Though a remotely-controlled telepresence robot on wheels with your face on it may help assert one’s presence in a meeting room on the other side of the world, there’s no denying that the people on the other end doing the whole “interacting” thing with said robot might find it a bit off-putting—creepy, even. Double Robotics, one of the first companies to develop the earliest iterations of this tech, has come up with the newest iteration of their flagship Double series of telepresence robots. The Double 3 still works very much like its predecessors but with a couple of new changes: While both the original Double and Double 2 required a separate iPad…

As purveyors of prime Grade A web content, the SolidSmack crew has done some of the heavy-lifting to make sure you get your Mondays started on the right track. Welcome to The Monday List. Every Monday, we link you up with some of the most insightful, informative, and socially-relevant stories to keep tabbed, bookmarked, reading listed, pocketed, or what have you to get your week started on the right foot. Be sure to check in each week for a new crop of freshly sprouted words curated straight from the source of your favorite homegrown ‘Smack. What We’re Reading This Week: Older Americans Are Starting More Businesses Than Ever Retire, reboot, become…

Huddle around the computer a little bit, your digital detox is a farce! How can you stay away from great stuff that you can read and chew on … mentally that is! We got you covered, while you were away, busy with your digital detox diet. Don’t be shy, take a look at the week that was, right here on SolidSmack. Cause we are ROCKIN! This Full-Cycle Orange Juice Kiosk Turns Orange Peels Into Cups We can all (mostly) agree that being environment-friendly and leaning towards sustainable manufacturing methods is a good thing. So is eating well and being healthy. So by the unspoken rules of the universe, doing both…

Save for the gluten-free militia, just about everybody loves pasta. It’s filling, reasonably easy to cook, and you can still eat it long after your teeth have fallen out from old age. But would your obsession for the Italian dish run so deep that you’d make a working PC out of it? If not, then you clearly don’t love pasta as much as Micah Laplante, the sole owner, and creator of Laplanet Arts. What started as a joke made by his wife eventually drove Micah to try his hand at making a working computer out of a variety of pasta: To be clear, only the outer parts of the PC are…

There are plenty of uses of 3D printing, and one of them is for design feedback. The most frequent use of 3D printing is prototyping, in which a proposed model of the final design is produced and tested. The testing can take many forms, from mechanical to aesthetic, and this approach has been very successful for many product companies. Today you’ll typically see desktop 3D printers in product design companies for this exact purpose. It’s faster, cheaper and allows for more iterations. Design Feedback With 3D Printing But another use that I suspect will begin to take on more prominence is design feedback. This is the idea that you’re not…

If you’re ever on Twitter or Instagram, chances are you’ve come across your fair share of smooth animations and design photos. You know the ones: 3D rendered clips and images that look and flow so well they have to be computer-generated. One such person who works on these designs is Julien Rivorie – a 3D artist and graphic designer based in France. Using a mixture of softwares including Cinema 4D, Marvelous Desinger, Substance Designer, Autodesk Fusion 360, Adobe After Effects, and everyone’s favorite: Photoshop, Julien specializes in making CAD designs of retro tech. While his works include ancient fossils like a Nokia 3310 phone, a Nintendo Game Boy, and a…