Picassohead – Everyone’s an artist with this super cool portrait generating tool. Give a try and explore Pablo Picasso’s most famous painting style, cubism. To create your own Picasso head, pick a face, add facial features from a variety of noses, eyes, hair styles and lots of other options and see what comes out. If you just want to explore what others have created, see the gallery. Mine is below.
DailyViral – One cool video a day is a simple yet appealing concept and DailyViral does it well. Each day a certain video will be showing on DailyViral’s homepage, and you can also see what videos were picked for previous dates.
DailyViral is a great spot for relaxing your mind and taking a quick break from your hectic schedule. Here’s an example of what you’ll find on DailyViral.
The Most Awesomest Thing Ever – When such a ludicrous superlative is used for a site’s name I use extra caution and criticism. Could it be that TMATE truly encapsulates the best things ever? I doubted it, therefore I took the site for a test drive. The site offers the familiar slam between two cool ideas, actions or persons. Users pick their favorite which helps to determine each candidate’s overall score.
To be honest, the name does come across as a bit pretentious, but TMATE’s basic idea and entertainment factor make it a decent time waster. Here’s what it looks like:
Videolicious – This free app will make you a pro film creator, thanks to the app’s genius technology and fabulous interface. Videolicious takes your chosen videos, pics, music and voice narration you took with your iPhone, and creates “a finished video, edited and layered together like a professional video editor- automatically!”
How does Videolicious work? See the funky video below which explains it all. This app is free and available on the App Store. Enjoy!
What I Made – When Scott Bedford’s eldest son started to draw, Scott realized he should revisit his childhood’s favorite past time and started creating and drawing again, too. As a creative industry professional, Scott decided to merge his two passions -creating and illustrating- and What I Made is where he shares his artistic projects.
Each project is something anyone could do, and the cool part about Scott’s endeavors is he always includes a step by step how-to illustration. One great example is the Coca-cola Light (see below).
What I Made is the proud winner of the prestigious 2011 Webby Award and
Webby People’s Voice Award for Best Personal Blog/Site. Aside from the unique concept of this blog, its overall design is simply stunning, and a quick visit to this blog will show you just why Scott’s spot won these awards.
Draw and Fold Over – When the Campaign for Drawing wanted to let people know of the Big Draw project celebrating the role of drawings in our life, they went for a special and innovative approach. The Draw and Fold Over page invites you to draw whatever you wish, and then share it with the community and receive feedback for it. So come in and draw for fun, for helping this organization, or for sharing the love.
Pica Pic – This digitalized collection of the old favorite handheld electronic games is a sweet piece of geek heaven on Earth. The execution of this project is phenomenal, and as you can tell from the screenshots below, the interface is amazing and conveys the “real” look and feel you never dreamed was possible. All that is left is to visit Pica Pic, select a game (there are numerous old favorites to choose from), and go back in time. Pica Pic is the creation of Hipopotam Studio.
Donkey Kong Jr. (Nintendo Game&Watch)
Photosynth – This cool photography tool by Microsoft invites you to create amazing panoramic, 3D photos using the digital camera you’re already using to take pics (mobile phone cameras work just as well). Although a program download is required, as is creating a Photosynth account, this powerful set of tools is so rewarding you won’t believe it’s free. In addition, your created 3D pics can be added to Bing maps, shared on facebook and even added to your website or blog.
The idea of creating 3D pictures with your mobile phone is phenomenal, although one can’t avoid the evident similarity between Photosynth and Google’s street view technology. Either way, I’m curious to know what effect will this concept have on the way we all take pictures in the future. Either way, here’s the full explanation on how to create mobile panoramas.
Now that we’re done with all the (justified) geeky raves, here’s an actual example.
WolframTones – For those of you unfamiliar with Wolfram|Alpha, it is Stephen Wolfram’s computational knowledge engine based on the British scientist’s New Kind of Science approach. WolframTones is an intriguing experiment based on the same scientific premise, and “works by taking simple programs from Wolfram’s computational universe, and using music theory and Mathematica algorithms to render them as music. Each program in effect defines a virtual world, with its own special story–and WolframTones captures it as a musical composition.” In other words, Wolfram Tones creates music from algorithms.”
The nice thing about WolframTones is you don’t have to be a computer science graduate to appreciate the beauty of composing melodies based on computational processes. The user interface is fun and easy, and the WolframTones magic really shines when you add more variations to your creation. Another great perk this experiment offers is a free download of your music creation which can be applied as a ringtone. To learn more about how to compose music on WolframTones, consult the FAQ page.
World’s Biggest PAC-MAN – Who doesn’t like Pac-Man? It’s fun, it’s exciting, and eating ghosts is the best feeling ever. Pac-Man creators have teamed up with Microsoft to show off the goodies of Internet Explorer 9, MS’ newest browser edition. One must admit, this marketing campaign is a brilliant and successful approach.
The World’s Biggest PAC-MAN offers numerous mazes for you to eat dots and chase ghosts in, and you can hop from one maze to the other by going through the side exits. Sign in with your Facebook account and start off with the main navigation page and choose your maze. As you gain more points you can earn rewards, see your stats compared to the current global high scores, and challenge your friends to play PAC-Man as well.
So what’s so special about Internet Explorer 9? Microsoft promises accelerated speed, smoother high-definition videos and clearer graphics, among other special features. For more info visit the IE 9 download page.
SkyView – This amazing iPhone app (compatible with 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPad 2) offers a unique planetary experience using cool augmented reality technology. Watch your favorite stars and constellations fade in and out of your camera view, search for stars and planets’ current location, and track celestial objects’ path through the skies in a 24 hour period (including satellites and the space station!) Tilting your iPhone to landscape view prompts the SkyView’s scientific mode which gives real-time azimuths and elevation of starts.
SkyView not only offers captivating images of celestial objects and zodiac constellations, but also offers a fantastic way to learn astronomy and physics. Available on the App Store on iTunes.
True Life Costs – This amazingly designed and executed website by Volkswagen brings an entire town to life to teach us the concept of good value and expenses over time. Once you arrive in town you are invited to explore a variety of expense categories, including vacation, house, food, family, and of course, car -after all, it’s Volkswagen’s website and they do a terrific job at showing their cars’ good value.
Putting marketing agendas aside, the True Life Costs project is fun to explore, it’s beautifully designed and it does succeed to send the message of calculated spending.
