Wonderluk goes metal

Wonderluk, the 3D printed jewellery site has now added metal pieces to their collection. Metal jewellery isn't new (well jewellery makers have been using metals for hundreds of years), but 3D printing with it is.

Though other sites like Shapeways have had metal 3D printed jewellery for some time, it's very unlikely a fashion conscious female is ever going to look there to find it, these types of sites are destinations for 3D print geeks who want to sell their own designs or buy other people's.

Wonderluk is different in that it's becoming a destination site for women's fashion accessories and therefore if someone's looking for jewellery they'll look at a site that specialises in it. The designs are also different in that many can not be produced by traditional jewellery methods (using 3D design software allows designers to make designs based on mathematical models etc).

In the past there has been some criticism that all the jewellery and accessories were made out of nylon (though pieces can be customised for size and a choice of 10 colours - excluding the base white), but now that's changed and pieces are available in sterling silver, rose or yellow 18 carrot gold plated brass and some in 18 carrot rose or yellow gold.

Nylon pieces are now generally under £50 (some are more as they contain a lot of material) and silver pieces start at over £100 (and gold plated pieces are the same price as silver). The 18 carrot gold pieces are over £1,000 but then it's a high-end piece of jewellery.

There's now the option to order completely bespoke designs, whereby the customer describes the item they want (and can link to pictures of something similar) and then a Wonderluk designer will get to work and create it.

This is definitely the future of jewellery and though only small now, Wonderluk does have the opportunity to disrupt this age old industry. Hopefully the next step will be wearables and that can only be a good thing.

HP Leaps ahead

HP has collaborated with Leap Motion to being Leap's 3D motion control to HP workstations.

Initially HP will bundle Leap Motion's Controller with their workstations and in future embed the controller hardware and software within the workstations.

Leap Motion have just announced the availability of their Software Development Kit (SDK) which will allow 3rd parties to add motion control to their applications.

Initially motion control will used to control the operating system itself, though apps will be available through Leap Motion's Airspace app store.

The stand-alone Leap Motion controller (which is attached to a PC/Mac through USB) is available for pre-order from Leap Motion for $79.99 (plus shipping).

Google Nexus One hits the streets

Google's new Android phone (the one everyone has been speculating about for weeks) was officially launched yesterday as the Nexus One (see end-note).

The phone is made by HTC and features a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor running at 1GHz (Apple's ARM CPU runs at 500MHz and many others at around 600MHz) so it should be snappy. It also has accelerated 3D graphics, a 5MP autofocus camera, a 3.7 inch widescreen WVGA AMOLED display supporting 800 x 480 pixels with a 100,000:1 contrast ratio and 1ms response (in other words Google haven't skimped on the display), it also has haptic feedback. It of course has AGPS, a digital compass and an accelerometer.

It's 3G and 2G supporting: -
UMTS Band 1/4/8 (2100/AWS/900)
HSDPA 7.2Mbps
HSUPA 2Mbps
GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz)
Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n)
Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
A2DP stereo Bluetooth

Which means it should work in most countries. Google have also opted for 802.11n which is the new high speed WiFi standard, but aren't supporting 802.11a.

Android 2.1 is the base OS (known as Eclair) which is meant to be considerably speedier than earlier releases and takes advantage of the 3D capabilities with a new 3D framework.

The phone is available now from Google for anyone with a Google Checkout account, it costs $530 unlocked (to several countries) or $170 with a T-Mobile contract (only in the US), Vodafone will launch the phone in Europe in the next few months.

End-Note: There's a twist here, Google doesn't own the name/domain Nexus One in several places and it's a reference to the Androids (or replicants) in Blade Runner, Nexus One being the first models while the ones Decker has to terminate are Nexus-6 - so one can presume that are at least 5 more models to come (Rachel/Deckard are either advanced Nexus-6 or Nexus-7). More is that the estate of Philip K Dick are looking at suing Google as they didn't ask permission to use the name, however that may be hot air as Mr Dick didn't trademark the Nexus name and there are already several companies out there using Nexus names).