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Transmitting Information Via the Sense of Touch: NHK Researchers Create a New Hope For the Visually Impaired

8 hours ago by Andrew Miller
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NHK, Japan’s public service broadcasting corporation, has created a technology which offers hope to the visually impaired by making use of the sense of touch in relaying information to the brain. The technology promises to be able to recreate the sense of touching an object with your fingers or hands despite the object not actually existing in the real world. It is a technology that could endow the visually impaired with a much higher degree of sensual richness.

yesterday by Preston Phro
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It wouldn’t be going too far to say that Photoshop is the best friend of many creators. As such, it’s understandable that there’s a lot of interest in the most recent announcement from Adobe, the software’s creator. The company announced on May 7 that they would be changing all of their products to cloud services with monthly fees.

As such, the company has set up a public blog for Japan, where they answer questions submitted by users concerned about how the changes will affect them. And that’s how the trouble began! After the same question was submitted over and over and OVER, the following exchange appeared on the site, brimming with unrestrained frustration. Read More

In the Future Your Own Hand Will be Your Smartphone (With the Help of 5,000 Pounds of Terrifying Machinery)

2 days ago by Mike
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Minority Report it is not, but Masatoshi Ishikawa – namesake of Tokyo University’s renowned Ishikawa Lab – brought us one step closer to the future when he recently invited Japanese press to witness the lab’s newest creation: a projection system that can track and display an image on a moving object.

May 9, 2013 by Michelle
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Let’s face it, lamps are boring. There is the occasional exception, like those hip swinging hula girl lamps you can buy in Hawaii or the pantyhose-clad leg lamp from A Christmas Story, but most lighting fixtures aren’t going to start any conversations.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow us to present you with a lamp to join the ranks of exceptional lighting sources. Created by YOY, a team of two Japanese designers, this light will make it look as if the wall has been peeled back to reveal a portal to another dimension.

May 7, 2013 by John Stuart Translations
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A team from Kitakyushu National College of Technology (Kitakyushu City, Fukuoka) and CrazyLabo (Koga City, Fukuoka) has developed two robots capable of detecting degrees of offensiveness in foot odor and breath.

Blow into the face of lovely Kaori, a female mannequin-headed robot, for a quick reading on whether or not you are ready to interact with others. After a brief analysis, Kaori will assign one of four ratings to the (un)pleasantness of your breath…
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Tokyo Robot Can Think, Learn, and Apply Knowledge: Nothing to Fear Here!

May 7, 2013 by Preston Phro
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It seems every time a news story about robots appears, someone inevitably freaks out, screaming about Skynet or the Matrix. Well, this time, they might be right!

While it lacks the dexterity and sweetness of other robots, this one can not only assess and comprehend its surroundings but also learn through the Internet! (Oh, please keep it away from Wikipedia. It’ll conquer the world in a month.) Read More

For Butter Lovers: Easy, Greasy Japanese!

May 3, 2013 by Rona Moon
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Toast in Japan is taken seriously. If you order the “breakfast set” at a restaurant in Japan, you will probably be confronted with one of the thickest slices of toasted bread you’ve ever seen. If you manage to peer over it, you might spot a boiled egg and a small, sad amount of salad cowering there.

At the supermarket, some popular toast spreads which come in a squeezy tube are chocolate, cinnamon, melon and “french toast” flavour, but for many people, toast means butter, and the more butter, the better. For butter-lovers, the new Easy Butter Butter-Former will transform hard butter straight from the fridge into soft and cotton-like butter threads, ready and easy to be used. Sound too greasy to be true? It probably is.

May 2, 2013 by Andrew Miller
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It as been reported that engineers at Japan’s fast breeder reactor plant Monju made a mistake during testing of the plant’s emergency power generator, which subsequently resulted in the release of black smoke and the ringing of the plant’s fire alarm.

May 2, 2013 by Michelle
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Crank up the Black Sabbath to 11 and bust out your iPhone, this one’s for all you Iron Man fans out there.

Apr 30, 2013 by Philip Kendall
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As much as we might bemoan their very existence when they interrupt our favourite TV shows or appear ad nauseam prior to YouTube clips, when done well ads can be genuinely entertaining. With each shot written, debated, edited and otherwise laboured over sometimes for hundreds of hours, successful ads become pop culture in their own right and are often of higher quality than the shows whose commercial crevices they are stuffed into.

An ad recently aired in the UK, however, become a talking point for all the wrong reasons when it depicted a man trying to kill himself by breathing in the exhaust fumes produced by what transpires to be a particularly environmentally friendly type of vehicle: Hyundai’s iX35.

Apr 26, 2013 by Master Blaster
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RocketNews24 writer GO is an avid Apple fan and user of all things whose names possess a lower case “i” or the word “Mac”. As such, whenever he’s travelling it’s comforting for him to find an Apple store nearby. He can feel relieved that there’s a place to go if one of his gadgets gets out of sorts, and it’s fun to see if there are any differences in other countries.

So after checking out the f@cebook clothing store and Ronald McDonald Duck, he was pleased to see something resembling Apple’s unmistakable logo. GO rushed in, not knowing what lay in store.

