Author: Nicholas Echevarria

Categories
Aquatics

Breathe easy as you dive a bit deeper with the STEPDive SCUBA system

The beauty of SCUBA diving is undeniable — an underwater world full of wondrous, and oftentimes strange, environments and creatures that never fail to capture the imagination of any diver. The problem lies in actually getting to the point where the experience can be enjoyed as the complexity and heavy equipment involved with SCUBA diving has a way of scaring off newcomers.

patent-claimedTo help, the team at SnorkelDive Innovations designed the STEPDive, a lightweight and highly portable diving system for new and advanced users alike. The system is comprised of three parts: a base station raft that holds an oxygen tank and sports a deck and cargo net to hold gear, a floating depth control unit and a range control clip that controls how far an attached diver can go. Together, the system allows for a step-by-step SCUBA learning experience that eases newcomers into basic diving techniques and good habits and allows advanced divers to go along.

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Categories
Camping

The Nomad Shadow Leaf leaves you made in the shade

The importance of proper protection from the sun at the beach cannot be understated. While it’s easy to have a good time and lose sight of protecting the body, most people usually apply some sun tan lotion once or twice, and call it a day. Others keep themselves under large, unstable umbrellas that are too small for the entire family and prone to being knocked over or blown away by strong winds.

Thanks to the magic of crowdfunding, even the beachside umbrella is due for a complete overhaul. Leaf for Life’s Nomad Shadow Leaf is that overhaul — a lightweight, portable sun shade with a wide variety of clever features for more beachside comfort. One of the parasol’s defining features is its anti-fungal, water-repellent canopy that uses a tensioning system to instantly open by simply unravelling it. When fully opened, the canopy seems small but is designed to sit at an angle that produces a larger area of shade.

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Categories
Music

The cardboard DRUMKIT lets you carry the beat on your back

editors-choiceIt’s a universally agreed upon fact: Drums are awesome. What’s not is how cumbersome, expensive, and loud they are, not to mention hard to assemble and almost impossible to carry around. This doesn’t stop professional drummers from engaging in their craft but can serve as a huge barrier to entry for fresher drumming devotees.

OBILAB music’s DRUMKIT solves these five problems with a painstakingly researched, designed, and produced cardboard drum kit. It comes packaged in a five-pound box that can be worn as a backpack for easy transportation so that intrepid drummers can do their thing wherever they may be. When set-up, the DRUMKIT features fiberglass panels on each of the major drums not only for increased rigidity but also to help newbies drum correctly. 

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Categories
Imaging Wearables

Recall your life’s greatest hits with Perfect Memory

Many of the awesome, curious and strange moments that happen on a daily basis end up being entertaining stories later on but are made better when they’re recorded for all to see. With a smartphone in everyone’s pocket, people have never been more capable of doing so. The only problem lies with actually pulling out the device in time. Since most of these moments happen so quickly, it’s hard to save them in time.

patent-claimedThe Perfect Memory is the perfect solution for this particular problem. The lightweight, Wi-Fi capable, microphone-equipped camera sports stunning build quality and can be worn around the neck, off a keychain, attached to a car’s dashboard, or anywhere else for that matter. With it, users can either continuously record their lives and tap the device to save the last five minutes of video or record at the tap of a button instead, with both modes able to be set to time lapse.

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Categories
Connected Objects Imaging Virtual Reality

EYSE live-streaming VR device transports you to somewhere more interesting

Every day, people around the world wish they were somewhere else: With friends on a trip, with family on a special day, on a tropical island relaxing, in the depths of a balmy jungle exploring — wherever. Usually, they feel this way to get away from the mundane of the current situation and while smartphone have given most people the power to live stream, it isn’t as immersive

patent-claimedIn the age of virtual reality of experience, it’s no surprise that the team at Vairdo developed EYSE, a VR-enhanced camera with dual 5MP cameras, an internal speaker and microphone that lets user live stream stereoscopic video others can enjoy with a VR headset. EYSE has a wide range of applications: It can be used to be present at far-off birthday parties and family gatherings, experience the wonder of drone flight first-hand, for better one-on-one instruction, to get an alternate, more aquatic view of the world, remotely monitor the home, and even treat phobias through immersion.

