goldengod

The materialistic but fine folks over at BornRich spotted this interesting eBay listing for an 80″ glass holographic TV. The expensive HDTV set uses holograms to project it’s images into a sheet of custom cut glass. The glass is designed to trap light from a certain angle, allowing images to be projected onto it, but allows other light through.

It appears that the seller had trouble getting people interested at a price of £5,500. Logically, this means that if he raises the price to £8,000, it’s bound to sell! It’s been relisted over at eBay UK.

In other obscenely opulent television news, LG & KeyMat took the less technologically interesting but more traditional route. Rather than fiddle about with “holograms” and “glass”, they busted out the old school luxury - diamonds and guns gold.

The Yalos Diamond TV is covered in 20 carat diamonds, presumably to match someone’s tacky-ass Sidekick. The LG 71″ HDTV on the other hand went with 24k gold plating for that nouveau-riche trailer-trash look. Watching Nascar with Paris Hilton has never been quite this retarded.

That’s it for this week’s episode of ‘Rich People: They’re Just Plain Better Than You’. Tune in next week for the first part of our ninety-two episode series about celebrity bidets.

Pink Tentacle has recently posted a really neat collection of dekotora photo galleries. You should definitely take five minutes out of your day to appreciate something so completely beautiful and ridiculous as a large truck done up to look like a sex-crazed Pachinko machine mounted it in a fit of overzealous passion.

For those of you don’t know, dekotora, or ‘decoration trucks’ are this weird-ass phenomenon that could have only come out of Japan. Wikipedia will help enlighten you in it’s usual geek-biased, semi-truthful way.

At its core, the principle is similar to that of art cars, but these Japanese trucks fall into a few very specific styles and overall are instantly recognizable as dekotora. Mostly because of the neon. The unnatural, retro-futuristic stylings with an overall theme of the decoration trucks resonates a lot more with me than the haphazardness of most art cars.

This isn’t to say that something like Carthedral isn’t sexy, but a lot of art cars are just really random. Like an artist trying to cram all the styles and subjects he wants to explore into a single painting.

You see a lot of references to the dekotora phenomenon in anime, such as Great Teacher Onizuka or Cowboy Bebop. It interests me to know that dekotora are an underlying cultural experience that everyone can form a mental picture of based on a word or two, much the same way we do with ‘Hell’s Angels’ or ‘Australopithecus’.

Flipping through The Cool Hunter’s archives the other day, I stumbled across this clever little advertising campaign from Canon Nikon. I’ve always been a big fan of clever ads that incorporate their surroundings into in a way. The wheel turning is what really makes the ad by simulating the shutter. You can click on the photo to see a larger version, but I sadly don’t have a video of it in action.

As you may have guessed, the ad is for Canon Nikon digital cameras and is currently on buses all over Asia. If you like this style of ad, there’s a whole bunch more that the folks at The Cool Hunter are keeping track of in their advertising section.

EDIT: Haje Jan Kamps of Photocritic has pointed out in the comments that the ad actually appears to be for a Nikon digital camera. My mistake, folks!

Canadian photographer Francois Brunelle has embarked on an interesting quest to take portraits of people with their look-alikes. Not the most visually arresting photography project in the world, at least when compared to LaChapelle’s fashion work or Toledano’s “Hope & Fear” series, but it possesses a simplicity that I really enjoy.

These are the people of myth made real. These are the men and women of a thousand stories that began with “I was in the Rome airport and I swear, I saw this person who looked just like you!”.

Everyone hears these stories, but Francois Brunelle is hunting down the people that have actually met and know their doppelgangers. Then he’s capturing them in his portrait photography to show everyone.

While I may never meet or know my duplicate, I really like being able to see and know that others can and have. The way he removes all other elements in terms of using blank backgrounds and neutral clothing really get me to intently study the faces of these people. I definitely look forward to the finished product.

If anyone’s interested, he has put out a request for anyone with a doppelganger or look-a-like to get in touch with him for this project. No compensation is given beyond receiving a free print of your photograph, but it’s an interesting enough project that for a lot of people that it doesn’t matter.

Compensation isn’t everything… unless you’re me.

Pileus: The Flickr Umbrella by shokai

Found this particular slice of genius languishing in my ‘to-write’ posts cue from a month or so back. It’s called ‘Pileus’ and bills itself as “The Umbrella Photo Browser to Relay Experiences in Rainy Day”.

The system is created using a webcam, projector, 3d accelerometer (whatever that is), an RFID reader & tag, the Flickr API, and of course, an umbrella.

The Pileus System is a mobile tangible browser to make rainy days fun. The system is constructed by the Pileus Umbrella and the Pileus WebService. User can see and take a photo and video with the PileusUmbrella. User can hand on own experience in rainy day to next user with an umbrella type photoset. User Connects the Grip with the Screen, then the Grip reads the Screen’s ID and login to own Pileus Account.

When user takes photos or videos, Pileus WebService evaluates media-type of data and uploads it to Flickr or YouTube, and then set a tag by screen ID. In addition, user twists the grip, it searchs contents at Flickr and YouTube by tag of screen ID, and displays contents in order.

Forget a harem of nymphomaniacal gymnasts, I’m really starting to lean in favour of a harem of Japanese design students.