Ketchup flows out of a bottle with remarkable ease in this demonstration of LiquiGlide, a food safe super non-stick coating by researchers at the MIT Varanasi Research Group.

via Co.Exist

Bill Hammack explains the intricacies of a smartphone accelerometer—the device that determines the orientation of the phone (video).

via Gizmodo

London-based toy and games company MakieLab has rolled out the alpha version of their Makies, customizable web-created 3D-printed action dolls. They are 10″ high dolls that come “complete with poseability, cute clothes, and removeable/changeable eyes & hair.” While not interactive yet, the head of the dolls is designed to fit a Lilypad Arduino (or similar). In this open alpha period, dolls can currently be created and ordered at the Makies website and future versions will be available soon.

Alice Taylor, MakieLab’s CEO, describes Makies and the open alpha release in more detail on her personal blog, Wonderland:

MAKIES is an action doll creator: a player/customer can design their own action doll – features, hair, clothes and everything – & we then 3D print it uniquely to them, build & dress it, and send on to them within 3 weeks of ordering.

There’s more to come, too: the avatar will be able to unlock collectibles for the action doll. In the future, the action doll will be able to do the same for the avatar, using clever bits of electronica \o/.

…For beta, we’ll have cheaper and more expensive versions available, playing with complexity of tailoring and size of print, etc. Tablet apps, too, and lastly, the all-important full battery of toy safety tests (totally confident on that last one – the doll’s already passed a full series, but we still need to do USA and Japan ones too, etc. It just takes time).

via Waxy

Our good friend Andy Baio of Waxy.org, along with Andy McMillan, have just announced XOXO, an arts and technology conference and festival that celebrates disruptive creativity that he is organizing at the Yu Contemporary in Portland, OR this September 13-16. Tickets are available for the conference through the XOXO Kickstarter project.

We want to take all the independent artists using the Internet to make a living doing what they love — the makers, craftspeople, musicians, filmmakers, comic book artists, game designers, hardware hackers — and bring them together with the technologists building the platforms that make it possible. If you have an audience and a good idea, nothing’s standing in your way.

XOXO is in three parts:

Conference (Saturday / Sunday). Talks from artists and creative technologists around the country that are breaking new ground.

Market (Saturday / Sunday). A large marketplace with a tightly-curated list of the best of Portland’s arts and tech scenes, sharing and selling their work, with food supplied by the best of our thriving food cart scene.

Fringe (Thursday / Sunday). A series of unique events around the city, including live music, film screenings, indie videogames, and craft beer and coffee tastings.

Leap is a motion sensitive controller that lets a user interact with a computer using hand and finger gestures (video). The device is about the size of an iPod and is so sensitive it can distinguish individual fingers or detect a pencil in a hand. Leap is available for pre-order and is expected to ship around December 2012. Leap is being developed by Leap Motion in San Francisco.

Leap represents an entirely new way to interact with your computers. It’s more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard and more sensitive than a touchscreen. For the first time, you can control a computer in three dimensions with your natural hand and finger movements.

This isn’t a game system that roughly maps your hand movements. The Leap technology is 200 times more accurate than anything else on the market — at any price point. Just about the size of a flash drive, the Leap can distinguish your individual fingers and track your movements down to a 1/100th of a millimeter

via CNET

gTar is an iPhone-powered electronic guitar that is designed to be played by anyone, regardless of their musical ability. The heart of the instrument is a docked iPhone running the gTar app. The app includes a library of playable songs—LEDs on the fretboard can guide a novice player through each song. The gTar can even mute incorrect notes. The gTar is being developed by California-based Incident Technologies. Incident founder Idan Beck and his team are funding the first production run of gTar via Kickstarter.

via TechCrunch

On May 19 and 20, 2012, Make Magazine and O’Reilly Media present the 7th annual Maker Faire Bay Area at the San Mateo County Event Center in San Mateo, California. Tickets are now on sale and a livestream will be available. There is also a Maker Faire app available to download for free.

A two-day, family-friendly festival of invention, creativity and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the Maker movement.

The Hardware Innovation Workshop presented by MAKE happens on May 15 and 16, 2012 at PARC in Palo Alto, California. Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone of Adafruit Industries will be the featured keynote speakers for this event. A complete list of workshop speakers, agenda and registration is available online.

Other featured keynotes include Massimo Banzi, co-founder of Arduino; Carl Bass, president and CEO of Autodesk; Jay Rogers, founder and CEO of Local Motors; Mark Hatch, co-founder and CEO of TechShop; Ted Hall, co-founder and president of ShopBot; and Brad Feld, co-founder of Foundry Group.

photos by Scott Beale

The Joy of Tech takes a look at How To Improve the Worst Mother’s Day Gifts Ever.

San Francisco-based Nikki Gunn Rodenbeck of Soft Cities creates personalized fleece blankets and cotton “mapkins” napkins from customized OpenStreetMap.org data.

…In collaboration with Stamen Design, OpenStreetMap.org, and Cloudmade (under the creative commons license SA-by-SA), we’re using open source data provided by OSM to design (or modify in the case of Midnight Commander) the style of the map, including all the city infrastructure, land details and icons. So we feature colorful, fun versions created by Stamen’s design hotshot Geraldine Sarmiento. I mean, why shouldn’t rivers in a candy colored world look like rainbows?

via The Awesomer and Gear Patrol

The Volkswagen hover car concept depicted in this Chinese VW commercial was the result of the People’s Car Project, an online initiative by Volkswagen Group China to crowdsource new vehicle concepts and technologies.

via Gizmag & Worldcarfans

The Invention of Laser Technology on Pleated-Jeans. Speaking of which, it was great to meet Jeff Wysaski, the guy behind Pleated-Jeans, at ROFLCon III last weekend. Pleated-Jeans was recently profiled on The Daily Dot.