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Categories
Apparel Cell Phone Accessories Imaging Wearables

Bornonaboard’s Wrist Mounted Display gives boarders easy access to their cameras

With sports like surfing and snowboarding, it’s crucial to be as lightweight and maneuverable as possible. And while most extreme sports enjoy the use of popular recording devices like GoPros, no matter how much smaller they’ve gotten over the years, they’re still as small as athletes would like them to be.

Enter boarding lifestyle company Bornonaboard. Its goal is to create apparel and accessories that allow people to more easily incorporate wearable technology to their boarding pursuits. The company has already created a set of hoodies and jackets that feature its EyePocket, a small pocket that fits most smartphones snugly to better record the action.

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Categories
Smart Home

Get a grip on your connected life with the Moband gesture wand

Alternative forms of device control are all the rage now, and for good reason. Smartphones and other touch-based devices are great for communication but usually end up adding complexity when it comes to smart home control.

The team at iWave designed the Moband to give smart home enthusiasts or anyone looking to more easily control their connected home objects another way to do so. The gesture-based universal remote control comes with 10 preset gestures (e.g. swing up, down, left, right, rotate, etc.) or the ability to create custom gestures, all of which can be linked to the functionality of one or more remote controls already in the house.

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Categories
Music Wearables

The Basslet jams out on the wrist to make you feel the beat

Music is meant to be felt. At least, that’s what the team over at Lofelt believes. Ask pretty much anyone, and they’d most likely agree with them. There’s just no arguing the massive difference between music heard and felt through a powerful sound system versus the dinky white headphones most everyone has.

patent-claimedLofelt’s Basslet brings the bass out from the ritzy city clubs and dank basement dance parties to wherever someone goes. It just does so in a pretty petite, sleek package that immediately casts doubt as to how truly effective it is. But while it looks like any other smartwatch, you won’t find any heart rate monitors or pedometers in its slim frame: Basslet was designed with nothing but bass in mind. Inside is Lofelt’s proprietary Losound haptic engine that recreate bass frequencies as low as 10 Hz.

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Categories
Connected Objects Cycling

CycloShield passive security system helps avoid road dangers

While cycling is a more engaging, more environmentally-friendly and healthier alternative to driving everywhere, the unfortunate truth is that cyclists are a vulnerable lot. With nothing to protect them from accidents, they’re at a much higher rate of injury or death, a huge, underserved issue the CycloShield addresses.

For cyclists who either commute or engage in the sport, the CycloShield passive security system is the way for a drastically safer experience. By attaching it to a bicycle’s seat bar, a set of sensors autonomously detect the approach or threat of a vehicle and audibly alarms riders of the impending danger. In the event of an accident, it not only sends an SOS message to both an emergency contact and to emergency services but also films offenders with a 5 MP camera — extremely useful in dealing with resulting legal battles more swiftly.

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Categories
Health and Wellness Wearables

BioRing tracks your biology for a better body

The hectic pace of the modern world is leaving more people stressed, sleep deprived, and lacking the proper nutrition to get through the day. That’s why information on all these various elements of daily life is crucial to make better choices. The team behind the BioRing is looking to help people do so in a tiny, unobtrusive package.

The BioRing is a simply designed, scratch-proof ring equipped with a 3-axis accelerometer, a bo-impedance sensor, and an optical heart rate sensor. The ring uses all of these sensors to track calorie, fat, and protein intake, stress levels, sleep status, heart rate, water levels, distance, and steps. The sensors by themselves aren’t enough to accurately track such a wide a range of factors, which is why the ring uses a proprietary algorithm to help make up for the gaps in technology, resulting in a margin of error of 14% for now, something the team expects to improve by the time of its expected delivery in November 2016.

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