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Awesome tech you can’t buy yet: Luggage you can ride, cider makers, and more

At any given moment, there are approximately a zillion crowdfunding campaigns on the web. Take a stroll through Kickstarter or Indiegogo and you’ll find no shortage of weird, useless, and downright stupid projects out there — alongside some real gems. In this column, we cut through all the worthless wearables and Oculus Rift ripoffs to round up the week’s most unusual, ambitious, and exciting projects. But don’t grab your wallet just yet. Keep in mind that any crowdfunded project can fail — even the most well-intentioned. Do your homework before cutting a check for the gadget of your dreams.

RoVa4D — Full-color CYMK 3D printer

3D printers can print in just about every material imaginable these days — but when it comes to colors, your choices are still somewhat limited. Sure, there’s a practically endless number of individual filament colors to choose from, but unfortunately, most printers can only handle one or two filament types at a time. If you want to make something multicolored, you’re pretty much out of luck — until now, that is. Thanks to a company by the name of ORD Solutions, there’s finally a FDM printer that can print an entire rainbow in one go.

The RoVa4D, as it’s called, works by extruding separate cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and white filaments into a single hot end, where they’re blended together and deposited from a single nozzle. This works just like the inkjet printer you have at home, except that in this case you also need white filament, since we aren’t printing on paper. The combination lets you print unlimited colors in a single print.

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Formula Pi – Raspberry Pi powered autonomous slot cars

A few months from now, somewhere in Cambridge, U.K., a little known company by the name of PiBorg will host the world’s first international autonomous car racing grand prix — and you and your friends can enter. See, the cars in this competition are actually toy robots designed to zip around a colorful 20-meter track. Dubbed “Formula Pi,” the cars are powered with the help of a Raspberry Pi and a bit of clever coding from programmers around the world.

In essence, the cars are like a DIY version of Anki’s AI-powered “Drive” slot car toys — but instead of coming with pre-installed, finely-tuned autonomous driving software, PiBorg leaves it up to you to do the coding. Your job, should you enter the competition, is to write the code that will help your car race around the track as quickly as possible, without colliding with other cars. When you’re ready, PiBorg will stage a series of races that will be broadcast over the internet for all to see. Pretty sweet idea, no?

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Parrot 2 — Portable smartphone-powered teleprompter

If you’ve ever tried memorizing lines for a video, you know firsthand just how much time it takes to film multiple takes, and then going back to edit out all the little screw-ups. To avoid this problem, professionals often use teleprompters, which allow the subject to look directly at the camera and simply read the prompts instead of memorizing everything beforehand. The only problem is that currently-available teleprompters are often too expensive and bulky, so filmmakers with limited budgets often turn to other methods — which result in a lack of genuine eye contact and warmth.

That’s where the Parrot 2 comes in. This brilliant little gizmo fits onto the front of your DSLR, and with the help of an accompanying smartphone app, reflects your script off of a mirror so your subject can easily read it. The Parrot is also ridiculously compact and simple to set up — something that both professional and indie filmmakers can appreciate.

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Alchema — Automated cider-making machine

Developed by San Francisco-based entrepreneur Oscar Chang, the Alchema brewing machine is designed to transform ordinary pieces of fruit into a boozy pitcher of craft cider. To do this, users first browse and select their desired recipe via the machine’s companion smartphone application. After doing this, they simply load the required fruit, sugar, and water into Alchema’s companion pitcher before adding a specific amount of yeast. Once this is complete, owners then close the device’s door and wait roughly one to two weeks for the batch to ferment. When it’s all said and done, you’ll have a fresh batch of homemade hard cider.

Unlike other at-home cider kits, Alchema requires very little cleaning and alerts users exactly when the fermentation process is complete — one to two weeks for cider, one week for mead, and roughly 16 weeks for wine. Additionally, the system constantly monitors air pressure, automatically releasing air if it starts building too quickly through the course of fermentation. Users even have the option of checking each batch’s alcohol contents directly from their smartphone and making use of the machine’s built-in weight sensor, which ensures the correct amount of ingredients are used every time.

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ModoBag — Rideable luggage

What if instead of dragging your suitcase through the airport, you could hop on top of it and ride it to your gate like a minibike? Sounds kinda ridiculous, but that’s precisely the idea behind ModoBag: the world’s first ridable suitcase With its 200-watt electric motor at full throttle, this “little bag that can” is capable of whizzing six miles through the airport terminal at speeds up to 8 mph on a single charge. At that rate, you’ll be able to get to your destination three times faster than the chumps who have to walk their way to their boarding area. It also features a dual braking system for those “uh-oh” moments when you’re about to crash into a travel companion or a fellow Modobag operator.

More than just a pretty bag with wheels, Modobag also has a high-performance, sealed-bearing steering column, touch control dashboard, and dual USB charging ports for power on the go. It even has an optional GPRS/GSM tracking system that’ll help you locate your bag with a companion iOS or Android app. It offers 2,000 cubic inches of packing space, has a base weight of 19 pounds, and can seat riders up to 260 pounds. Best of all, it’ll fit in an airplane’s overhead bin and is completely compliant with TSA, FAA, and IATA regulations.

Read more here

Drew Prindle
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Drew Prindle is an award-winning writer, editor, and storyteller who currently serves as Senior Features Editor for Digital…
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Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

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CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

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AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
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Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

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