The Elsewhere frames.Elsewhere
The Elsewhere headset looks like something an old-timey doctor might wear. A precursor to bifocals, maybe, or an early surgical microscope. The $50 pair of adjustable lenses clamp to your iPhone. Your lens purchase also unlocks the Elsewhere iOS app. Load up the app, clamp your phone to the goggle thingies, and press the lenses to your face. Voila! 3-D video on your phone!
Wendellen Li and Aza Raskin, a former Mozilla and Songza exec, call it “a breakthrough in perception” that can “turn anything into VR.” VR is a big buzzword right now, so forgive them. Elsewhere is more like 3-D, and it really does work with anything. It re-formats photos and videos on your camera roll to appear three dimensional. Raskin calls the underlying tech “technomancy,” but you also can call it a modern stereoscope. He also mentions steganography, which is a way of concealing one image or file inside another, and claims he can use motion and other data within a video to grab far more information from it than your camera app does.
Whatever Elsewhere does, the effect is pretty cool. I sat in the lobby of a fancy San Francisco hotel looking around slack-jawed. You can adjust the contrast of the image with a swipe of your finger, which makes the field of depth more or less pronounced. You can zoom, which can make you feel either like you’re surrounded by a video (that’s when it feels most like VR) or that you’re Eleven in Stranger Things, standing in the dark nothingness of the Upside Down, looking at something miles away. At one point Li showed us a YouTube video, on a MacBook, which we watched through our iPhone cameras, and viewed through the Elsewhere headset. The depth effect still worked.
Elsewhere’s not trying to be VR the way Google or Oculus want to be VR. Li and Raskin call the headset a “project,” not a startup, and tell a long story about wanting to create a different way of seeing the world. For $50, it takes all the content you already have, and makes it feel richer and deeper. In that sense, it’s almost like a View-Master for the iPhone age. It’s fun, and that’s all it’s meant to be.
The many colors of the new Amazon Fire HD 8.Amazon
Here’s a simple tablet buying guide. If you can afford it, buy an iPad. If you can’t or don’t want to drop that kind of coin, buy an Amazon Fire HD. It doesn’t have the cool computer-like features the iPad does, nor does it support a stylus, but if you’re looking for a way to watch movies and play games you can’t beat the Fire tablets. Nor can you beat the price tag. For instance: the new Fire HD 8, a super-durable slate with an 8-inch screen and the latest version of Amazon’s Fire OS, costs a grand total of $90. It’s less expensive than Apple’s Pencil stylus, never mind the tablet it writes on.
The HD 8’s best feature will be Alexa, which Amazon says is going to be integrated “in the coming months.” (More buying advice: wait until then to get one, because “in the coming months” can mean literally anything.) Once the voice assistant arrives, you’ll be able to long-press the Fire’s home button and get access to everything you’d find on an Echo or Tap. Control your music, add stuff to your shopping list, make the robot read to you, do whatever else you and Alexa do together. If you’ve been looking for a cheap living room tablet to use as a controller for your smart home, this is the one.
Otherwise, the Fire HD 8 is just another middling tablet. It comes in four colors, and Amazon’s selling protective cases in the same colors. Its specs are…fine. 1280 x 800 display: fine, not great. Quad-core processor: probably enough for what you’re up to. 12 hour battery: great! The camera won’t change your life, and neither will Amazon’s still-weird take on Android. But if you’re a reader, or a viewer, and especially if you’re a Prime member, every Fire tablet is a treasure trove of stuff to check out.
Alexa’s coming to Amazon’s other tablets, too, so if you’re really hoping to save some coin you can pick up a $50 Fire. If you’ve been wanting to see what Alexa’s all about, that’s the cheapest way ever to do so. But the Fire HD 8 is a much better device, for not that much more money. And don’t forget: you can buy five of them for the price of the iPad Mini. And they both play Netflix pretty well.
Bragi
If Tim Cook doesn’t get on stage and announce a new iPhone that is decidedly, one hundred percent, bet-yer-bottom-dollar devoid of a headphone jack, a lot of companies are going to look pretty silly. Everyone’s been thirstily announcing their own wireless earbuds over the last few weeks, from Samsung to Bose to Jabra, and now Bragi’s gone and made its announcement in Cupertino. On Labor Day. Bragi’s new in-ear headphones, bizarrely called The Headphone, are in theory a perfect companion to your new supposedly wireless smartphone.
