An exploration of virtual experiences and environments in and about China.
Named "Sonny", from ZheJiang University. Winner of the red dot design award in Life Sciences.
Squishing toy injection mechanism + give the kid the toy after the shot.
Will the kids be more amenable to injections with the cute packaging? (Is this another example of glossy design without meaning?)
Via Core77 via coolest gadgets.
Tuesday’s 7.1 earthquake in Taiwan has caused a minor communication breakdown in Asia. BBC reports that Taiwan, South Korea, China and Japan are affected (and I would like to add Hong Kong).
Local websites are wholly accessible, as are certain big websites (BBC, Google) but not the majority of the web.
Reporting from the field, Jason Li, "This sucks. But the Facebook works. As does Gmail. So it’s not all lost."
We’ll be taking the next few days off to celebrate the holiday season.
In the meantime, here a few tidbits from Christmas in Virtual China:
Check out the very cool VisionUnion.com site, which on its English page describes itself this way:
With rapid updated information, the content of VisionUnion covers the
complete designing industry. We have 12 columns — News and
Information, Plane Designing, Industrial Designing, Multimedia
Designing, CG animation, Architecture and Environment, School Union,
Members’ Works, Union Arena, Picture Searching, BBS, and onvision Store
of Designers’ Works. We provide information, work appreciation, theory
and documents, interviews and feature stories. Every channel is
different and we require that every chief editor be responsible for the
achievements of its channel.
Some places to explore: links to 2006 Chinese art school graduate works across fine arts, design, and industrial design schools all across China (scroll down to the bottom of the page), such as these beauties from the Shandong Industrial Art Academy:
Individual designers’ works can be found here, making it a browser’s delight. Mark Zhao, for instance, has a piece called "Big Mao".
Chinese Engadget has a tutorial on how to make a PC-in-a-mooncake-box.
Link to post on Engadget. Via PostShow.
If you think watching advertisements on purpose is fun, you’ll want to check out the selections at iAdChoice where they rate and recommend Chinese video clip ads, interactive websites, animated ads, rich media ads, and more. You can also search by industry rather than format, as in transportation or health ads. iAdChoice seems to be an arm of iResearch, which has an extensive English language presence, but it’s not the same as the Chinese. If you want to browse and you don’t read Chinese, do this:
go to any of the links above. Currently on the recommended video clip ads is one for the hip Toto Neorest toilet. Under the picture of the display screen for the ad is a hyper link that looks like this:
Click on it and it will bring you to a window that runs the ad itself. There’s also an ad for the iPod Nano available, and a perfume ad for Guerlain. Browse the hyperlinked ads at the very bottom to fine Chinese domestic brands like the sports apparel provides Anta.
Enjoy!
Belinker is like Dodgeball, but for China: via SMS, it alerts your nearby (within 1500m) friends as to your whereabouts, and you be will alerted to crushes (or in Chinese, 梦中情人) nearby.
You have to sign up on the internet first and there’s a fee if you send more than 50 "belinkers" a month.
Its currently offered in 8 cities (the big ones).
As an aside, I’m always interested by how they presented their imagined users:
Particularly when in contrast to Dodgeball’s:
Link to belinker website.
Shanghaiist’s post on it, from July.
跑跑卡丁车 ("Kart Rider", or "Crazy Racing") is one of the most popular online games in China. It’s basically a variant on the Mario Kart formula, and comes from South Korea.
Here’s a Flash version of the game, which is sadly stripped down, but still fun as a casual game:
At Icebin’s blog, via PostShow.
(Space bar to jump, left and right arrow to navigate, and the car automatically accelerates.)
TTBUG涕涕虫网站 ("Booger Bug Site") is an online hub for the Booger Bug character.
First, it features a bunch of high-quality Flash shorts, funny and with a great Looney Tunes-style soundtrack. All shorts do not feature dialog, and I think it’s because they want to reach out to an international audience. I mean, they have an English website.
I recommend episode 1.
As shown above, you can opt to download it for your iPod, PSP or 3GP (phone). They also have character-themed merch (from lamps to T-shirts). Their "life" section even has recipes, skincare and travel sections, in both Chinese AND English!
My favorite part is the character bios, and if you read past the bad English, they are great "personas" of typical comic characters.
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