June 22, 2006
Beam me up, Scotty!
Japanese cars just keep evolving!Exhibit A: the new Nissan Terranaut modeled after Star Trek's USS Enterprise shuttlecraft. Instead of the usual SUV boredom, the Terranaut has a spherical laboratory that gives all the riders access to its various workstations.
Check out the cool video of the car at http://youtube.com/watch?v=lsU8R5lJPOY If you watch it all the way toward the end, you can see how they're even doing the control panels in the style of Star Trek.
I'll tell you more about Japanese cars later. There are some really cool features coming up you should know about. But for now, I'm still too jetlagged to write much. Sorry.
June 19, 2006
I, for one, welcome our new Overlords
Okay, I'm not even going to try to explain why they're building this one ... But Sakakibara Kikai, a Japanese company that usually makes advanced farm equipment (but also ventures into intelligent robots on occasion), has developed a robot you can ride in that looks a lot like a Star Wars Land Walker or like any of the millions of anime transformers we all grew up with. Life imitates art, I guess. Not sure what they're planning to use it for yet. Maybe it was just a demonstration of mobility. But some of the online videos even show it armed with huge guns.
Here's the creator's website: http://www.sakakibara-kikai.co.jp/products/other/LW.htm Click through to see the video.
