If you want to put out the bare minimum of decorating effort, you can buy pre-lit Christmas trees. They’ve already been strung with lights, and all you have to do is hang the handmade ornaments you’ve had since grade school. Or you can buy a fake fir with chintzy balls and tinsel already adorned. Brazil studio Ambos took a more high-tech approach to decking out its tree: projection mapping.
Think of the projector you have in your conference room. While it projects images on a screen, with projection mapping, that same device is used on a non-flat surface — like at Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion ride, which projects images on fake heads to make them look alive. To make its projection-mapped Christmas tree, Ambos digitally rendered a tree in 3D, created the projections on a screen, then projected the images onto an actual tree, according to Fast Co. Considering how obsessed my cat is with ornaments, I can see the appeal, but then again, he may take a projection-mapped tree as his own personal laser light show to pounce upon.
Projection mapping is often used to temporarily transform buildings, too. Earlier this year, the Sydney Opera House invited several artists to project animations on its iconic facade. It’s typically a CGI-heavy display, but Universal Everything took a different approach with hand-drawn animations.
“In contrast to previous years’ artists’ use of advanced CGI, our analog, handmade animation process reveals a human soul in the drawings,” Universal Everything Founder Matt Pyke said in a press release. “Due to the use of traditional animation techniques, this film could have existed in 1920, albeit with a 21st-century twist — bringing our influences of global pop culture, modernist graphics, and physics simulations into a playful exploration of this iconic building.”
Outdoor security cameras are not always practical if you live in an apartment or rental. Drilling into an exterior wall may be off-limits, while pointing a regular indoor camera through a window can create another problem once reflections start showing up after dark.
Baseus is trying to solve both issues with the new PrimeSentinel W1, a $69.99 security camera designed specifically to monitor the outdoors through glass. It mounts directly to a window without drilling and uses a 4K Starlight sensor with an F1.0 aperture for full-color monitoring during the day and at night.
This post is brought to you in paid partnership with Best Buy.
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With AI progressing so fast, it's only a matter of time before we start getting AI companions like the ones we used to see in movies like R2-D2, Wall-E, or Baymax. Now, Singapore-based OKA Technology has unveiled Mori, a cute little AI companion that looks less like a conventional home robot and more like someone turned the Pokémon Foongus into a table lamp.
Mori isn't meant to clean your house or control your smart home, but to serve as what OKA calls a "Nature Companion." It uses subtle movements, warm lighting, nature-inspired sounds, and small reactions to make its presence around the house feel calming rather than distracting. Mori can sit quietly while you read, sway along to music, welcome you when you enter a room, or encourage you to slow down for a moment without requiring a screen or a conversation.