This is one of those ‘once seen, cannot be unseen’ kinda sites. Draw a ninja turtle nose on a picture and send it in. My submission above, freedom ninja Ron Paul. Check out the Teenage Mutant Ninja NosesTumblr here.

update: Well, it looks like the Ron Paul media blackout is moving to the internet as the picture was never posted on their site.

This printer uses helium to blow foam bubbles through custom advertising stencils. The resulting foam advertising flies rigt out of the printer and into the sky.

I love this concept, but when it comes to shapes, all I can think of is unleashing thousands and thousands of space invaders.

Throwable Cameras are an awesome concept, and this 3D printed ball with 36 cameras by Jonas Pfeil takes it to the next level. Just toss the ball in the air and when it reaches the vertex, all the cameras take a picture. The result is a stitched together panoramic image with a full 360° unobstructed view. I can think of all sorts of variations of this that could be useful, from adding infrared and using it for military and police actions, to using a launcher to get a shot of the whole neighborhood, to doubling the cameras for 3D shots. Video Below

The camera isn’t yet on the market, but I’m sure the first question they are going to get from the masses will be: Can I get it in purple?

The land mine sticker above is part of a land mine awareness campaign by Unicef (United Nations Children’s Fund). The other side is sticky and camouflaged with a pattern to match flooring. When the camouflaged ad is stepped on, it sticks to the bottom of the shoe. The text on the front reads, “In many other countries you would now be mutilated! Help the victims of land mines!”

There is a beauty to this type of guerilla advertising. It allows for an organization without a lot of resources to spend a small amount of money on a clever advertising gimmick and then see their message spread multiply through the internet as sics like ours report the gimmick. Some of us even have enough shame to spread the message as well.

Where we live, if we fail to watch where we step, we end up with a smelly shoe. Other countries aren’t so lucky. For more on Unicef and land mines, see their page here:

http://www.unicef.org/emerg/index_landmines.html

From a processing standpoint, the task is monumental. We take so many social and stylistic cues from an image. I can’t imagine trying to tech a program to find what some random person on the internet is looking for in the pile of billions of images that is the web, but Google has decided to take it on.

Let’s give it a challenge and see if it panics!

First, go to Google’s image search page. Then drag an image into the search bar. That simple. I’m using Kevin Sloan’s awesome image above to see what we can find.

Well, it still needs work clearly, but I’m actually rather impressed. First of all, it did nearly instantly find me a ton of sources with the same image, so if you are using it that way, it gets an A+. The above pictures came from a section it refers to as ‘visually similar images’. What impresses me is how many completely unrelated but undeniably similar compositional elements it found. The search engine isn’t differentiating objects like we would, as flamingo and monkey, which on the one hand is unsurprising, but on the other, I’m a little shocked that not a single similar image popped up on the front page with either a flamingo or a monkey in them. It instead seems to have focused on composition, pattern, and color.

Take the picture of the woman with her children in the upper right; she is wearing a flamingo colored shirt, the cup in her hand is its head. There is a cloudy sky, trees on the horizon, the shadow on the lawn gives us the plateau, the monkey is seen in her sunglasses, and its leg in the same position as her daughter (held). Her shorts are the sky under the flamingo, and perhaps best of all, the stovepipe as monkey tail.

I can’t wait to play with this some more. I sense a multitude of new memes coming from this, with every famous image in history having a page of doppelgangers.

Most of the entries this year seemed a bit sub-par. The bigger contestants like Calistoga and Yakima are no longer in it, and most of the rest are just new paint jobs on last year’s model, though I can see why. It all started with disputes over who was in charge, licensing problems, and threats of cancellation. Why would anyone put months of effort into building a sculpture for a race that may not even happen? On that note, I’ve got a message for those involved in the politics: nobody cares who you are, so either get your crap together or hand over the reigns to someone who will.

This year, the politics went too far. When officials barred Tess and Sara Kraus from piloting their tiger (below, made by local high school students) for failing to prove their age, these two responded in true Amazon style by getting up and rousing chanting supporters from the crowd with a speech that would make Xena proud. In the end, parents had to take the place of the devastated teens, and pedal the float past the officials, at which point they switched back, and continued on. They’ve been told they will not be treated as a part of the race, all in the name of some liability tyrant.  Well, I hope someone feels safer now.

There was certainly no lack of enthusiasm though, and turnout was good, considering. I was glad to see the Endeavor entry come in first on day one. NASA needs a victory under their belt after the gutting of our space program. The high ground and the best technology have won nearly every war and industrial race in history, and those of the future will be no exception.

This albino gorilla even seemed to be having some trouble with the law. I moved on after taking this shot, but I expect the gorilla is in Guantanamo by now.

Above is this year’s entry from Duane Flatmo, a man who puts out so much awesome every year that I’m tempted to put him in the site navigation. I’m not that impressed with the conversion this year after seeing his last several entries, but taken on its own merit against the rest of the field, it is still a contender for number one.

And it breathes fire!