The Headphone headphones (I mean, this name, come on) are a simplified version of the Bragi Dash. The Dash is full of wild ambition about being a computer in your ears and terminology like “smart hearable,” but The Headphone is just…headphones. Two totally wireless buds, one with three small buttons for controlling playback. You can use them for music, phone calls, Siri, and everything else you’d do with headphones not called Headphone. They connect to your phone via Bluetooth, and Bragi says they’ll last for six hours before needing to go back in the charging case.
A few of Bragi’s more futuristic ideas made their way into The Headphone, like “audio transparency,” which lets you allow some ambient sound in even while you wear the headphones. In general, though, it’s a much simpler device, at a much more stomachable price: $119 for pre-orders, and $149 once it’s on sale. That’s less than half the price of the Dash.
The Dash still feels a little futuristic, which is in part a kind way of saying all the best things about it don’t work very well so far. But the biggest problem we had in testing those buds was that they just didn’t stay connected very well, which turns out to be a big downside for wireless headphones. Much of Bragi’s software work has focused on connectivity over the last few months, and the company swears it’s better now. If that’s actually true, and if Apple killing the headphone jack causes enough pain for enough users, Bragi’s rush to announce something might have been a smart move. Assuming, of course, it can stand out among the Bluetooth headphone tidal wave cresting over Best Buys everywhere.
DxO
Point-and-shoot cameras are dead. Those Android-powered Nikons? Kaput. GoPros, well, depends how much you wakeboard. For most people, in most situations, smartphones are the beginning and end of a photography toolkit. And for those who want better pictures than an iPhone can muster on its own, accessories like the DxO One balance quality and convenience, augmenting a smartphone’s camera without getting too much in the way. Today, the DxO One gets even more useful—in even more places.
No company has enhanced the iPhone’s camera better than DxO, longtime maker of high-end photo software, and more recent camera manufacturer. The DxO One is a $500 palm-sized camera with a one-inch, 20-megapixel sensor as good as any point-and-shoot. It’s also an accessory that plugs into an iPhone’s Lightning port, uses your phone as a viewfinder, and dumps its gorgeous shots right into your Photos app for you to filter at will. Now, the company’s announcing a huge software update to the One that gives it wireless capabilities, and a line of accessories thats let you take the One places you’d never dare to bring your phone.
Every DxO One the company has shipped so far had a wireless chip inside it—it just wasn’t activated. Now it’s being turned on. With version 2.0 of the camera’s software, you can pair the camera to your phone via Wi-Fi just by plugging it in, skipping all the stupid direct-connection configuration (unless you’re in the woods and there’s no other network, in which case configuration it is). You can use your phone as a remote viewfinder for perfectly framed selfies, or mount the camera for long exposures away from your phone’s bright lights and moving parts. You can control a few settings on the camera itself, like switching from video to photo, but most fiddling still happens in the app. The real difference is just in the places you can fit the camera now—anywhere a deck of cards could go, the One can.
DxO would really like you to think of the One as kind of a GoPro for still shots. Sure, the GoPro shoots stills, but its super-wide fisheye lens doesn’t quite do its subjects justice. Using the One’s new Outdoor Shell, which comes in two models and starts at $50—a splash-proof one for taking on the boat, the other basically meant for deep-sea diving—you’ll be able to take more normal-looking photos and videos anywhere you can think of. There’s even a mount on the shell that will attach the One to most places you’d stick a GoPro.
There are a few other new accessories in the DxO lineup, like a simple stand, and a pouch that’s meant to attach to your belt just like you holstered a pager 20 years ago. But it’s the combination of wireless shooting and ruggedized housing that’s most exciting. It makes the DxO One a partner for your phone, rather than a parasite. Your phone can stay on shore while you stomp around in the water, or in your pocket while you carve down the mountain. DxO is already thinking about and working on integration with live-streaming video apps, too, which would be even cooler.
It’s the best of a point-and-shoot, a GoPro, and an iPhone, in a single package. And all the biggest upgrade costs is the time it takes to wait out a software update.
