Tag Archives: JellyFish

Interactive jellyfish robot responds to hand gestures

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When I visited Kelly Tarlton’s Aquarium in Auckland last year, one of the most fascinating things I saw are the jellyfish. They were very pretty and captivating and looking at them gave me a certain sense of calm. I still don’t know much about them except for the fact that they don’t have the usual organs we see in animals like hearts, brains, and even eyes. It would be interesting to know more about these creatures and this project may just be something that can connect humans more to these “free-swimming marine coelentrata”.

Designer: Adonis Christodoulou

The aim of the project is to establish a sort of communication between humans and jellyfish, even if it’s not the actual animal but an interactive robot driven by machine learning. After going through several prototypes, they came up with something that has actuators with reels that are able to wrap around the “tentacles”. The sides also have holes that will keep the threads perpendicular to each of the reels. There are fours strings attached to a single level of the reels and the next tentacle is located above the previous one.

The software design is where things get really interesting. There are connected through communication channels among Wekinator, Processing, and Arduino. They teach the machine hand gestures that are then translated into “emotions” for the jellyfish robot. Raising the hand will induce a calm attitude while doing the finger heart will make the jellyfish happy. If you want to make it mad, do a fist and if you want to make it sad, do a thumbs down. Once the robot processes this emotion it triggers movements in the robot.

It’s a bit unclear how this will actually translate to understanding jellyfish more. But by the anthromorphization of the jellyfish through servos, LED, and robotic articulation, they are able to “give life” to this mysterious but interesting specie. It’s also cool to see different robotic transmutations, as long as they don’t someday overthrow humans.

The post Interactive jellyfish robot responds to hand gestures first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Jelly Lamp reinterprets the lethal sea animal as a delicate contemporary table light

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If I’d never read a biology book in my life, I’d never have known how dangerous jellyfish are. Nothing about their appearance indicates ‘health hazard’! They look so spongy, so translucent, and so playful that they look less toxic and more toyish. Doubling down on their harmless demeanor is the Jelly Lamp, a tabletop lighting design that features a bulbous frosted lampshade that sits atop a single curved metal-wire stand that looks like a jellyfish’s legs/tentacles. Switch it on and a bulb inside the lamp comes alive, luring you towards it with its mysterious, warm glow! Don’t be afraid to touch this jellyfish… it won’t bite!

Designer: Colin Jackson (Ink Studios)

Designed by Colin Jackson of Ink Studios, the Jelly Lamp hopes to capture the soothing mystique of the marine animal. Just like its inspiration, the lamp doesn’t have a single straight line or sharp corner about it – everything’s curvilinear and heavily rounded, giving it a soft appeal. For the sake of sticking to its minimalist decor-driven aesthetic, the lamp is designed to be symmetrical with 5 equally spaced legs, giving it the visually pleasant appeal that allows it to sit on your table alongside other stuff. A wire emerges from underneath the lampshade, connecting the bulb directly to a power outlet, and Colin even mentions that the lamp doesn’t simply switch on or off, it pulsates gently, creating an ambient aura that should definitely captivate your attention!

The post The Jelly Lamp reinterprets the lethal sea animal as a delicate contemporary table light first appeared on Yanko Design.

This squishy jellyfish-inspired push pin design is a stationery that stings gently!

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We love stationery design and especially cute ones inspired by animals! Medusa is a jellyfish-shaped push pin that moves like the actual jellyfish when pushed into the board, this one is gentler.

The designer has made this push pin soft and translucent just like the real ones in the ocean. It’s also slightly colored to give it a fluid visual effect. The CMF and the simple movement of the pin work together to make Medusa a functional yet realistic ode to the marine marvel. The tentacles of the pushpin also serve as a way to keep your fingers safe from stray pointy pins. If this pin falls and rolls under a table, your stray fingers will encounter the squishy silicone tentacles only.

The design comes in only one color as of now, but I can imagine a variety of colors to keep mystical creatures floating across your cork board to keep things alive and interesting. Who wouldn’t like to have a box of these!

Designer: Minjuan Yao for Fabio Verdelli Design Studio

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Tentacled Cocktail Glasses: Sipping Under the Sea

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Looking for the perfect cocktail glasses to compliment your ocean-themed home bar? How about these octopus glasses from Cerahome? Each glass holds four ounces of your favorite cocktail (or poison if you’re hosting a murder mystery) and would look great in the hand of Ursula while she steals your voice in exchange for legs.

