Wage Star Wars In Your Kitchen With Death Star LinoleumWELL, OKAY, DEATH STAR TILES. BUT EITHER WAY, YOU CAN STILL RELIVE THE TRENCH RUN.

According to the best estimates out there, building your own Star Wars Death Star would cost you the equivalent of 850 quadrillion dollars. That’s enough to break your second mortgage. If you just want the aesthetics of a Death Star without its planet-obliterating abilities, though, Thomas Silva designs have you covered. They’ll sell you tiles to turn any surface into an X-Wing trench run.

First, some background. When special effects house Industrial Light And Magic built the Death Star for the original Star Wars movie back in 1976, they designed it with a few considerations in mind. A lunar-sized war machine, the Death Star’s surface needed to seem both vast and desolate, like a manmade moon of death, mass-produced by an evil empire that reflected its disdain for life right down to its bleached, bulbous skin. But at the same time, ILM needed whatever design they came up with to be practical, something they could build quickly and film from many different angles without obviously betraying that the so-called Death Star was just a model built on a warehouse floor.

ILM’s solution was genius: they made a se-riesof interchangeable tiles that they could layer as needed for Death Star close-ups. Each

of these tiles looked soullessly imperial and vaguely biomechanical, but they could be mixed up as needed to emulate a much larg-er surface. Superimpose a bunch of swooping X-Wings and voila! You’ve got the Death Star run. As long as you have a flat surface and the right tiles, you can transform it into a destroy-er of worlds.

That’s why we’re so delighted that someone has finally reproduced those tiles. Asked by a client to create a home theater evocative of being inside a starship, the guys at Tom Spina Designs created a series of 14 “master tiles” that could be tiled on the walls to recreate the feeling of the Star Wars trench run, as seen from the inside.

“We suggested themed three dimension-al tiles inspired by the Star Wars Death Star trench and surfaces as a wainscot of sorts, running under the screen and along the lower walls and steps,” explains Tom Spina Designs on the company’s website. “These would give a sense of “tech” to the decor and, while recognizable to the avid fan, they would

not be an over the top, obvious themed ele-ment. The end result blends wonderfully, with our pieces being a subtle accent, just one part of a large and awe-inspiring themed home

theater.”The brilliance of ILM’s approach was that it reduces the Death Star down to linoleum. Now you can buy that linoleum, albeit at a be-spoke price. As of writing, Tom Spina Designs hasn’t clarified to Co.Design how much that would cost, but it’s got to beat 850 quadrillion dollars, right? May the adhesive force be with you, always.

Point is , In a Galaxy far far away, there were tiles, awesome tiles, tiles that made every Star-Wars fan boy wet their pants. If you consider yourself a real Star-Wars fan , you should prob-ably get these, if nothing else you can always do what you did when you were a kid.

Use your imagination. The Force is stongest, when you use your imagination.

John BrownleeWriterJohn Brownlee is a writer who lives in Boston with two irate parakeets and a fiancée of more exquisite plumage. His work has appeared at Wired, Playboy,

PopMech, Cult Of Mac, Boing Boing, and Gizmodo.

The Xbox One Is Microsoft’s Glitchy Vision Of The Future THE XBOX ONE IS A TEASE OF OUR FUTURE--ONE THAT’S AS FRUSTRATING AS IT IS EMPOWERING.

More than any platform before it, the Xbox One promises an interface driven by multi-modal interactions--use the control-ler, use a tablet, gesture, or just speak to the console to do whatever you like. It’s the most groundbreaking product in Microsoft’s port-folio, and yet, it’s held back by the simple fact that its crown jewel--the newly engineered Kinect, a body tracking, heartbeat-reading, voice-understanding camera and speaker--still doesn’t hear the human voice well enough for a living room environment.

THE PROMISE

The Xbox One wants to be the ultimate liv-ing room entertainment device. Whereas its predecessor, the Xbox 360, played games and streamed movies, the Xbox One sucks in your cable signal via the ubiquitous HDMI cable, where its interface allows seamless switching between games, television, apps, and the Xbox homescreen. One day, it might even control your Internet of Things objects, too.

