Bouncing Red Ball

If you’re a Gundam fan, you might be happy to learn that Nippon Travel Agency is now offering the “Green Tokyo Gundam Project Official Tour” through which you can stay at either Grand Pacific Le Daiba or Hotel Nikko Tokyo in Odaiba, where you can gaze at the Giant Gundam from your room and sleep soundly at night, blissfully aware that you are protected from enemy robots by one of the most lethal mechs ever invented.

Plans start at 13,600 yen ($142) with twin bed and breakfast, a 30th Anniversary Gundam plastic model and pamphlet, and a view of Giant Gundam from your bathroom. Those with views from the bedroom and/or balcony go as high as 43,400 yen ($455) depending on the day of the week. Some packages are reportedly fully booked already.

Speaking of views of Gundam, here are 10 remarkable photos by Gundam fans for you out there who are too far away to see the real thing. Click on the photos to the see bigger versions; the horizontal pics are especially good for desktop wallpapers.

{Photo by hirorico}

{Photo by Tokyo Night Landscapes}

{Photo by sinkdd}

{Photo by Kumawo}

{Photo by A-GARAGE (Blog: Psychedelic Nostalgic Town pntown.exblog.jp)}

{Photo by mechanics}

{Photo by Pink Tentacle}

{Photo by Yo! shizawh@t!}

{Photo by 工場長 (Kojocho)}

{Photo by beef.200%}

The giant Mobile Suit Gundam now standing in Odaiba in Tokyo won’t be officially open to the public until July 11 but it looks increasingly ready for action by the day.

After being fully assembled last week, technicians are now testing its arsenal of lights, smoke and sound before the official “unveiling” two weeks from now.

Awesomeness just got set a notch higher.

Videos of Gundam’s light-up dress rehearsal at Odaiba, Tokyo

Shohei’s illustrations, sketched with ballpoint pen, are characterized by sparse use of color, bold lines, high contrast and gritty subjects. “Intense”, as one website (NSFW) put it.

Loud and dynamic, Shohei’s artworks are illustrative of Japan’s manga-influenced style of drawing.

Many of his illustrations (four of which are shown below) are displayed at Hakuchi Land; many are NSFW. He lives in Tokyo and blogs at Hakuchitare (where one can find videos of him working on his illustrations).

Retaliation

Sayako’s Rage (”Die!!! Iyaaaaa!”)

Onsen Pingpong Geisha

Hyaaaaa!

Japanese iPhone user ozma2x connects his cellphone to the very fast Denso robotic arm he uses at work. Will they play nice?

It turned out that not only did they talk; ozma2x also was able to control and monitor the robot in real time with the iPhone using Wi-Fi.

It’s pretty impressive that a standard cellphone that one can buy at the nearest K’s Denki has the necessary functions to control an industrial robotic arm. And that Denso machine is not bad either, performing everything it’s told fast and without fail.

iPhone and Denso robotic arm play nice

From ozma2x:

The other day, I bought an iPhone. I was amazed at its high performance. So I tried to connect it to a robot I use in my job.

This is a “6-axis VS robot”. Very fast.

An ethernet port is standard, so I can easily connect it via Wi-Fi. Maybe I can use it for the iPhone. According to the robot manual, the robot can be controlled via TCP/IP. Transmitting and receiving packet through b-CAP seems to be enough.

Let’s just start with a compile of a sample program made by the manufacturer.

Compile has succeeded. And let’s check the connection on the iPhone. The connection succeeded.

I made a remote monitor by 3D display function of the iPhone. Send the b-CAP packet for the robot, then…

You can monitor the robot in real time. You can also control the 3D display with multi-touch. Within the range of Wi-Fi you can monitor the robot everywhere.

A while ago Bouncing Red Ball featured twenty of the narrowest houses and buildings in Japan which drew a lot of responses from people who are probably used to living in mansions with wide open views.

Incidentally, a “mansion” in Japan is usually a cramped communal housing complex, not the grand dwelling that it is known in the West. And if you’ve tried riding those crazy trains where passengers are pushed inside by station staff, you know that Japan is not for the claustrophobic.

Possibly the most claustrophobic restroom on the planet

Here is the hallway to the toilet of a pub in Japan. The reasoning probably goes: if you’re drunk enough, you will forget your dread of narrow spaces. Not quite surprisingly, that usually works with Tokyoites.

If you’ve been wondering why the Japanese (and especially Japanese women) are so slender, now you know why.

{Photos by seiten4go.com}

The Tokyo Special Import-Car Show (SIS) which ran from June 19 to 21 in Tokyo Big Sight exhibited about 1,000 imported customized foreign supercars which drew multitudes of car enthusiasts from all over Japan.

As a side show, there was also the Import Anime Car (Itasha) Show in SiS which featured imported foreign cars painted with popular characters from anime and manga in a special space near the exhibition hall.

The photos below are three samples from Mainichi’s online gallery. Visit the site for more.

Import car desktop wallpapers

The exhibition website also has a gallery of wallpaper-sized photos of selected “normal” cars from the show for downloading, like the photos below.

Click on an image (in the gallery) and click on the “ダウンロード” word on the lower-left hand corner to download a zip file of the image.

Launched in September 14, 2007, Japan’s Kaguya (a.k.a. SELENE) successfully completed its mission of collecting data on the Earth’s satellite and was terminated by a controlled collision on the lunar surface on June 11, 2009.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), which supervised the mission, just released Kaguya’s final motion picture shots of the Moon’s surface taken by its Terrain Camera just prior to its maneuvered crash landing.

The 1-minute video below shows the lunar probe cruising very low on the moon’s surface 12 minutes before impact; its final footage just before impact were pitch dark because it landed on the darkened part of the near right side of the moon near Gill Crater.

Kaguya’s low-altitude cruise on the lunar surface before impact

Last high-definition still photos before impact

JAXA also released still images taken by Kaguya’s onboard High-Definition Television (HDTV) at one-minute intervals while it decreased its altitude from 27km to 14km before impact. Higher quality photos are available at JAXA’s website.

One of the most popular videos in Nico Nico Douga, Japan’s video-sharing community, is this nifty little robot that makes coffee: preparing the cups and dripper, grinding the beans, filtering the coffee and pouring the finished product into a cup.

Hina, a little humanoid robot, is the creation of mujaki (Blog), and is based on Kondo’s KHR-2HV, with modified parts around the joints and especially the head. mujaki says it took 3 months to complete the mods to make the robot more human-like.

Below is the newly uploaded Youtube video.

“Hina-chan, no sugar please, oh, and a little bit of milk…”

Although its gait seems rough, its movements when grinding the coffee and pouring water is especially human-like, like something a little girl would do.

A nice addition at the end is the clip where Hina spilled the coffee on the table and made a mess. ^_^;;

“Hina” means a young chick in Japanese. mujaki himself has written on his blog:

Hina:
1. A newly hatched chick
2. A young girl’s little doll
3. A word that suggests “small” and “pretty”
4. Our black-and-white kitten

By the way, “Hina” is not the robot’s name; it’s the model or series name. I don’t have a name yet for the robot.

Specifications of little Hina, the robot:

Height: 36 centimeters
Weight: 1.1 kilograms
Freedom of movement: legs 6×2, arms 4×2, neck 1, total=21
Servo: KRS-788HV×20、GWS-PICO-STD×1 (neck only)
Power: 12v hobby robot battery, wired power
Control board: RCB-3J
Posture control: gyro x2, acceleration sensor

{via IT Media}