Tag: ONLYINJAPAN

Wearing gold fronts and jewels in your teeth is so Aughts. The 2010s call for a thoroughly more modern oral adornment. Enter Japanese fashion designers Mr. Ishibashi and Daito Manabe, who have created LED inserts that are worn behind the teeth. The light-up smiles are now being used as part of a marketing push by Laforet Harajuku, a popular department store in Tokyo, and are becoming a much ...

Japanese gamers, specifically male ones, are downright obsessed with 'Love Plus.' In case you've never heard of it, 'Love Plus' is a dating simulator in which players get a virtual pet girl to chat up and (hopefully) kiss. The DS title is getting the sequel treatment, 'Love Plus +,' and, to promote the new installment, Konami created an augmented reality iPhone app. The app allows users to ...

Thirty-year-old Yoshifumi Takabe did what any emotionally repressed nerd might do when his mother, with whom he lived, threw out some of his robot action figures. He burned down the house. Takabe, who says he became suicidal after losing the Gundam 'bots that he considered his life partners, just plead guilty in Kobe District Court for setting the blaze in 2009. ...

We've always wanted to try yanking a tablecloth off a table without destroying all of the fancy place settings. Leave it to our experimental friends from the east to tap into our strangest wants. According to Arcade Heroes, a new Japanese arcade game called 'The Tablecloth Hour' requires players to pull an actual piece of fabric, which yanks a virtual tablecloth from an onscreen table. ...

We've all lost a high-tech gadget or two to that most low-tech of the natural elements: water. (Or, in the recent case of this writer's laptop, coffee.) Always miles ahead of us stateside folk, who have alternately used hair dryers and bowls of quick rice to dry out our devices, the Japanese have implemented the Dryer Box, a sort of clothes dryer for drowned gadgets. The copy-machine-sized ...

You know how some people collect those plastic sushi replicas that Japanese restaurants place in their windows (also collected: fridge magnets)? Now you can udon your iPhone with cases that come in tasty (kind of) flavors like Bento, Sunny Side Up Egg with Bacon, Tonkatsu or Yakisoba, and are each available for pre-order at $43.20. Yes, these actually exist. [From: Serious Eats] ...

We understand that SIGGRAPH frequently exhibits the most outre and ridiculous tech experiments -- the ones that could be useful on a larger scale and within a different context. But Takuji Narumi of Tokyo University may be the winner of the Most Insane Research award for his Meta Cookie System, which seems to serve no purpose but to advance the idea that our future lies in a simulated reality ...

Share Apparently, enjoying a fresh slice of watermelon isn't a strictly American experience; just check out this Japanese-made watermelon cooler. According to Crunch Gear, it also has the ability to warm your melon (for whatever reason), or anything else you put under its plastic dome. For about $230, you can wheel your watermelon right up to the beach and bask in your lack of frugality. Now, ...

We've all wanted to smash a guitar into thousands of pieces like The Who's Pete Townshend, but unless you're making Pete Townshend-type money, it's not a wise idea -- until now. According to Wired, manufacturer K's Japan has designed a line of guitars that are meant to be played, smashed and recycled. Costing just $55, the aptly-named 'Smash' has a lightweight neck and hollow body carved from ...

As it's done with just about everything in the world of technology, Japan has just taken targeted advertising to a whole new (and wholly creepy) level. According to a new report out of Tokyo, several companies have begun testing digital billboards that can instantly identify the age and gender of anyone who walks in front of its attached cameras. Once the data is collected, the billboard then ...

Robot designer Hiroshi Ishiguro has a flair for creepy, wax-figure verisimilitude. Ishiguro has invented an entirely new distribution curve for the Uncanny Valley, hanging steadily in the middle of both the appealing/unappealing and endearing/frightening axes. A couple years back, Ishiguro created a robot version of himself (well, more of an evil twin), and now he's come up with an uncanny ...

(Wait, this isn't an April Fool's joke? Okay, then... ) Skating, perhaps the last true haven for loner, angst-ridden teenagers, is apparently engaged in an epochal battle with white collar (i.e.lab coat) conformity. If defeated, millions of rebellious cool-guy misfits could be left with no tangible way to demonstrate their painful awesomeness to an uncaring world. According to Crunch Gear, ...

In what might be the weirdest pairing we've seen, Nintendo and Google have partnered to create a Wii game that challenges players to accurately guess search-engine rankings. According to Joystiq, the game 'And-Kensaku' will be released in Japan at the end of April, but there's no word on a U.S. release. Essentially, the title is a collection of mini-games based on search-engine results, which ...

Dental students need fear no longer torturing real patients. Robotics company tmsuk, in conjunction with several Japanese universities, has designed a robot for use in training those dentists-to-be, continuing a long-standing Japanese love affair with robotics. The robot, named "Hanako," is programmed to act and react like a real patient. She performs random actions such as sneezing and ...

In Japan, as in most of East Asia, the elderly have always enjoyed an "elevated" status in society. A new chair, however, makes that hierarchical tradition clearer -- and more literal -- than ever. Designed by researchers at Kobe University, a prototype chair unveiled at a recent Osaka robot fair uses a bed of air cushions and air-hockey-like jetstreams to hover above the ground and transport ...