The future of interface isn’t speech, but it isn’t touch, typing, or ges-ture, either. It’s all of these specialties and more, each standing at the ready to show-case its talents as con-text requires.

And the hardware supports this through the new Kinect, which aside from listening at all times, paints your room in invisible infrared light to both track your body and control your speakers and television much like a smart remote. The new Kinect is completely re-en-gineered from the Xbox 360, which no doubt emboldened Microsoft to build vocal com-mands deeper into the Xbox One’s interface.

Whereas the Xbox 360 allowed you to say a few commands generally displayed onscreen, the One interface encourages you to learn a vocabulary that’s good anytime, any place, within the UI.

In theory, this means you can walk into your living room and simply say “Xbox On” to turn on your Xbox, as well as your television and receiver.

Then you can say “Xbox play Forza Motorsport 5...Xbox watch TV...Xbox watch HBO...Xbox an-swer [Skype video call]...Xbox go to Netflix,” etc.

THE PRACTICE

In practice, you might say “Xbox On” three to four times for the system to wake. You might say “Watch HGTV” only to be taken to ABC. In a room of perfect silence, you might say any number of things that simply don’t seem to do anything at all. And in a room filled with the explosions from an action flick, you might say something and be heard flawlessly.

In my own testing, I’d estimate that vocal commands work about 50% of the time--the most common commands, like “Watch TV” or “Go Home” almost always work, while many others seem to fail more often than they suc-

Video games automatically pause mid-battle, and the software switches as fast as multitask-ing should, no matter the input.

ceed. So why don’t I just give up and use my Xbox controller? Or change channels with my Tivo’s remote? I certainly do sometimes (how else could I ever watch HGTV?). But voice is an omnipresent crutch that, floating in the ether, tempts me again and again.

Because when the Kinect does work, Micro-soft has created magic that feels so good I can’t give it up. I’m old enough to remember the clocks on VCRs that perpetually blinked 12:00 because some engineer built a clock interface that no human could decipher. How can I not appreciate the godliness of having my hands full of Chinese takeout boxes and, much like asking my wife to grab plates, ask-ing my Xbox to turn on ESPN?

“WHEN THE KINECT WORKS, MICROSOFT HAS CREATED MAGIC THAT FEELS SO GOOD I CAN’T GIVE IT UP.

The appeal of speaking to Xbox is that it can control the system, not just rattle off trivia. Take a similar system, Apple’s Siri. When Siri Googles “sushi” for you, it’s relatively unremark-able. But when she handles an actual task, like making a reservation for a sushi restaurant, the feeling of empowerment is incredible.

And thanks to the Xbox One’s underlying connectivity to so many various medias--your cable, Internet connection, Skype account, etc.--the console is always chauffeuring me

through the interface to someplace where the action is, like a game, channel, or movie. Talking to the Xbox One, when it works, offers an unprecedented feeling of control over a digital entity.

And in this sense, Xbox One is a huge expe-riential leap from the Xbox 360, which, most of the time, only allowed you to read a list of commands on the screen.

Voice done properly, with a deep understand-ing of our pronunciation and vocabulary of our dialect, can open wormholes within the interface, transporting you straight to whims that the best 2-D UI designers could never anticipate. The Xbox One opens enough vocal wormholes that I can’t go back to punching in all of my coordinates by hand.

EVENTUALLY…

It would be easy to hedge that, in five to 10 years, Microsoft will iron out the kinks (many through free firmware updates). But that’s

these specialties and more, each standing at the ready to showcase its talents as context requires.

So buckle up, there may be turbulence. I promise the view is worth it.

“VOICE DONE PROP-ERLY CAN OPEN WORMHOLES WITHIN USER INTERFACE”

exactly the sort of thing we’ve all been saying about voice recognition technologies and flying cars for decades. So who knows?

