Adidas is getting into augmented reality in a unique way — taking some of their most iconic shoes and stamping them with an AR code on the tongue. Holding these shoes up to a web camera will them cause the 3d Adidas Neighborhood to bloom right out of the shoe. Just…I don’t know, watch the video.

As time goes on, Adidas will be releasing games specifically tailored for this AR Pack. Use your shoe as a phone? Running game like you used to do with Nintendo PowerPad (known in Japan as Family Trainer)? Maybe I don’t understand how this is actually supposed to work. I guess I’ll just watch the Youtube video again and keep quiet. As for you, click over to the Adidas site for a preview of the AR experience. Download a special code and go to town. As it says on the site, however, the only way to get the full nine yards is to grab a pair of the shoes.

iPhone users – here’s a new way to customize your home screen. This iPhone Font designed by Anthony Burrill seems easy enough to implement and looks great. Click over to the site and watch the short instructional video on Youtube.

(spotted on supernews)

Let’s talk about Javelin for a second. Javelin is from Brooklyn. Javelin may strike you as typical hipster B.S. with a capital B. The key, though, is that Javelin is also really, really fun; fun of the old-school, weird, dusty cassette tapes played through boomboxes at the block party variety.

I just saw these guys do their thing last night, and props to them – with only two people, one of them on the mic, and one of them bouncing around banging drumsticks, they manage to set it off. As of this interview last August, they were performing by broadcasting their sounds with an FM transmitter and setting up with 20 boomboxes all tuned to the same frequency which is TOTALLY AWESOME. I don’t know if that’s how they got their 80’s-jams-captured-from-space-and-rebroadcast sound last night, but it would make perfect sense. You can get some free downloads at their site, dollarbinsofthefuture.com.

The idea of a $700-800 computer tablet had thrown me before – more than anything, I didn’t give it much thought. But it’s on now. Apple’s in there like swimwear (we think, as of 11:40 EST). Apple? Tablet? Applet? The technology has a lot of potential applications – video, photo display, etc. – but it’s garnered a bulk of the attention based around what it could do for the e-book market.

What’s the deal with this, though, anyway? The guy at HP uses Star Trek as an example – on the show, slate computers were de riguer. The thin tablets were all around, their touch screens ready to input or display information sans keyboard. Sci-fi is now sci-reality.

On that note, consider this offering from BookBook. Currently, it’s meant for a Macbook but, if we’ll all have tablets around the house within a few years in lieu of worn-in hardcovers, it’d be nice to wrap them up in something that looks this familiar.

This beautiful contraption spotted on Benedict Radcliffe’s site. I had to do some digging and, in the process, uncovered this great post by Animal New York (pictures theirs and Radcliffe’s) on the event in which it was featured – Joyride, an art event included in the Bicycle Film Festival.

Two cultures that seem to intermingle as it is (biking and graffiti) now have a tangible symbol of their alliance. Careful using that on the street, though, cause ‘graffiti bike’ brings one incident in particular to mind – this Wired article from 2007 gives a good rundown.

In summary, kid makes chalk-spraying bike. Kid starts website (BikesAgainstBush.com). Kid is a mad genius, apparently, designing the website so that users could submit messages, which would transmit to his laptop via cellphone, which would transmit to his chalk-spraying device, which would spray said messages on the ground while he rode it during the Republican National Convention. None of it played out this way, though, because he got arrested in what amounts to a really messed-up situation. Bummmmmmout.

The thought of graffiti art as an iPhone app has a really hollow, corporate ring to it (‘Tag’ the back of your McDonald’s cup to build your ‘street cred’ with the McNugget Buddies and the rest of the Happy Meal Gang…but don’t let Mayor McCheese ‘ketchup’ you in the act!).

But when the technology is in the hands of real street artists passionate about graf, it’s a lot more likely you’ll sit up and take notice. Created by Graffiti Research Lab, the app gives artists a chance to record and archive their designs on the fly, creating tags based on finger swipes and alternating thicknesses based on speed, rendering the whole thing in 360-degree 3-d images. Check out the above clip to see what I mean. Spotted on Freshness Mag.

equipment at the Polaroid film factory, rescued by The Impossible Project

While on the subject of Wallpaper, there’s an interesting piece about Polaroid right now on their site that’s worth a look. Apparently, some aren’t quite ready to go quietly into the good night. As you might know, some time ago Polaroid shut down the instant film side of their operations, concentrating solely on digital and killing off a hugely nostalgic piece of camera history.

While others are ready to take Polaroid’s place with their own takes on instant photography (Fujifilm’s Instax stepped up to the plate nicely), it still didn’t seem right that a cultural icon this ingrained in our consciousness would simply stop making their trademark product.

Apparently, some dedicated fighters felt the same way. The Impossible Project is a collective of former employees dedicated to once again producing Polaroid instant film for use in vintage Polaroid cameras. Look for the film to come out again in 2010, and support their efforts at The Impossible Project’s site.