James Cameron’s Avatar is turning out to be a timely, rumored-to-be-half-a-billion-dollars project. Augmented reality, a real-time, interactive, 3-d experience (sort of like, well, actual reality) has been popping up everywhere.

Marc Owens, a designer-in-residence at London’s Design Museum, made this crazy piece of work which lets you see yourself as a virtual character walking around and doing stuff in the real world. Like this. Remember that episode? Anyway, point is, it’s some Twilight Zone-type mind-trip.

The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.

Like what, exactly? Shoot people? Fly? How many gamers asked for “Walking around London’s Design Museum Adventure in 3D” for XBOX last Christmas? Ok, ok, it looks cool. I’ll leave it to the pros to figure out what to do with it.
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Besides, who knows where it’ll be in 5 years? 10? Even the USPS is getting in on the AR frenzy as everyone and their mother’s mother struggles to find a practical use for this technology that seems like it should have a million.

For a certain sub-section of us, watching this clip is going to be a deeply nostalgic experience. This is Radiohead on SNL, shortly after Kid A came out, performing ‘Idioteque.’

There are a host of reasons that seeing this on TV in October 2000 blew our little minds (Thom’s freakout performance that borders on a religious experience, for one) but, for sure, a question on everyone’s mind at the time — what the hell is Jonny Greenwood plugging and unplugging on that thing, first of all, and is it, like, controlling our phone lines right now or what exactly, and could he please stop because, frankly, it’s making us a little nervous mainly predicated on the fact that, for real, we have never in our lives seen anything like that before?

Wonder no more. The thing inside that big, mysterious, walnut-cabinet thing is an analog sequencer — according to the website of the company who makes it, it’s a “system 8000 and rs200 sequencer” to be exact. In fact, this is the same company that Greenwood sought out to build him knock-off versions of one of his electronic instruments to use on tour. The instrument in question? An Ondes-Martenot, which was designed by a man named Maurice Martenot after he met Leon Termin, the creator of the theremin, closing the loop on one, big, extended electronic instrument family.

Does this help me at all in the realm of knowing how to use any of this stuff? Not really. For now, I’ll stick to what I know. Pocket stylophone, anyone? Mini theremin?

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A great find spotted on Secret Forts. Somehow, this makes a lot of sense. Stripped down to these 8-bit versions, you can still hear the beauty shine through. The title screen for Paranoid Android gets me thinking, too, about the possibilities in a Radiohead cartridge for NES. Can’t you see Thom Yorke as a videogame character?

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Spike Jonze and Max Records on set of Where The Wild Things Are

What’s that you’ve got there, Spike? A pair of Grados? Hey, just sayin’.

And while we’re on the subject, how about this wooden headphone amplifier from the Brooklyn company? I’m in love — a little extra ‘oomph’ in a beautiful package.