Things We Like

Everybody loves robots, and judging by the fact you're reading this, you probably love iPhones, too. Combined, they are a magical combination that brings a smile to our faces. The latest of these is Walky, the product of Yuta Sugiura the Digital Life Project at the Graduate School of Media Design at Keio University in Japan. It's a bipedal robot that translates finger movements into robotic footsteps (and a few dance moves, to boot). It's certainly one of the coolest and most intuitive iPhone-to-robot interfaces we've seen. Video after the break.

Right, the cats at Waterloo Labs have built a car that can be controlled with an iPhone and decided to surf on it a la the original "Teen Wolf." Since a picture's worth a thousand words, click below and see how it was built, what materials were used and the appropriate warnings and disclaimers before you try something similar on your end:

Want to see something cool? Japanese design firm PROTOTYPE has networked 20 iPod touches to create one interactive display that creats chain reactions between devices, making for some very cool visual effects. Possibly coolest of all about the project is that it's highly scaleable, making it possible to create a 16x9 wall of iPod touches, all reacting and being awesome. Video after the break.

So you think you're pretty great at Rock Band [App Store, $9.99] on your iPhone or iPod touch because you can beat your friends, eh? How about a machine? That's right, tough guy. Joe Bowers has created a machine with no purpose other than mastering Rock Band and putting us humans to shame doing so. It consists of a robotic "hand" that can detect changes in light, and it can play the game's highest level of difficulty without the help of us fleshy types.

I recently got a call from friend of the site Jordan Satok who wanted to tell me about his new project, App of the Day. AotD does one truly awesome thing; it recommends one iPhone app based on user submitted nominations. The app that receives the most nominations becomes the app of the day. Anyone can nominate an app, all you have to do is register. There's a one nomination per day limit to keep things fair, but nominations are carried over each day and no app will appear twice.

If you're addicted to apps (and we know you are), you should definitely check out App of the Day.

Looking for the best halloween costume ever? Sorry, you're too late, because these two guys have taken the cake with expensive, bulky, and incredibly nerdy iPhone costumes. How hardcore are they? Well, not only do they actually show the screens of the iPhones on their shoulders, but they each have a 42-inch LCD TV built into the front, bringing the total of the two to $2,000. We're also guessing the devices both had to be jailbroken to make it work, which means bonus points in our book.

Earlier this week, news of the iDriver application, which was developed by computer science researchers at Berlin's Free University, hit the web. As the name would suggest, the application allowed users to drive a modified minivan, the "Spirit of Berlin." Per PopSci, steering, break and acceleration commands are sent over Wi-Fi and the demo video features researchers are driving it around an airport for testing.

Video below!

The hacks don't stop with the iPhone (despite Apple's wishes) and there are some pretty cool ones out there. One we found today was that's the handywork of developer Steve Troughton-Smith, which, according to SlashGear, essentailly places Mac OS X's Exposé feature on your iPhone 3GS.

If you're hiking and run across a bear that might want to eat you, either give it three dozen cans of beer until it passes out (as was the case back in a USA Today article back in 2004) or feed it your iPhone. Per CIO.com, when Vermont hiker Kris
Rowley was approached by a bear and it kept following her, it proved
more interested in chowing down on her
iPhone.

Maybe there's still something to be said for jailbreaking after all. According to The Unofficial Apple Weblog, the following footage of SmartScreen, an app that lets you add and use widgets on your iPhone lock screen, has been released: