Oddity Central

These Experimental Glasses Stop You from Staring at Screens
Multi-Talented Artist Creates Incredibly Detailed Artworks with Kitchen Salt
Company Creates World’s First Functional Meteorite Handguns

These Experimental Glasses Stop You from Staring at Screens

Posted: 03 Jun 2016 12:20 PM PDT

With so much information available at our finger tips, at all times, it’s no wonder that most of us spend more time staring at our smartphones or computer screens than we do interacting with other real-life people. Some of us are so addicted to modern technology that we come up with all kinds of crazy ways to keep ourselves from using our phones or laptops all the time. One such solution is this pair of glasses that become opaque whenever you look at a screen.

The experimental glasses, called “Screeners”, were thought up by 28-year-old Chino Kim, as a way to rid his life of screens. "I’m tired of this mainstream tech culture that’s obsessed with things like virality and monetization and locking down our eyeballs for as long as possible," he told VICE Motherboard at the recent NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program Spring Show. "I feel like the guy in A Clockwork Orange with my eyes clamped open. The Screeners address this head-on and they fit into my general interest in poking fun at the things I find alienating about everyday life by turning them on their heads."

Screeners-glasses

Posted: 03 Jun 2016 08:04 AM PDT

Croatian artist Dino Tomic usually works with conventional materials like pencils and paper, but his latest project has him spreading kitchen salt on a black background to create insanely detailed portraits and Indian mandalas.

The Norway-based salt wizard, who works as an art teacher and tattoo artist, starts off with a large black canvas and uses a plastic bottle or a paper cone to painstakingly squeeze out the grainy mineral until he completes his mindblowing masterpieces. Believe it or not, Tomic just recently started working with salt, as a way of keeping busy while relaxing his wrist, which had started to hurt from too much hand-drawing.

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Posted: 03 Jun 2016 06:36 AM PDT

American company Cabot Guns has recently unveiled a pair of “extra-terrestrial pistols” made almost entirely from a piece of Gibeon meteorite that crashed on Earth approximately 4.5 billion years ago and was discovered in Namibia, in the 1830’s.

“It hasn’t been done before and that’s the kind of thing that drives me,” Rob Bianchin, founder of Cabot Guns, said last year, when the company first announced its intention to forge twin 1911 handguns out of Gibeon. “Meteor is rare, more so than terrestrial precious metals and I wanted to create a set of guns that were formed from a material that had intrinsic value,” he added.

For the last five months, the expert gun makers at the respected company that many refer to as the “Rolls Royce of firearms” have been hard at work, trying to cut as many necessary pieces from the expensive lump of meteorite. It was a tougher job than most people realize, or as Bianchin puts it “we were sweating bullets. That first cut, when we sliced the meteorite chunk in two, was really scary.” Luckily, the team had some experience after using Gibeon to craft meteorite grips for one their standard 1911 handguns. That first success inspired them to push the envelope and create the world’s first meteorite firearms.

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