A few years ago, during a night out, I was introduced to a man in his early twenties that was the school acquaintance of a friend. During the general polite conversation that followed I asked him what he did for a living, to which he replied, “I’m a photographer.” I immediately found the subject interesting (I love photography) and started asking him lots of questions – what his main points of interest were, who he worked for, how he got into it – and after a few minutes it became evident that he wasn’t a photographer at all. In truth, he was a barman with a good camera who liked taking photographs. I was a little confused (and slightly insulted) by the fact that this man had ‘bent the truth’ in an attempt to appear more successful or creative – I’ve done plenty of bar work over the years and…

Living in a society with the increasingly hectic, overstimulated and restless environment, have you ever wished to slow down time or at least the perception of it? A Germany student named Lorenz Potthast felt exactly this way. As a result, he created “the Decelerator Helmet”.

The Decelerator Helmet is a piece of avant-garde headgear that allows the wearer a perception of the world in slow motion.

Inside the helmet is a camera with video signal and a netbook. The netbook slows down information from the camera by way of a program Potthast wrote in vvvv. Outside the helmet hangs on a Head-Mounted Display. It receives the speed of the video stream regulated by the netbook and thus is capable of mirroring the images the user sees on the video glasses in the inside of the helmet for people on the outside to see. To actually determine the speed of the video stream, a remote control is necessary.  This…