The Xbox One, for all that it begs us to talk, may very well never get better at listening than it is today.

That said, the One is still prescient of the world of user interface to come--one where, sure, some controls are imperfect, but there are al-ternatives. Because as billions of dumb objects become alive and combine into the Internet of Things, do you think one interface can pos-sibly rule them all?

The future of interface isn’t speech, but it isn’t touch, typing, or gesture, either. It’s all of

The PlayStation 4 Is Stuck In The PastAND THAT’S NOT A BAD THING. HERE’S WHY.

Late last year, I spent a surreal week in Flor-ida driving around the Orlando-area high-ways in a Ford Fiat, a tiny automobile with the transmission of a wind-up car. As a wall of traffic threatened to remorselessly crush my Fiat like a plastic car beneath an unstoppable steel wall of death, I would floor the gas, only to have the transmission struggle as it tried to enter a higher gear. As the engine warbled like an asthmatic blowing into a plastic toy whistle, the Fiat would be incapable of going any faster than 40 miles per hour for 30 sec-onds or more, until finally lurching out of its shrill, trebling fugue state and lurching into a higher gear. Only then would the Fiat start driving like a regular car again.

Playing around with Sony’s newest console over the weekend, it suddenly occurred to me that the PlayStation 4 is a Fiat, racing toward the future against the flying time machine of Microsoft’s simultaneously released Xbox One. But that doesn’t mean Sony has lost. Far

from it. In fact, Sony’s hoping that racing a Fiat against a time machine is the tortoise and the hare, all over again. And to the victor, go the spoils: whether Sony or Microsoft, the winner of this generation’s console wars will conquer the living room and become the billion-dollar gatekeeper to all the media--videos, music, games, and more--that you consume through your television.

Ever since 8-bit was superseded by 16-bit, gamers have been clamoring for the next generation of consoles, called “next-gen.” For most of gaming’s history, this has meant pret-ty much one thing: improvements in horse-power. A console wasn’t next-gen because it radically rethought the entire paradigm of sitting in front of a TV playing games; it was next-gen largely because the graphics were prettier, the games were faster and the experi-ence was more streamlined than the consoles that had preceded it.

In many ways, then, the progression between so-called current-gen and next-gen consoles has been like stepping on the gas of a car and waiting for the transmission to change gears. When a new console comes along, it represents the cutting-edge in consumer technology for a time, but as the years pass, that technology starts falling behind until it’s struggling to keep up with the demands that software developers are making upon it. When that happens, a console is replaced by its next generation, and the cycle repeats itself.

That’s certainly what is going on as Sony upshifts from the PlayStation 3 to the Play-Station 4. The PlayStation 3 was the first Sony console with high-definition graphics, a beefy GPU, a built-in hard drive and networking capabilities, and the PlayStation 4 just shifts those capabilities into a higher gear. It has a faster processor, better graphics, more RAM,

faster networking and an even bigger hard-drive. The menus have been streamlined to be more easily navigable from across the room. The PlayStation DualShock controllers have been redesigned to be more ergonom-ic and more tightly integrated with Sony’s PlayStation Eye camera. These are all improve-ments, but not paradigm shifts: The PS4 won’t change the way you play games in your living room, only incrementally improve the existing experience.

That’s not a bad thing. It’s the way new con-soles have always worked. In fact, the only reason the incremental nature of the PlaySta-tion 4 is worthy of comment at all is because it stands in sharp relief against the Xbox One, which aims to be next-gen in a different sense than the PlayStation 4: it wants to upset the living room forever. With the Xbox One, Mic-rosoft has unveiled a console that can under-stand what we say to it, and even intuit what we want from our body language. It can read your gestures, hear you speak, control the other gadgets in your living room, and even peer through your pants to see your dong.