Available from Amazon for $25 a pair (affiliate link), the glasses have five points of contact on their bases, making them “very stable and not easy to knock down.” Is that a challenge? Because I once accidentally knocked over a full beer keg.

Obviously, these are going to be perfect for the Enchantment Under The Sea dance-themed party I’m going to throw. We’ll dance and sip cocktails from our tentacled glasses and quote Back To The Future all night dressed as our favorite characters from the movies! You know I started writing this as a joke, but the more I think about it, it might actually be the best idea I’ve ever had.

[via DudeIWantThat]

Scientists make jellyfish swim faster to prepare for deep-sea exploration

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Scientists at Caltech and Stanford University want to turn jellyfish into deep-sea explorers that could be directed around the ocean, recording info as they travel. In a paper published in the journal Science Advances, the team explains how they've d...

Squeezing this pen releases its nib and your stress!

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Pens are an integral part of our lives, even though we may not always realize it. They’re the mediums through which we capture our deepest thoughts, and make our crucial to-do lists that run our lives (at least mine). However, the everyday ball-point pens aren’t the comfiest to use. Whether it’s removing their respective caps, or unveiling their nib using a rotating motion, there’s always a certain effort to be put in, before you can actually use such a pen. So, designer Jarim Koo designed the Jellyfish pen.

The Jellyfish pen takes huge inspiration from, well, the jellyfish. Its wavy and curvaceous form reminds one of the jellyfish you find flittering through the ocean. Transparent and flexible, the marine creature and this pen have a lot in common. The pen comprises simply of the ink tube made from polyethylene (PE), and the outer transparent body.

The PE lends the ink tube its flexible property, so when you hold the pen, its wave-like form expands, and the ink tube protrudes from the little slot on one side of the pen, exposing the nib, and allowing you to write with it it. However, once you release the pen, it contracts, bringing it back to its original form, with the ink tube tucked away. Koo perfected the form so that it would meld in with our index finger.

There’s a certain fun factor to the Jellyfish pen. I mean, you basically have to squeeze it, to operate it! Not to mention its jelly-like translucent aesthetic is far from the ordinary and has a calming effect for some reason. Its the kind of pen I would love to have owned during my school days, easy to use, with no fear of losing its cap, and finally its quirky looks simply seal the deal!

Designer: Jarim Koo

Harvard’s noodly robot fingers are great at grabbing jellyfish

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Robots can be a bit heavy-handed. Their forceful grip might not be a problem when they're moving boxes in a warehouse, but they can damage fragile marine creatures like jellyfish. Researchers may have a solution. They've created a robotic hand with a...

Shaped like a jellyfish, the HM7 Aquapod is a beautiful, organic wristwatch

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After exploring the roads, skies and even outer-space, MB&F’s HM-series looks deep into our oceans for inspiration with the HM7 Aquapod. The Aquapod is a thing of sheer beauty, with the elegance of its bulbous body, reminiscent of a jellyfish. Exploring the third dimension to create a watch that’s memorable and mesmeric, the HM7 Aquapod has a domed sapphire crystal on the top as well as the bottom. A rotating bezel sits around the bulbous body much like the waist of the jellyfish, with not one, but two crowns embedded between the watch’s body and its floating bezel ring. The hours and minutes are displayed by two aluminium/titanium rings rotating on oversized central ceramic bearings, with a marking on the dome helping you read the time, while the at the center of the wristwatch is the very heart of the gentle beast… its 60-second flying tourbillon.

While the central tourbillion grabs one’s attention on the top, its exhibition base reveals the watch’s spectacular winding rotor, visually guarded by tentacles machined from solid titanium with a platinum sector underneath. The watch comes with a 72-hour power reserve and automatic winding with the ability to manually wind it too, using the secondary crown. While the HM7 isn’t a diving watch, its clear inspiration is aquatic in nature. The watch comes in four variants, red, blue, green, and black, with each variant made from either Grade 5 Titanium, 18k Rose Gold, or Platinum 950.

Designer: MB&F

Jellyfish-inspired e-skin glows when it’s in ‘pain’

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Artificial skin stands to have a variety uses, with potential applications in everything from robots to prosthetics. And in recent years, researchers have been able to instill sensory perception, like touch and pressure, into artificial skin. However...