Huawei
A giant conglomerate released a new phone this week. It has outrageous specs, nice design, some funky new camera tech, and a bunch of bizarre ideas about software. So far, there are two companies that fit the description—Samsung and Huawei. Here’s where the narratives differ: The one we’re talking about only costs $400. And you’ve probably never for one second considered Huawei in your phone-buying decisions. Silly you.
Huawei’s new device, the Honor 8 (there have been many other Honors before), is every bit the spec monster smartphone. Glassy, colorful design; 12-megapixel camera, plus a second sensor just for good measure; ultra-fast processor and four gigs of RAM; fingerprint sensor that doubles as a clickable shortcut key; latest version of Android; lots of storage, with room to add more. In most practical ways, it’s not that far off from Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 7, or other Android phones like the new Moto Z. The only thing the Honor 8 is missing is the absurdly high (and VR-friendly) screen resolution, but you know what else it’s missing? $400 on the price tag.
Globally, Huawei’s the third-biggest smartphone seller. Only Apple and Samsung sell more phones. But the company’s hardly made a dent in the US, because most people still flock to carrier stores every two years to wait in line and sign stacks of paperwork just to pay way too much for a new phone. The Honor 8 won’t be in a Verizon store, and it won’t come on a contract. It’s just $400 (or $450 with more storage), click buy, end of transaction. That’s how it’s so cheap, by the way—turns out if you don’t have to pay AT&T to carry and market your phone, or pay rent on retail stores, you can sell your phone for a lot less. Of course, there are definitely things you get for your extra money, like Samsung’s extra design flourish and superior camera. But the gap is vanishing.
The $400 smartphone has become a truly exceptional beast. The Honor 8’s just the latest entrant into a group that already includes the OnePlus 3, the Nextbit Robin, the Xiaomi Mi 5, the ZTE Axon 7, the iPhone SE, the Alcatel Idol 4S (which looks a lot like the Honor 8), and more. You’ve probably never heard of most of them, which is the problem—they don’t have the marketing budget, because they’re not overcharging you for their phones. Truth is, you can get a great phone for much less, all the way down to $200 or so, but right now the price for a truly great smartphone is $400. Anything above that, you’re paying for retail stores and Lil’ Wayne commercials. So maybe next time you’re shopping for a phone, don’t just roll down to your carrier store. Just use your current phone to go online and buy your next one.
Soylent
As soon as you wake up you’re already late. You snoozed again, three times this time, and now your meeting starts in exactly the time it’ll take you to put on shoes, leap in the car, and put the pedal to the floor all the way to the office. So you don’t eat breakfast. Or worse, you scarf down a donut that you’ll feel in your gut and wear on your shirt for the rest of the day. But maybe tomorrow, Soylent hopes, you’ll grab a Coffiest instead.
Coffiest is Soylent’s newest creation, the latest in its line of meal-in-a-bottle products. Like regular Soylent, it’s meant to give you a broad nutritional base, basically taking all those parts of the “complete breakfast” you’d see in a 1990s cereal commercial and cramming them into Soylent’s standard 400 kcal bottle.
A bottle of Coffiest also has 150mg of caffeine, which isn’t actually all that much—more than in a small cup of diner coffee but less than half what you’ll get from a Grande Pike at Starbucks. And just for good measure, Coffiest also includes 75mg of L-Theanine, a supposedly more even-keeled energy supplement that some people swear by even though the scientific evidence isn’t necessarily overwhelming. All together, it’s a 400-calorie meal for about $3.10 a bottle. We haven’t tried it ourselves, but given what we know about Soylent and coffee, Coffiest probably tastes like caffeinated Cheerios. And, let’s be honest here, you’re gonna fart a lot the first few times you try it.
The idea for Coffiest has been brewing (sorry) at Soylent for a while. There’s a big community of Soylent users sharing recipes and ideas on Reddit and elsewhere, and one of the most popular ideas was adding espresso shots, coffee powder, or coffee extract into Soylent 2.0 to give it an extra kick. Even people at Soylent were doing it. So with a little caffeine and a little cocoa powder, it became a new thing.
