. [link: http://dragonball.wikia.com/wiki/Scouter As long as future augmented reality apps don’t get on the side of freaky and intense.

I think these Vue specs are the way of the future and a logical next step in smart devices. If you’re a wearer of glasses and a lover of technology, this may just be the best new addition to your collection of gadgets. And even if the battery runs out, well, at least you can still see clearly.

Would you get these Vue Smart Glasses? Find out more about the Vue here.

Oh come all ye...what now? This A.I. composed Christmas carol is seriously wrong!

Love them or hate them, Christmas carols are an integral part of the holiday season. From Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer to The Little Drummer Boy we all know the usual Christmas classics.

But here’s a Christmas carol that you’ve never heard before…and you may never want to hear again!

A madcap bunch of researchers in Toronto have decided to dedicate themselves to furthering the possibilities of artificial intelligence (A.I.), by teaching a computer how to compose a Christmas carol. They played 100 hours of Christmas carols to the computer alongside showing it a bunch of Christmassy photos in order to ‘teach it’ all about Christmas songs. The result is…well, just plain weird.

Some example lyrics:

“I swear it’s Christmas Eve. I hope that is what you say…A Christmas tree. There are lots and lots and lots of flowers.”

Oh come all ye…what now???