Apr 25, 2013 by Philip Kendall
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Instruction manuals: the last bastions of hope when your new toy doesn’t seem to be working properly. For those of us who grew up around gadgets like iPods, PCs, games consoles and TVs, the instruction books that come with our latest purchases are rarely even glanced at, often doomed to spend the rest of their days in the back of a dusty cupboard or quickly stuffed into a recycle bin. If all instruction manuals were as cute as Toshiba’s latest offering, though, perhaps a few more of us would be inclined to break them open every once in a while.

Bundled alongside Toshiba’s dynabook series of notebook computers, this illustrated instruction manual features cute and cuddly anthropomorphic seal character Para-chan and school uniform-wearing Mana-chan, who guide us through everything from set-up to getting the most out of our machine.

Reading attentively and following the steps like we’re supposed to just got that little bit more otaku.

Apr 25, 2013 by Philip Kendall
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Poor old Luigi just can’t catch a break. Often only taken out of the box when a second player joins the game, forced to stand idly by as his brother Mario gets to smooch the princess, and reduced to the role of comical, vacuum-wielding scaredy cat in his haunted house adventure games…

Even in this, “The Year of Luigi”, wherein creators Nintendo put the man in green under the limelight, it seems that Luigi’s red-capped brother has managed to get his famous face onto what is supposed to be a special edition Nintendo 3DS celebrating all things Luigi.

Apr 24, 2013 by Philip Kendall
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Opened almost two decades after it was originally imagined by real estate tycoon Minori Mori, Roppongi Hills — a self-contained mega-complex in the middle of Tokyo complete with office buildings, shopping malls, parks and trendy apartments — has become home to thousands of well-to-do businesspeople and Tokyoites, as well as a metropolitan mecca for those craving designer labels and fine dining.

In honour of Roppongi Hills’ 10-year anniversary, a number of celebrations are being held both online and off. The most creative and eye-catching by far, though, has to be the Tokyo City Symphony, an interactive online synthesizer produced as part of the Love Tokyo project. Combining music, 3-D projection mapping and a 1:1000 scale model of Tokyo with Roppongi Hills’ iconic 54-storey Mori Tower at its centre, visitors to the site are invited to project psychadelic patterns and colours onto the tiny, intricately-detailed model city in order to create original “symphony” music. The effect is nothing short of hypnotic. Read More

Someone Get the Defibrillator! Xbox 360′s Software Sales Figures in Japan Shockingly Low

Apr 19, 2013 by Philip Kendall
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The Xbox 360′s successor may well be just around the corner, but Microsoft has a serious problem on its hands in Japan. According to sales figures published by Japan’s Dengeki Online, even last week’s top-selling Xbox 360 game, Gears of War: Judgement, only managed to sell a paltry 347 copies in total. In a country where sales for Nintendo’s handheld 3DS reached almost 60,000 units in the exact same period, it’s clear that Microsoft’s console is struggling to keep its head above water.

Apr 17, 2013 by Philip Kendall
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Players of the Call of Duty series are no strangers to downloadable content in the form of additional maps on which to shoot, stab and detonate. Ever since downloadable map packs were released for Call of Duty 3 back in 2007, console gamers have been treated to (or blighted by, depending on your stance on DLC) regular releases of additional content to purchase or risk being the one guy in their group of friends who can’t play on the same maps as everyone else.

This time around, developers Treyarch are dropping virtual soldiers and screaming headset-wearing pubescents on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands. As well as being situated in the shadow of an erupting volcano, the town featured in the map is absolutely covered with cute cultural references and written Japanese which, we’re happy to say, is not riddled with mistakes.

Apr 17, 2013 by Philip Kendall
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“Seen this way, Tokyo really is beautiful.”– A comment from the Japanese Niconico Video user who originally posted photographer Samuel Cockedey’s video “Inter States” to the social video site.

The time-lapse video shows splashes of neon interspersed with orange street lamps, streaking red taillights and rushes of black figures, painting detail onto the concrete canvas that is Japan’s capital city. Hives of energy and movement, it sometimes takes an outsider’s perspective to recognise that even a sprawling metropolises like Tokyo can be quite breathtaking when we stop to notice them. The full video after the jump.

Apr 16, 2013 by Philip Kendall
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And here we were feeling smug about our regular fibre optic Internet connection…

Sony Corporation announced yesterday that its own Internet service provider So-net Entertainment has launched what is thought to be the world’s fastest Internet connection for home use, with download speeds clocking in at a massive 2 Gbps, on average twice as fast as competing high-speed fibre connections in Japan.

Apr 11, 2013 by Philip Kendall
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It’s been a long time coming, but Nintendo may have finally cottoned on to the idea that gamers do not enjoy relying on AA batteries to use their wireless controllers. According to reports circulating the Internet this morning, the Kyoto-based company has carried out an online survey asking users whether they’d be interested in purchasing officially branded rechargeable battery packs for their Wii controllers.

Apr 10, 2013 by Philip Kendall
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Japanese video game giant Nintendo has announced that it will be accepting applications from university students between May and June to attend a special seminar beginning this summer; the first of its kind in three years.