The company also announced the Soylent Bar, a 250-calorie protein bar for on-the-go snacking. The bar’s not available yet, but it’s coming soon. Together, they might create a subtle but important shift in how people think about Soylent. When it first came out, Soylent was received like a fad diet—eager testers flooded the internet with stories about What Happened When I Only Drank Soylent for a Month and debated Soylent-based weight-loss tips. Lots of people freaked out about the flavorless future, the cultural beauty we’re losing in the name of expedience, and why some of us seem to hate eating. Someone even had a Soylent dinner party, which just sounds awful. That’s not how you Soylent.
It’s like it says on the label: While not intended to replace every meal, Soylent can replace any meal. WIRED’s own Joe Brown, at whose desk you’ll always find a Soylent box or twelve, says that “I don’t drink Soylent in place of delicious food, I drink it in place of bad food—because it’s better than take-out.” Or, in the case of Coffiest, it’s better than a Boston cream. It’s a quick, healthy alternative to a drive-thru when you don’t have time for anything else.
Pocket Casts 6.0 for iPhone.Shifty Jelly
It’s time to stop using Apple’s Podcasts app. Yeah, it’s nice that it comes pre-loaded on your iPhone—but so does Apple Maps, and if you use that you’ll probably end up driving into a river. If you’re exploring the weird, wide, wonderful world of Internet audio, you need something better.
There are lots of better somethings, no matter what platform you use. But a brand-new update to Pocket Casts makes it hands-down the best iPhone podcasts app, not to mention the best overall service for people who want to podcast from all manner of different devices. The new version for iOS, Pocket Casts 6.0, brings the app—which was great for a long time, and has kind of languished the last couple of years—into full-fledged modernity. It’s now really easy to find new podcasts to listen to, sort through the ones you already have, and more. Pocket Casts keeps lists of episodes you’ve already started, ones you’ve downloaded but not listened to (which is handy for clearing space on your phone), and more.
Version 6.0 borrows a few great features from other podcast apps, like automatic silence-trimming and voice-boosting. It has all the fiddly bits podcastheads will love, like chapter markers, show notes, a running queue for uninterrupted listening, and support for 3D Touch. For everyone else, it’s just a super-simple grid of show icons. There are still a couple of small things missing, like Overcast’s awesome ability to download a single episode without subscribing to an entire show, but Pocket Casts has just about everything you could want.
The app costs $6 in the App Store, but it’s worth every penny. It looks great on iPhone and iPad, it’s really fast, and the company behind it swears the next update won’t take so long. You can sync and listen to your podcasts on Android and the web, too, and even Windows Phone in case you work for Microsoft. It’s time you took off the iTunes training wheels and found out what a real podcasting app looks like. Oh, and pro tip: turn on the dark theme. It’s great.
Doppler
Doppler Labs, the company behind the straight-outta-science-fiction earbuds that let you control the volume of the world, has a new product out today. It’s called Here One, and you guessed it, it’s another set of wireless earbuds. But these aren’t just for tweaking the sound mix at a concert, or tuning out subway noise. Here One is all that, plus everything you’d expect from a standard set of wireless headphones, and then even more stuff on top of that.
The Here One buds will cost $299 when they ship in November. This company’s never been short on ambition or confidence: Doppler calls them “the last thing you’ll ever put in your ears.” (Sorry, Q-tips.) The Here Ones are, at the simplest level, a set of wireless headphones. They can stream music, take calls, interact with Siri and Google Now, and the like. Normally I wouldn’t spell these things out for a pair of headphones, but Doppler’s previous Here buds couldn’t do those things. What they could do, and what the Here One buds supposedly do even better, is let you filter and change the noise of the real world. Using the companion app, you can change frequency response, tune out things like baby screams and train screeches, or turn up the volume of the people in front of you. There are multiple directional mics inside the Here One buds, so the sound editing becomes even more powerful.
Doppler
Doppler really loves the idea that its products work for absolutely everyone, no matter their situation. “We are not a medical device,” says Doppler CEO Noah Kraft. “But we do think that there is this crazy false binary, that people either can hear or can’t hear.” When you first set up your Here Ones, you’ll go through a customization process, so the software can learn the particulars of your ears and hearing and thus attenuate sound specifically for you.
Once you’re up and running, you’ll also be able to mix real-world sound with whatever you’re listening to, in what Doppler calls “layered listening.” Instead of jamming headphones into your ears to drown out the world, you can have it sound as though your music’s playing from a speaker a few feet away. You can hear Chance The Rapper and whoever you’re talking to, or listen to Radiolab on your bike and still hear the cars flying by.
Doppler’s only one of a number of companies working on truly wireless headphones. If the last buds are any indication, the Here Ones will be among the most comfortable and usable of the lot. But don’t ask Doppler to be proud of that. “The interesting engineering is not the wireless headphones,” says executive chairman Fritz Lanman. “That’s the table-stakes stuff.” He’s right: soon enough, everyone from Apple to Samsung to Microsoft is going to try and sell you wireless earbuds. Doppler’s trying to go way beyond that, to change the way users hear altogether. To put a computer in their ears, and see what happens next.
WIRED
If you bought a Sony or Sharp TV from the past couple of years and you have an iPhone, you’ve got yourself a new way to navigate your smartwares. At long last, Google’s Android TV Remote app is now available in the iOS App Store. It replicates the functionality of the same app for Android, which has been available for years.
The remote-control app for Android TV devices isn’t all that full-featured—it’s essentially just an app version of the plastic remote included with the Google Nexus Player. Regardless, it’s a handy backup clicker or a back-from-the-dead use case for an old iPod Touch. You’ve got your D-pad for navigating menus. Got that home button right there, too. Back button? Check. Even has an icon on there for a-playin’ and a-pausin’, and you can turn the whole screen into a touchpad like some kind of weirdo.
But the most useful function of the app is its double-duty microphone/keyboard feature. You can use your phone as a mouthpiece for Android TV’s excellent voice search (hopefully Siri won’t get jealous). The app one-ups the Nexus remote by letting you input text with your phone’s touchscreen keyboard. Plus, it communicates to your TV or set-top device over Wi-Fi, so you don’t need a line-of-sight connection. And yo, it’s free.
Franz
Way back in the Mesozoic Era of the Internet, which was approximately 2009, maintaining your status as an Internet Socialite required a deft understanding of a multi-faceted messaging ecosystem. You obviously had to be logged into AIM, with just the right away message that told your real friends you were still nearby (and you better not skimp on your buddy profile). But you couldn’t ignore your MySpace IM or Yahoo Messenger, just in case your maybe-real Internet crushes wanted to chat. And you gotta keep up your nerd cred on IRC. Being popular was hard work!
Now, though, technology has become more sophisticated and user-friendly. And as messaging has become a key component of how we do almost everything online, our interaction with chat is easy and understandable part of our everyday lives. Wait, no, that’s wrong. It’s the exact opposite. Messaging is more important, more powerful, and more versatile, and yet wrangling all of our constant conversations together is like herding cats. Except there are a thousand cats, and they’re all rabid and loud and running in every direction as fast as they possibly can while meowing horribly offensive things about all the other cats and giving you really important work deadlines. It’s not a pretty picture.
Years ago, apps like Adium, Meebo, and Trillian quickly became a crucial part of every Internet Socialite’s arsenal. All your accounts in one place, neatly organized, so you could remember who’s who and what’s where at all times. There’s nothing like that now, and there really couldn’t be; messaging apps are more than just text-sending protocols, they’re entire platforms. Every platform is different, and there’s no way to neatly combine them.
The best we can hope for is to at least bring all those disparate things into one place, which is exactly what Franz does. Franz is a new-ish free app for Mac, Windows, and Linux, that combines more than a dozen different messaging services into a single window. When you open Franz, you can instantly be logged into Slack, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Skype, Hangouts, and more. The app itself is just a container—you’re basically opening web views of all the apps, tabbed in a single lovely window. By combining them into one place, though, you get a single set of notifications for all your services. A little red “1” will show up next to anything with an unread message, so you know at a glance what’s waiting for you. And best of all, you’re not stuck switching between a dozen browser tabs or a folder full of apps. Even though you don’t, it feels like you have just one messaging app. It’s just Franz.
Franz isn’t a perfect, universal messaging solution. It’s not Adium 2.0. But it’s the closest thing we’re probably ever going to get. As the messaging ecosystem metastasizes and becomes the universal interface for how we do everything, easy access to our many tools is much more realistic than trying to build a single Megazord Messenger that encompasses them all. And besides, this might be better anyway. You get Slack the way it’s meant to be used, and with a single key command you’re jumping into Facebook’s most complete vision of Messenger. Until we get that universal messaging app that would make life so much easier, this is definitely the next best thing.
