At NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program Spring 2008 show, graduate students were exhibiting some interesting and unusual projects. Like Oscar G. Torres’s Helios Power Tree, for instance. The leaves are constructed from thin solar cells that are all connected to a battery at the tree’s base from the branches and trunk. The battery uses solar power to charge and powers blue lights around the tree. There are USB outlets on the base.

The idea is that the tree would sit in a public space so that people can use the solar energy that it collects to charge any of their USB-powered gadgets. Money may not grow on trees, same with gadgets, but it turns out that juice to power those gadgets can grow on trees.

Pioneer recently unveiled a new 1080p home theater projector designed for its Elite line and enhanced with the company’s KURO display technology. It is known as the Pioneer Elite KURO Projector and you’ll find it pricing around $9,000.

The Pioneer Elite KURO Projector was designed specifically for the custom install market, offering Pioneer’s KURO display technology for “deep black levels and rich colors.” This technology is featured in the projector’s multiple viewing modes. It also offers dual HDMI 1.3 support.

Creative has doubled the gigabytes in their Shuffle-rival, the MuVo T200. The PMP had previously only been available in 2GB, but will now come in a 4GB version. The T200 has a compact 128 x 32 pixels 65k color display. With a non-replaceable rechargeable battery, Creative is promising up to 9hrs playback on a single charge.

Music is transferred via the built-in USB 2.0 plug, which also recharges it. MP3, WMA/WMA (DRM9) and Audible Format 2,3,4 files are supported, and Creative says that you can fit 133hrs of WMA-encoded music onto it. You also get an FM radio, with 32 preset slots and voice recording. No US price yet.

Of all the emotions we go through when playing games, frustration is probably the dominant one. Here, we have a psycological profile of the gamecube come to life. In the fall of 2003, Kathryn Elliot was asked to pick up a product, analyze the intricacies of color involved, then redesign it based on a dominant emotion associated with it. She chose Nintendo’s GameCube, so it was naturally going to depict frustration. She named it the Frustration Game Cube. Or Frube. It’s designed to aggravate, portray and possibly even relieve a player’s frustration, with Frube’s many changes.

To highlight an element of frustration in the color scheme of the gaming device, she colored the GameCube purple and yellow, which are aggressive colors. The shape of Frube further irritates as it will no longer sit on a shelf easily. Some other design changes are asymmetrical position of the front plug-in panel and a jagged cut lid, which makes it difficult to figure out which side opens and how.

This is obviously the Hamburglar’s getaway vehicle. Frankly, I’m surprised we don’t see this kind of thing more often, since Harley’s are a symbol of the American dream. Judging by the hoardes of obese Fast Food enthusiasts out there, the only thing more American is obesity. Which makes this a much desired vehicle.

Hamburger enthusiast Harry Sperl of Florida took a look at his Harley and his collection of burger collectibles. This is the result. The Hamburger Harley. Let the fatties begin fighting over it, while Grimace and Ronald laugh hysterically. It’s got all the fixings, melted cheese, lettuce, tomato, buns and patty. The top bun flips up to access to the seat, and the handlebars have a tray with a burger and fries.

Our favorite little Star Wars droid is like Rodney Dangerfield. He gets no respect. They make laundry baskets in his likeness, even soy sauce bottles. When will they give the droid some proper respect? Not today. Here is the latest R2 item. An ice bucket with Han Solo in Carbonite ice cubes. They managed to diss Han with this one as well.

Great for a geek BBQ. R2 can serve up the ice and Han can keep your drink cool. This will make you the head geek at any event. It’s available for pre-order for about $33. It may even distract Jabba enough so you can rescue the real Han in Carbonite.

We are living in the YouTube generation right now where seemingly everyone is putting videos online of themselves or friends doing stupid things, signing or otherwise making a complete ass of themselves. To facilitate the ease of capturing video for online use lots of specialized, low cost video cameras have popped up and the latest is from Creative.

Creative has introduced the Vado Pocket Video Cam that retails for $99.99. The camera can be had in silver or pink colors to suit the guys and the ladies. According to Creative the Vado is dramatically lighter and thinner than other cameras on the market and can still capture high-quality video.

iTunes has officially started offering HBO series episodes available for download online through iTunes. This is a welcome announcement for many who would love to get episodes of the Sopranos, The Wire and Flight of the Conchords onto their PMP’s, but it comes at a price.

The price is actually what makes this announcement most interesting. Apple, who seems to have previously been with the belief that all series shows are priced equally, seems to have made a concession with HBO. The series episodes of the Sopranos is priced at $2.99 each, which is a whole dollar more than the usual $1.99 rate for a TV show.

Nintendo has announced the launch of its WiiWare game download service for the Nintendo Wii. This launch comes almost a year after Nintendo announced the WiiWare game development platform last June. If you’ve hooked up your Wii game console to the Internet you can connect to the Wii shop channel, buy some Wii points and start downloading some new games online.

The Wii points exchange rate is at $1 USD to 100 Wii points and the online games run from 500 to 1,500 Wii points each with six games initially available. The service offers games built my independent developers that they can then post and sell through the Wii Shop Channel. The initial game lineup is different in the U.S. than those launching in Japan with the single exception of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As a King, which launches in both.

We’ve seen our share of concept mice here at the Brick, but this one tends to hold your eye and make you pause. It looks somewhat sexy, yet unfinished. It’s almost prententious. The City mouse is designed by d-Vision and has a shape that’s supposedly much more in harmony with how we use our hands.

The design means more precise movement and fewer repetitive stress injuries. As far as anyone can tell, you don’t slide this thing around on your desk. You tilt it, rocking the curved bottom to move your arrow. It’s nice. I like it. I would rock it’s curved bottom, for sure.

Here is a laptop on some serious steroids. The Eurocom D901C Phantom-X has more muscle then is good for it’s battery life, which is a mere hour. Some features include: Quad Core Xeon X3360 2.8GHz processor, 1.5TB of storage space (three SATA-300 drives), 8GB DDR2-800 RAM, Blu-ray burner and a 17″ display. As far as looks, it’s pretty average though.

If you have deep enough pockets, you’ll want to check this laptop out. Just be careful you don’t throw your back out lugging this 12 pound beast. Judging by Eurocom’s other products, it will likely cost you about $3,500.

The Magnavox and Sylvania branded Funai NB500 Blu-ray players have been spotted at Walmart. A number of Walmarts apparently. The NB500 is a Profile 1.1 Blu-ray player and is priced at a fairly reasonable $298. It’s got HDMI version 1.3, HD audio codec’s, and DVD upscaling.

Yes, these are low end players, and already somehow outdated, but the price being what it is, it’s going to get it’s share of buyers. We’re not really sure what you can expect performance-wise, but if any of you brave souls should buy one, do let us know in comments.

Keyboards are mostly made out of plastic, which means that with few exceptions, they aren’t very durable and they aren’t very pretty. Which is why this shiny keyboard caught your attention. That’s exactly what Enermax wanted to do with it’s KB006U keyboard. It’s constructed from aluminum, so you are not going to want to abuse it by slamming a hand into it after losing to your opponent in a game.

The KB006U keyboard will be available in silver and black, at least in Japan on May 18th. It also includes a few USB 2.0 ports to hook up more peripherals. No word on price yet.

Google has announced that they will launch Friend Connect, a new service that will allow any site to be turned into a social network. No charge. Basically, Google wants to turn the internet into one huge, universal social profile. Google wanted to tap into the hundreds of millions of users that participate in social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

But when you’re Google, you don’t make a competing site and then see what happens, you launch a service that turns the internet itself into one humongous social networking platform which can be used by anyone, with no charge.

D-Link, which first introduced the DSM-750 back in September, is now making this device available for purchase at around $330. It is essentially a set-top HD Extender for Windows Media Center.

The DSM-750 lets you play and display music, photos, movies, online content and live/recorded television on connected televisions throughout the house. You can get the full details on this device after the jump.