Cool Shit #14
Here’s an update on weird interesting innovative stuff we’ve found on the Internet.
Spotify will use your DNA to create playlists — Music streaming service Spotify will personalize the playlists of subscribers based on their DNA though a partnership with genealogy company Ancestry. Spotify and Ancestry’s custom playlist generator will choose a range of songs reflecting the cultural music of users’ heritage based on where their ancestors came from. The playlist curation is free, but the genealogy DNA test kit costs around $100.
Shopify + AR — Shopify is leaning on phone-based AR to make online purchases look a little more lifelike for users.
Lighthouse — A robot that swims through pipes and finds out if they’re leaking. MIT doctoral student You Wu spent six years developing the design, building on research that earlier students began under a project sponsored by a university in Saudi Arabia, where most drinking water comes from expensive desalination plants and around a third of it is lost to leaks.
Black Mirror’s interactive episode — Netflix will be bringing an interactive element to one episode of Black Mirror next season according to a report from Bloomberg and confirmation from The Hollywood Reporter. At this point we don’t really know how exactly the interactivity will work, but both publications reported that it will be a sort of choose-your-own-adventure thing.
Kate Isobel Scott’s new animation — Kate’s plasticine animated skill was recently picked up by New York-based street brand Knickerbocker to create a short focusing on a 1950s New York street scene with a skateboarder.
HP Spectre Folio — A high-end laptop that’s bonded with leather, and that HP is marketing with the cringeworthy term manucrafturing. HP is using 100 percent genuine, chrome-tanned leather for this new machine and is shipping it in two tones, warm brown and a deeper bordeaux. It’s the world’s first leather laptop.
HRP-5P robot — This humanoid robot that can carry out simple construction tasks, like installing drywall.
