So there you are, walking down the street, when you hear a voice in your head. And instead of the regular voice, the one that tells you that you want a cheeseburger or that you should buy more video games, this one is an unfamiliar one telling you to watch a new TV show. Are you going crazy? Perhaps, but that’s not the cause of this. Nope, it’s just a new form of advertising. Awesome!

Yes, there’s a new add in Soho in Manhattan that uses a speaker beaming down an “audio spotlight” that only you can hear, making it sound like it’s coming from inside your own head. Is nothing sacred? If advertisers can start beaming sound into our heads from afar, what’s next? In-dream advertising? I weep for the future.

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The Portable PC Theater probably won’t replace your PC, even if you do use it as a media center. It will come in handy, though, if you want a computer that you can tote around and take to show friends whatever hot video is going around the web. Instead of a monitor, it has a detachable projector up top that’s between stereo speakers, and all the cables tuck away inside the machine when you pack it up into its tight little package that’s only a few DVD cases wide.

It’s a cool concept, and a whole lot prettier than a projector taped to a DVD player. But it really works about the same. Designed by Jin Woo Han, the Portable PC Theater looks to be a concept for a Microsoft shuttle.

Outdoor types who are into extreme sports: listen up. You don’t have to rely on some wired-up coat that controls your MP3 player when there’s a helmet that can do it for you. Hammacher Schlemmer has a winter sports helmet with Bluetooth headphones built in. The transmitter wirelessly connects to an iPod sitting safely and snugly in your coat pocket while you whip down the trail listening to your favorite hard-rockin’ granola-lovin’ music mix.

Made of ABS plastic and polycarbonate foam for the liner, your noggin is protected should you slip and fall, and the classic black design tells everyone your helmet is cooler than theirs. Listening to music while having fun? Great idea. $300 for a helmet that keeps you from hearing someone screaming at you to get out of the way? Not a great idea.

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The race to build a working and dependable scramjet is happening all the world over — the United States, China, Australia and who knows who else all want one. DARPA’s HTV-3X, also known as Blackswift, is an unmanned scramjet-powered plane that may take to the skies as soon as 2012, hitting speeds of up to Mach 6. Why the rush? Planes flying with scramjet engines would be able to fly from New York to Tokyo in two hours. Certainly more enticing to the nations of the world, a missile using a scramjet would be able to hit any target anywhere on the globe in a handful of minutes.

The fastest jet at the moment is the SR-71 Blackbird, which tops out at Mach 3.3. Scramjet engines have been tested at speeds of anywhere between Mach 6 and Mach 15. This amount of crazy acceleration is possible by sucking in air through the front of the engine, squeezing it into the thin sleeves of the combustion chambers until it superheats and subsequently igniting the fuel and generating thrust.

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The Kanguru USB Duplicator allows you to plug in up to 24 thumb drives at once and dictate what information goes onto all of them. An LCD on the unit helps you to know what you’re doing, and you can map hotkeys so that you can copy and format drives with the touch of a button.

The Kanguru USB Duplicator might not seem so useful if you’ve only got a thumb drive or two (just copy and paste you lazy bum!), but these days flash drives are replacing pamphlets. If you’ve got a press release or a portfolio that requires not only text but large images as well, handing out cheap, low-capacity thumb drives is a lot easier than printing it all out.

The cost might make you wish you were duplicating cash, though: $3,000 for a Kanguru

Kanguru

The Digital Veil is an art piece by Soomi Park that combines black and white flash animations with a wearable LCD screen. The wearer’s face is visible through the white parts of the animations and obscured by the black areas, so onlookers are presented with a distorted face that’s always shifting. The wearer can randomly change what images are displayed by making noise toward a pin microphone, as the animations are saved to different levels of volume.

The other model seen above to the right is wearing another piece of Soomi Park’s, a set of LED-tipped eyelash prosthetics that raise questions about the fetish-like obsession with large, or “bedroom,” eyes in Korea and the lengths women go to get them, including plastic surgery.

Soomi Park is a designer and student at International Design School of Advanced Studies in Seoul, South Korea.

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