Sony just announced the ELF-MN1, a six-inch spatial reality display that shows characters, avatars, and objects in full depth right on a desk or side table, all without any special glasses or a headset. It joins the company’s XYN lineup of spatial tools and arrives in Japan on December 11 for an open price that lands around 54,000 yen, or roughly $342.89 at current rates. Demand has already outrun early expectations, so delivery may take longer than usual once orders open.
Buried a full kilometer beneath Mount Ikenoyama in central Japan, a stainless steel cylinder roughly forty meters across and just as tall holds fifty thousand tonnes of water so pure it can slowly dissolve metal. Walls, floor, and ceiling carry more than eleven thousand photomultiplier tubes the size of large beach balls. When sodium lamps light the drained tank for rare maintenance, those tubes turn into a field of golden spheres that bend a visitor’s sense of distance and scale.
Arctic Fox Technologies has built a wired mouse, called Super Mouse, that places a 3.1-inch square touchscreen directly beneath the area where a palm rests during normal use. The unit measures 109 by 91 by 29 millimeters, carries a boxier profile than most everyday models, and arrives in yellow, white, or gray finishes. Standard left and right buttons sit above a scroll wheel, with two programmable Hyper Keys positioned nearby for actions that feel better as a physical press. Power and data both travel through a single USB-C cable, so the device stays tethered to the computer at all times.
Asger reached a point where digital game libraries stopped helping him play and started delaying it. Hundreds of titles sat behind menus, so choosing one required scrolling, second-guessing, and more scrolling. Childhood cartridges had worked differently. A glance at a few plastic cases settled the decision before any screen lit up.
Photo credit: Gerhard Bliedung | ETH Zurich
Karen Antorveza Paez finished her doctorate at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich after years spent turning a known bacterial process into finished architectural pieces. Certain living bacteria called Sporosarcina pasteurii can lock loose grains of sand together by growing microscopic crystals of calcium carbonate between them, the same mineral that forms limestone and seashells.