Morphield Is A Hot Mess Of Wiring, Also Really Cool

In case you missed MB Labs’ demo of their project for the Red Bull creation contest last Sunday night, the page describing their build is up and is giving us at Hackaday a run for our money.

The Morphield consists of a piece of fabric stretched over a frame, itself hiding 135 solenoid-controlled balloons that move the field instead of playing soccer by moving the ball. These solenoids are controlled by a wiimote, allowing players to manipulate the terrain of the field and hopefully guide a ball into their opponent’s goal.

In addition to creating a worthy competitor to Hackaday’s own Minotaur’s Revenge,  MB Labs also released an Arduino library and an API so the Morphield can be repurposed for other games, kinetic art installations, and – we’re hoping – a gigantic, soft version of a pin art display.

When the guts of MB Labs’ Morphield was revealed on the Red Bull Creation live stream, the only words that showed up in the chat window were ‘wow,’ ‘holy crap,’ and ‘amazing.’ We’ve got to agree; the guys put together a really cool game that will also be over once the Creation contest is over.

11 thoughts on “Morphield Is A Hot Mess Of Wiring, Also Really Cool

  1. I like the concept! Reminds me of something I was told when studying physics:
    Apparently, before the advent of computational power, scientists used balls rolling on stretched rubber membranes to simulate the path of charged particles in an electric field. Charged electrodes would be represented by plates clamped onto the membrane, which could be raised or lowered w.r.t to the main surface to represent their potential. Apparently this gives a decent analogy.

    1. If you think about it for a minute, it’s still a body moving in a field, just gravitational, not electric. Charge is nothing more than potential energy, so raising/lovering points on surface will let youu change charge. And nice sheet of rubber, tangent everywhere, will provide field modulation.

  2. We did make it by the deadline and Voting is NOW!

    If you liked it, please vote for use! we could use the vote!

    Harvey Moon from MB Labs
    PS. Thanks Hackaday for posting!

  3. Respect guys for posting our project. We didn’t have much time to follow the live streams but when we did we were always cracked up when your feed came on. Seems like a fun group. Best of luck in the competition.

    -Bill

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.