This one gets my vote for most questionable engineering. Maybe I was missing something, but these guys were pedaling like mad and going at a slow walking pace. The guy next to them even felt the need to put his foot on the ground to keep his bike from falling over, and it sounded like they were using their pedaling to tumble rocks in their pontoons rather than for propulsion. It looks heavy, but it was apparently blown over by the winds at the dunes.

Gloryopolis, above, is another great entry. You may remember them from last year’s Classical Nudes sculpture. They reused a well engineered base, but did a complete overhaul of the art. This is what it’s all about, and they pulled off the superhero theme better than I’ve seen done before.

There are some interesting regulars in the race that don’t get a lot of notice, like the dog above. I’ve posted pictures of this cycle/dog pair before, and now I’m curious. Has this dog been in the race since it was a pup? I’m going to have to go through my old pictures. The salmon on the right was entirely scaled with compact discs.

There are hundreds of people in single person contraptions and bicycles as well. I don’t know if it is home made or off the shelf, but I want the cycle below. It looked comfortable, efficient, and she could turn it 360° in place.

If you would like to see more coverage from Kinetic Sculpture Races past, check out my coverage from past years at the links below:

2010

2009

Several years ago, Google started a project along these lines, asking the public for their ideas to change the world. They offered big connections and prize money to those ideas they chose as the best. They ended up far behind schedule, and I wasn’t that impressed with their choices in the end, but I like that they tried. My submission is below:

A data path exists for processing credit and debit transactions at stores. Use this system to upload store receipts to online accounts. The customer could then use their account at home (like online banking) to use this information as they see fit, and the aggregated data could be used to varying degrees (allowing for privacy) to better the retail system.

• Like online banking or Amazon recommendations, it could be both secure and useful to all involved.
• Allows people to track their own spending in an interactive fashion while saving manhours.
• Potential for adsense like contextual marketing.
• Could merge with personal finance software, calculate nutritional intake for dieters, alert people with allergies. etc.
• Affects a large portion of the world (everywhere you want to be).
• Employers can keep tabs on company credit card usage.
• Checkboxes to make easy tallying and splitting of bills for roomates.
• Reminders or suggestions for recurring purchases.
• Easy to find one click tech support, manuals for bought products.
• Competing stores could send advertising telling you how much you would have saved shopping with them.
• Quicky target customers with product recalls. This could have prevented many deaths recently in China.
• Could integrate with massive medical databases to find hidden correlations between products and health.
• Manufacturers could target customers with coupons and offers.
• Environmental: Saves paper on receipts, manuals, coupons, advertisements, as well as the other impacts from creation and delivery of such products.
• Google is one of the very few companies with the resources, expertise, and trustworthiness to make this a reality. If you don’t do it, who will?

What problem or issue does your idea address?

• Waste Management
• Deforestation
• Clutter
• Wasted man-hours
• Unnoticed product recalls
• Compulsive spending
• Allergic reactions
• Credit Fraud
• Running out of milk
• Lost product manual/warranty
• Advertising wasted on the uninterested
• Medical research
• Landfills

Involuntary collaboration refers to a project contributed to by multiple parties in which at least one of those parties did not intend to be working with the others. Examples include things like covers of songs, spoofs of movies, and in the case of the pictures above (painted in part by Chris McMahon), unwanted landscape paintings bought at yard sales, which he then painted monsters into. I think they’re brilliant, and would be a perfect DIY project to hang in your kid’s room, or send to your grandmother.

A similar process (seen below from The Monster Engine), has adults upgrading children’s drawings of monsters to add realism. Sometimes the toughest thing for an artist can be just sitting in front of the canvas wondering what to paint, or going through all the trouble of painting a whole landscape when what they really want to paint is a big hairy monster, and it can be hard to throw away original artwork, even if it is boring.

Related Posts:

Involuntary Collaborations

Lunch theft is a serious problem in some offices. You go through all the trouble of shopping, cooking, and then hauling it al the way to work, only to find yourself hungry, angry, and without a plan. Well heres the plan for next week: anti-theft lunch bags, available here.

Alternatively, you could just sprinkle a bit of spirulina powder on the bread. This will make it more healthy and give you the same effect.

If all else fails, this Ghost Pepper Naga Jolokia is one of the hottest hot sauces out there.  Add a very liberal dose to a decoy lunch, and then go out to eat, secure in the knowledge that while you are enjoying your lunch, some thief is getting a preview of their afterlife.

Eco friendly marketing is a rapidly growing field, as it should be. With an ever growing number of consumers taking such things into account when choosing which companies to support, a marketer needs to as well, or see their market share go to their competitor.

Now this method in particular isn’t for everyone, as it has social implications from being a bit radical, but some companies have taken to power washing their logo onto dirty sidewalks. It’s hard to prosecute someone for only cleaning part of the sidewalk, and if anyone wants to remove the branding, they have to finish the job. It’s win-win.

See Also:

Reverse Graffiti

(via DudeCraft)