The Tempescope shows you tomorrow's weather by physically creating it
Another very cool item hidden within CEATEC, Japan's biggest tech show, was the Tempescope. The team behind it call it "an ambient physical display that visualizes the weather, inside your living room" -- it's an elaborate lit-up box that shows you tomorrow's weather in a very classy, oddly relaxing, way. To work out exact what kind of weather it should summon, the Tempescope pulls hourly forecasts from a wireless connection from a PC (future models could pretty easily pluck similar information from your smartphone), and once the 'scope knows what's happening, it'll try to create those meteorological conditions inside the sealed cuboid you see above. A combination of water and ultrasonics creates the cloudy vapor inside the box, while water can also be gathered at the top, and dripped down to create rain. LED lights at the top attempt offer up an estimation of either thunder or sunshine, depending on what's going down tomorrow.
The product of after-hours and weekend tinkering by a small team of three, it's been in development for a few years and now they plan to launch crowdfunding campaign early next year which, if successful, will pave the way for a professionally-finished, thoroughly modern weather vane. You can check their site for all the details -- and even the whole schematics for the thing, if you're feeling particularly productive.