Blueseed is an ambitious project to build a floating startup incubator and anchor it off the coast of Northern California, near Silicon Valley (Fox Business video). Because the vessel will be in international waters, entrepreneurs will not be subject to the stringent work visa requirements of the United States. Blueseed is projected to launch in late 2013 or early 2014.

via VentureBeat

Touché is a new sensing technology that can provide touch sensitivity to everyday objects, liquids, and even the human body (video). The technology can detect complex hand gestures and body movements. Much like conventional touchscreens, Touché uses a capacitive sensor to detect touch; but Touché takes readings across a wide range of frequencies, allowing it detect much more complicated interactions. Touché is being developed by Disney Research Pittsburgh.

via NewScientist

This retro-futuristic 1983 video announces the Viewtron system, an early telephone-based information service by AT&T and media company Knight Ridder. The system could provide weather reports, news, stock prices, and other info through a video terminal that was connected to a modem. It was expensive, slow, and ultimately canceled in 1986.

On Friday May 18, 2012 from 12 PM to 6 PM, several New York City-based tech companies will open their doors for a free citywide open house called WalkaboutNYC. The folks at Harvest started this event in 2010 as a way for folks to check out workspaces and get inspired by the people behind the New York City technology movement. A list of participating companies has been posted and RSVPs begin on May 1, 2012.

TechCrunch Disrupt NY is a 3-day technology conference in New York City that features a Startup Battlefield Competition. The event takes place May 21-23, 2012 at Pier 94 in Midtown Manhattan. The Disrupt NY Hackathon is also part of this event and happens May 19 and 20, 2012. Tickets are available now.

TechCrunch Disrupt gathers the leaders and innovators of the technology and media industries to give you deep insights into the creative destruction happening right now. The big changes. And the subtle trends.

We’ll bring the experts together to talk about what’s next. And why.

You’ll meet the people behind the new startups, new products and new technologies driving disruption today and be part of a conversation that will stimulate and challenge you.

LeWeb is Europe’s largest tech startup conference and this year’s LeWeb London is themed Faster than Real Time. Speakers for this LeWeb London 2012 include a really great line-up of speakers. The event happens June 19 and 20, 2012 at Central Hall Westminster in London and there is still time to enter the startup competition.

LeWeb London has offered our readers a special discount of £100 off the regular ticket price.

LeWeb poster by Hugh MacLeod

The Magic Cube by Celluon projects an operational full-sized laser keyboard with motion detection and it’s compatible with a variety of devices. According to Celluon, this smart little gadget also works as a multi-touch mouse and a handwriting recognition device.

The Celluon Virtual Keyboard uses a light projection of a full-sized QWERTY computer keyboard on almost any surface. Used with MAC Laptop, PDA’s and Smart Phones, the Virtual Keyboard provides a practical way to send e-mails, word documents processing and spreadsheet tasks, enabling users to leave laptops and computers at home. VKB’s adaptable technology studies the user’s finger movements to interpret and record keystrokes.

via Harvest and Jennifer Baum

IndieWire has gathered the entire series of online posters for Wes Anderson’s new film, Moonrise Kingdom. In a cool use of technology, these one sheets are interactive and character driven. The film opens in theatres on May 25, 2012.

via Vulture

Things Don’t Seem Wonderful If You’ve Seen Them All Your Life was illustrated in 1912 by political cartoonist John T. McCutcheon and it’s as every bit true today as it was back then.

via Dan Shick and 100 Years Ago Today

The Poodle USB Hub is a smartly designed device that uses its four “legs” as four 2.0 hi-speed USB ports and its eye as the indication light. It is available to purchase at Fred Flare.

via Technabob and Geek Alerts

Choc Creator, the world’s first 3D chocolate printer was developed by a team of researchers at the University of Exeter and is now available to purchase. The printer has been listed on eBay by the company behind it, Choc Edge.

3D chocolate printers can directly produce 3D chocolate objects without using expensive molding tools. It can also deposit complex and artistic 2D patterns onto other foods or substrates siilar to a chocolate chef pipes chocolate onto cakes, dishes, deserts, etc. The 3D chocolate printer can be broadly used to make creative, artistic, personalized and decorative chocolate products and gifts.

via Viral Viral Videos

Studio Roosegaarde along with Anouk Wipprecht have designed Intimacy 2.0, a line of futuristic high-tech fashion garments made with leather and opaque smart e-foils which become “increasingly transparent based on close and personal encounters with people.” Their video shows how the garments transform from opaque to transparent.

Social interactions determine the garments level of transparency, creating a sensual play of disclosure.

INTIMACY 2.0 features Studio Roosegaarde’s new, wearable dresses composed of leather and smart e-foils which are daringly perfect to wear on the red carpet. In response to the heartbeat of each person, INTIMACY 2.0 becomes more or less transparent.

via Animal

Google has announced Project Glass, a technology-in-development that will allow users to wear Android-based display glasses to stream information right in front of their eyes. They are asking the community for input and have released photos and a video. In February 2012, The New York Times Bits blog wrote an in-depth story about this augmented reality project and reported that “the glasses will send data to the cloud and then use things like Google Latitude to share location, Google Goggles to search images and figure out what is being looked at, and Google Maps to show other things nearby.”

A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment. We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do.

Nonstartr is a handy startup pitch generator by Andrew Cedotal and Alexandra Leo.