With the Xbox One, Microsoft imagines a future of machine interaction in which our gadgets are more than silicon-minded Helen Kellers, blind and deaf to everything but our touch. But one problem is that the defining quality of the future is that it’s not quite here yet. That’s certainly true of the Xbox One: as my colleague Mark Wilson has pointed out, all of its advanced modes of interaction simply don’t work very well. In fact, the most de-pendable aspect of the Xbox One’s interface is using a traditional controller to navigate menus and control your console, just like you

would on the PlayStation 4.

Both Microsoft and Sony want their consoles to be the most important box in your living room, the gadget through which you buy and consume every type of media that goes through your TV. In order to get you to give

them that power, Microsoft’s pitch is that the Xbox One will let you interact with your living room in a more natural and intuitive way than ever before. But there is a problem with that pitch: ultimately, there’s nothing more natural about talking to a machine than pushing a button. After all, our brains are already pro-grammed to understand buttons, and we intuitively know that if you press one and it

doesn’t work, that button must be broken. But if a machine doesn’t understand you, who is to blame: you or the machine?

Perhaps this is the brilliance of the PlayStation 4: everything it does is attainable today. Sure, the PlayStation 4 mucks around with gestures and cameras just enough to allow you to play a dance game or two on the system, but it doesn’t otherwise stray too far from what Sony already knows works. Microsoft’s gamble on futuristic UIs might eventually pay off, but in the short term, it’s going to introduce a lot of stress into people’s living rooms.

There are no such questions associated with the PlayStation 4. It works just like any video game console you’ve ever used. Everything about the PS4--right down to the softly ulu-lating, vaguely New Agey music that burbles beneath the menus--wants to soothe you and relax you. It wants to own your living room by dint of never stressing you out enough to make you want to turn it off.

This is Sony’s gamble. The PlayStation 4 is a slow, steady foot on the technological accel-

erator, steadily building speed and momen-tum until the gears of the future shift. But what Microsoft is trying to do with the Xbox One is go from first gear to third, and that’s where Sony’s betting Microsoft’s flying car from the future will stall out, crash, and burn.

This Electric Scooter Collapses To Carry-On SizeFROM THE MAKER OF ELECTRO-SKATES COMES A SCOOTER THAT’S CONVENIENTLY COMPACT, IN FORM AND PRICE.

Depending on whom you ask, transporta-tion’s so-called “last mile” problem--how you get from your car to where you’re going while guaranteeing your feet never actually touch the ground--is either an important one to solve or a sad dilemma of the chronically lazy.

Whether the challenge is legit or a scary social scenario out of Wall-E, Peter Treadway is intent on cracking it. Previously, the Los Angeles designer gave the world electro-rollerskates to zoom across that last mile. Now he’s at it again with the Acton M Scooter, a compact electric model that folds down to the size of a wheeled carry-on bag.

“While we were developing our skates, people contacted us who were looking for a scooter,” Treadway tells Co.Design. Thinking it over, he realized that scooters have some advantages over skates. They’re easier and less physically demanding to learn and ride, and you can use them to transport items like groceries.

But most of the electric scooters on the market were expensive or looked like medical devices. Plus, you usually can’t use a scooter

simply to supplement your commute; there’s no stashing it away. In most cases, you have to make the entire trip on one, and then when you get to your destination, you have to park it outside. Treadway thought he could do better.

Enter the Acton M Scooter, which weighs only 70 pounds and is now available for $999 pre-order. The scooter, which can be ridden standing up or sitting down, isn’t a speed demon--it maxes out at 12 miles per hour--but that’s plenty, as it’s not meant to be your go-to means of transport. It’s small enough to easily load into your trunk and can range 15 miles on a single two-hour charge of its lithium-ion battery.

“Because it’s so portable, the M Scooter opens up a major transportation bottleneck, allow-ing a commuter to take the scooter through the ‘no trans land’ of indoor spaces where ve-hicles aren’t allowed,” says Treadway. “Whether riding through the neighborhood, running errands at a nearby store, or driving to a big event, the M Scooter is so compact you can always have it with you.

The Acton M Scooter is currently on Kickstart-er, having raised nearly $70,000 as of writing with a couple days to go.