Wearable Controller For Your Paintball Tank

If you’re too frail to take the full impact of a paintball round let this tank serve as your surrogate. The camera perched on top of the platform feeds video back to the operator’s head-mounted display. Instead of using a joystick or other traditional controller, the user aims by looking around, with his or her head movements mimicked by the camera and barrel of the tank. It looks cooler than it sounds so jump with us after the break to see for yourself. If you’re playing against this thing, we’d recommend aiming for the camera lens.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3ZV3wMjneE]

11 thoughts on “Wearable Controller For Your Paintball Tank

  1. Looks like a prototype terminator tank. Pretty slow though so I wouldn’t consider it much of a threat unless it were uber quiet and could sneak up on you. Exposed wire also poses a robocop moment “these look important *RIP*”. No video of it’s terrain movement?

  2. Lag and drift seem to be the big barriers to usability here. You’d have to spend a lot more time re-engineering the turrent to make it turn fast enough to keep up with a person’s head movements.

  3. This is probably a prototype for a military application. I used to operate that robot platform in Iraq to disarm roadside bombs. Too bad a base model cost over $100K because I would like to see this at local paintball field.

  4. To clarify my original post: paint-or-pain is a game type in which the players are eliminated either when they run out of paint, or they can’t take the pain. I’ve never played it personally, but I’ve heard stories of people just unloading on one another with a box (containing 2000 rounds) at their feet.

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