Tee Schubert

Website ThinkGeek came up with The Personal Soundtrack Shirt as an April Fools' joke, but mouth-frothing customers demanded that they go ahead and make it. The shirt plays 20 different sound effects and music samples from a chest-mounted speaker. Using a wired remote, you can play cheering, crying, police sirens and so on. Better, you can choose your own 20 effects and load them into the shirt using an SD card. You can also connect the t-shirt directly to your personal media player. Imagine a rendition of ‘My Humps’ played from between your lovely lady (or gentleman) lumps. All the delicate electronics can be removed when it’s time to wash the tee.

Price: RMB 205. Web: www.thinkgeek.com

DSLomoR

When you spend thousands of kuai on a DSLR you expect accurate exposures and colours. But once you work out how to get them, life-like pictures can get a little dull. Enter the Lomo lens adaptor. These unassuming little rings allow you to mount Diana F+ super wide, fish eye, macro and telephoto lenses to Canon EOS and Nikon D series cameras. It’s a beautiful marriage – though one their parents may not approve of – between the quirks of plastic lenses and the ability to take hundreds of shots before choosing the shot you want to print.

Price: RMB 82. Web: www.lomographyasia.com

Espresso? Yesso.

Coffee machines tend to be either big and expensive or make pretty mediocre cups of Joe. The Twist harnesses the power of nitrous oxide (which I’ve been aware of since I was, like, 18), to blast hot water through coffee grounds or pods and create what Wired says is “excellent, creamy espresso,” as good as “what you’d get from a US$2,000 (RMB 13,660) countertop machine.” It even looks cool, with a forked spout that allows you to share with a friend. 

Price: RMB 1,160. Web: www.mypressi.com 

    Party-Shot, Right in the Face

Face recognition software always freaks me out. If a robot can recognise your smile, it can recognise where to aim its death ray. Then again, doing stuff also freaks me out, so a camera that can scan a party using a swivel dock, find smiling faces and automatically take shots seems pretty handy. You could even use it to estimate the number of smiles at your party, and see if people were more miserable at someone else’s.

Price: RMB 1,024. Web: www.sonystyle.com

Microphone Home

Mikey sounds like an annoying American kid who dresses like a cowboy and talks too much. I’m probably thinking of Mike TV, from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Not only can you trust that the Mikey won’t steal rides on your magical teleportation-slash-shrinking device, he’s also a really good listener. The microphone plugs into the charge port of iPhones and most iPods, and uses the built-in voice memo function to record. The mic won’t give you professional quality recordings of live concerts or anything, but it does an excellent job with conversations and acoustic music.

Price: RMB 546. Web: www.bluemic.com

So Three Dimensional

Ever since James Cameron’s Avatar project, there’s been a retro revival in the future of 3D imagery. Fuji’s FinePix Real 3-D camera has dual lenses, like eyeballs, which it uses to capture and combine two separate images. There are three ways to view your 3D shots: you can pick up the RMB 3,415 Finepix Real 3-D V1 viewer, an eight inch digital photo frame; you can buy ‘lenticular’ prints, 5x7 inch for RMB 50 each (processed in Tokyo, needs a two week turnaround); or, probably the best option, check them out on your PC monitor, using nVidia’s RMB 1,360 3D Vision kit and a special new pair of 3D glasses. All the viewing options are expensive, but you do get 50 per cent more dimension than regular photos.

                                                                  Price: RMB 4,096. Web: www.fujifilm.com

Software: iPhone Apps

You can now practice the not so ancient art of the autotuner, Rap’s equivalent of yodelling, thanks to the I am T-Pain application. You can sing along to T-Pain, your own tracks, or just make your own a cappella recordings. Available from the iTunes store, US$3 (RMB 20).

Layar builds a notorised version of the world using the iPhone's GPS, camera and compass to identify where you are and connect you to the information you or others have chosen to associate with it. The web has captured a little bit more of the world. Available from the iTunes store, free.