Loz Blain

There's not a lot that's particularly remarkable about the MD80 mini spy camera - it's pretty tiny, it records reasonable 640x480 video in AVI format at 25 frames per second, and it can be set to standby for up to 250 hours until it's activated by a sound, making it a good little spy cam unit. It's pretty similar to any number of helmet cam/mini video cam units but for one fact - it costs less than US$25 on eBay, delivered to your door. For the price it's an outstanding product and the sort of thing you could habitually carry around in your car, recording driving conditions for an instant evidence stockpile in case of an accident or incident. And more broadly it's an example of how Chinese design and manufacturing can get a competitive, quality product to market at a price point that absolutely annihilates the competition, to the point where if you're still concerned about quality, you might just as well buy five of the things in case four break. Which they're not doing nearly so much these days. Read More

Wouldn't it be great to have a digital food machine sitting in your kitchen that could create any dish, real or imagined, from scratch at the touch of a button? Cornucopia: Digital Gastronomy is a concept design that uses the well-established principles of 3D printing - plus precisely timed and temperature-controlled mixing and cooking - to open the door to a virtually limitless realm of replicable, creative cuisine in shapes and combinations that are simply impossible using our current, centuries-old cooking techniques. It's a wonderful look into the future of cooking, from the creative food lover's perspective. Read More

The iPhone's application capabilities continue to astound us. We've seen on-the-fly multitrack recording already in our a cappella review of Sonoma's 4Track app, but this one takes it to a whole new level. Voice band is a multitrack recording app that lets you build up the sound of a full band, including guitars, bass, drums, sax, synths and vocals, using only your voice as an input. The demo video after the jump shows just how simple this process is, and how astoundingly good the results are. Amazing stuff. Read More

Back in the 70s, the robots were coming for our crappy manufacturing jobs. Now, it seems, they're coming for our crappy table service jobs. Korean company ITM Technology has developed a restaurant concept around a cute little robot that fulfills the role of a waiter - it takes orders from customers, either verbally or through a touch screen, then relays them to the kitchen, and brings the food out when it's ready. Robo Cafe eliminates ordering errors, reduces staffing costs dramatically for restaurant owners, and even brings the boss all the tips. It's probably not going to be nearly as interesting to Tiger Woods, though. Read More

Motor vehicle accidents are the single highest cause of death for young people - and the dangerous practice of texting while driving is on the rise among teens and young adults. Textecution is an Android app that parents can install on their kids' phones. It's designed to shut down all texting functions - sending and receiving - if the phone handset is moving at more than 10mph. It's a flawed solution, but a first step towards combatting a very serious issue that's only going to become worse as smartphones proliferate. Read More

Hyundai's tasty Blue Will concept car turned up at the Detroit NAIAS this week for its first showing on American soil. We got to take a close-up look at the Korean company's blue-sky plug-in hybrid and were impressed by some of the details - headlamp surrounds made from recycled PET bottles, a full undertray for sleek aeros, a glass roof impregnated with solar cells, drive-by-wire steering column and a thermal generator to turn waste heat from the combustion engine into electricity. Read More

The effects of 2008's petrol crisis are showing no signs of abating at this year's Detroit NAIAS - small cars, electrics and hybrids are the big stars of 2010 in Motor City. And Chevy is looking to capitalise, with a new muscled-up 'hot hatch' concept based on a revitalised update to its lukewarm Aveo platform. The 138-horsepower, 1.4 litre Aveo RS is Chevrolet's tricked-out take on what the tuner community should be able to do when the new, improved Aveo platform launches in 2011 - and Chevy's hoping this funky show car helps turn around the current Aveo's reputation as a rebadged Korean econobox. Read More

No matter how much you spend, there just doesn't seem to be any clear way to future-proof your home theatre system. You can have the biggest HD screen on the block, but suddenly, if it can't do 3D, it's all but obsolete. With the rush of 3D content that's under development in the gaming, TV and cinema worlds, 3D is set to become the new HD within the next couple of years - and with that in mind, Optoma has pulled the covers off its HD66 digital projector at CES - a US$699 home theatre projector capable of showing 720p content in 3D with a max image size around 300". Read More

Now that 3D is finally taking off again at the movie theatre - thanks in large part to James Cameron's evangelism in the leadup to his groundbreaking Avatar film, it's clear that immersive video technologies are big business again. And if the latest 3D stuff doesn't put you in the picture enough, how's this: Immersive Media has adapted the same 360-degree cameras used by Google's Street View cars to shoot video. That means you can actually look around as you watch the video... Which can feel absolutely bizarre, as in the case of the BASE jumping video after the jump. Extraordinary. Read More