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6
This week at the NAB Show, the annual trade show for people who make video content, virtual reality is going to be everywhere. Condition One, a startup-slash-studio that was earlier to VR filmmaking than most, is making one of the show’s early announcements: a new VR camera called the Bison. This 360 rig is made for the kind of run-and-gun documentary shooting the company’s known for. Or at least the closest you can get to that given the current state of VR tech. It won’t be for sale, but it will be part of the company’s toolkit as it continues to make VR movies—so if you want footage from the camera, you have to hire Condition One to shoot it.
Here’s the rundown on the camera itself: The Bison is named for the first thing Condition One founder Danfung Dennis shot with the initial prototype. It’s comprised of 16 cameras, and all together they’re capable of shooting full 360-degree video with full 3D audio. It’ll produce 5.7K resolution video, at up to 48 frames per second, for up to two hours on one battery charge. It’s made of a rugged aluminum, and has an intense cooling system to keep it running even in the hot sun. Even the tripod is made of carbon fiber, so you can’t destroy this thing if you try. The camera’s minimum focusing distance is two feet, which makes Dennis particularly proud. “We’ve been really focused on creating presence in the near field,” he says. “To have subjects within your arm’s reach, to have close subjects to you… You really feel presence.”
Danfung Dennis.Condition One
The Bison falls somewhere in the middle of the VR camera field, such as it exists right now. There are solutions like HypeVR, which amounts to an impossibly expensive and cumbersome set of super-high-end RED cameras rigged together for VR. Google has Jump, GoPro has Odyssey, Facebook has Surround 360. (Bison, by the way, is probably closer to Surround 360 than any other single product.) They’re all big, expensive, and mostly made of a bunch of individual cameras stitched together. On the other side are the super-simple 360 cameras, like the Ricoh Theta. Those aren’t pro cameras by any stretch. Condition One seems to intend the Bison to be sort of the DSLR for VR; it’s more compact and easier to use, but absolutely capable of making something Oscar-worthy.
Part of Condition One’s journey has involved learning what works, and what doesn’t, in virtual reality filmmaking. Before getting into VR, Dennis was a longtime war photographer, so he tends to like to run and gun. But moving around is not exactly a delightful viewing experience in VR—it’s more likely to make you sick. So even if it were possible (and it really isn’t), it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to try and make a shoulder-mounted or hand-held VR camera. But the Bison’s close, at only 12.5 pounds. More important, it’s rugged enough to go the places you’ll want to put it; Dennis has watched as bison, jaguars, and (in a less-frightening shoot) monarch butterflies inspected the camera while he watched from afar. The remote trigger works from a half-mile away, too, so you can keep yourself out of your spherical shot and still get the footage you need.
As they worked, Dennis says, they found that the hardest part wasn’t the shooting—it was the stitching. Taking a bunch of cameras, and putting all their images together in a way that looks right, is hard and intensive work. The best solutions will make everything seamless, literally and figuratively, and making their own hardware made it easier to build the necessary software too. Now they’re trying to figure out what kinds of VR movies people want to watch. And where to put them so people can see them. And how to make money. Right now, in VR, if you solve one problem all you get is a hundred new ones to figure out.
Google
More than just about anything you own, your smartphone represents you. Your photos, your communications, your work, your leisure activities, your nudes, everything’s in this one rectangular piece of metal and glass. You smartphone, therefore you are.
As our phones come to contain our personalities, a good case becomes all the more important. Not only does it keep your phone from shattering on the sidewalk and taking all your memories and plans with it, it turns your phone into something that looks and feels more unique. More personal. More you.
Google’s taking the idea even further, introducing a new Live Case Creator tool that lets you turn a point on a map or a photo into a phone case you can slap on the back of your Nexus 6, 6P, or 5X. You go to the creator website, and upload a photo or use the Google Maps interface to select a location. Then, position it on the case however you want, select among Google’s many filters, which add color or transmogrify your photo into an abstract art piece. Confirm it, buy it, and Google prints and ships you a case of your very own.
Maybe coolest of all, these Live Cases skin the wallpaper of your phone to match your new case. If you go with the map, you can turn your wallpaper into a similarly colored, moving map of where you are right now. If you choose a picture, you can make an album of other shots for your phone to style and switch between automatically. There’s also a button on the back of each case that will launch your phone’s camera (if you choose a photo case) or find you nearby places in Maps (if you pick a location).
Google first hinted at plans like this when it worked with Skrillex on a handful of customized phone cases. Googlers say they were blown away by the response to that project, and that people wanted more. The company’s pushing the boundaries of what a case can do to and with your phone, and is obviously committed to a deep sense of personalization and identity with phones. It’s always been part of Google’s vision for Android, right down to the tagline: be together. Not the same. Maybe before long picking a phone case won’t be like choosing clothes from the rack, finding the garment that fits you most closely. It’ll be more like making your own clothes, and getting it exactly right.
Mini Materials
If the rumors are correct, Apple is bringing back a smaller iPhone. This makes sense. There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all smartphone or even a two-sizes-fit-all smartphone. Some people want a phone that fits in the pocket of their skinny jeans. Other people have larger-sized skinny jeans. A third group of slacks-wearing people want a phone the size of a skateboard deck.
The same idea holds true for almost everything. Some people want big versions of things that are supposed to be small. Others want small versions of things that are supposed to be big. All of this is possible. On my desk right now, there’s an oversized pencil, an undersized building, a miniature hockey player with a disproportionately large hockey stick, and a “King Size” Sharpie.
Here is a photograph of these objects taken with my phone, which is the size of a skateboard deck:
Giant pencil for scale. Tim Moynihan/WIRED
More often than not, things that aren’t their appropriate size are whimsical and fun. On occasion, they’re even thought-provoking. Examining an object that isn’t normal-size lets you appreciate its form or design detached from its function. This will help you forget about taxes for a little while.
Alas, acquiring miniature and oversized objects isn’t as easy as walking into a store and heading to the “giant” or “tiny” section. Luckily, there are dedicated online outlets for each of these retail needs.
For things that are smaller than normal size, perusing the digital aisles of Archie McPhee, Suck UK, and ThinkGeek is a good place to start. McPhee has items such as squirrel-size coffee cups and underpants, a functional miniature drum kit, and a tabletop ark of the covenant. Suck UK has you covered on the guitar-case lunchbox and planet-themed eraser fronts. ThinkGeek is the place to go if you want a miniature filing cabinet for your business cards or a tiny, functional Tesla coil.
But those are all readymade products. If you want to create your own miniature projects, cruise by Mini Materials. It’s like a Home Depot on the island of Blefuscu: miniature cinder blocks, shipping pallets, bricks, and two-by-fours. There are also tiny packets of concrete mix and minuscule buckets of mortar.
For things that are larger than normal size, Archie McPhee is also a handy source, with things like giant googly eyes, a coffee cup that holds around two gallons, and a gigantic slice of toast you can sleep on. But again, if you want oversized stuff, it’s best to go to an oversized-stuff specialist.
GreatBigStuff.com is the titan of the market, offering mission-critical objects such as plus-size Whoopee Cushions, a flask that holds a gallon of whisky, a giant functional computer mouse, and a massive (and edible) Ferrero-Rocher candy. You can also buy a large stack of fake cash to use as a foot rest and an unlimited supply of oxygen for $1.
For things that are actual size, try all other stores.
Makey Makey
What if you could play a videogame with a banana? Or a drum machine with a burrito? MaKey MaKey lets you do exactly that—and more.
MaKey Makey turns everyday objects into digital touchpads for your computer. Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum designed it while they were in grad school at MIT. Inspired by the maker movement, they wanted to create an open-ended way of getting people to think creatively about how kids interact with our increasingly networked world. The result is a clever kit that makes a controller of literally anything that conducts electricity.
“Makey Makey is a device for allowing people to plug the real world into their computers,” said David Ten Have of JoyLabz, which produces the kit. “We want people to be able to see the world as their construction kit. And basically the way MaKey MaKey works is that it pretends to be a USB keyboard.”
Each kit comes with a circuit board—the heart of the kit—a set of alliga