This hack makes the virtual real by displaying your video game character’s health meter as a column of illuminated water.
The build video, which you’ll find embedded after the break, is really quite remarkable. The column is a clear piece of pipe anchored at one end by hand-tightened plumbing drain fittings. This allows [Bfayer] to attach a flexible bladder which he constructed for the project. An actuator pushes a hinged board up against the bladder to raise and lower the water level in the tube.
Alone that’s pretty impressive, but [Bfayer] went the extra mile and then some. He uses a four-way fitting at the bottom of the meter. One fork connects to the bladder, another allows air to be injected using an aquarium pump. The bottom of the fitting has a clear window so that an RGB LED array can shine into the water which was doped with highlighter ink to pick up the colored glow. To pull the whole thing together he coded the custom control interface seen above.
[via Reddit]
Wow! That is beautiful! Very nice work.
Doped with highlighter ink to pick up the uv and fluoresce, tonic water works quite similar. The bubbles add a lot to picking up the colour.
Very clean work, and a fantastic video.
I’ll need to see if I can finagle some funds at work to do something similar.
oo….very nice. add quinine and use UV led. instant fluorescence
That is the coolest useless machine ever
What do you mean useless, they should install these in hospitals!
THATS TERRIBLE….(ly funny)
Very beautiful!
Health bar?
No, I don’t think so. It’s blue. This is OBVIOUSLY mana.
RGB, and you can make the gradient anything you want.
Wow I’m impressed how neat the whole thing is :)
http://i.imgur.com/SEvHA.jpg
Stop reading this site then.
it wasn’t intended as praise?
Relax, it’s standard troll bait.
its very impressave and nice idea! … but i garentee you that window on the bottom will rupture
Don’t see why. There’s really not that much pressure on it.
watter is very heavy … constant change in flow and that has all the weight directly over it
not to mention epoxy can only take so much changes in stress
Epoxy is used all the time for these kinds of things. Furthermore, if you looked at how the window is installed, you’d see the pressure is pushing the window against the fitting it was glued to. Finally, if that tube were 10 ft tall and full, the water would only be exerting 4.3 psi — you can seal that with your hand.
I’d be more concerned about the bag busting open.
That is very impressive! I am amazed by the adjustment speed! Very good job!
The adjustment speed is because the video is running at 3X normal speed. It’s actually slower.
Corner of the video says Speed: 1x while moving and 2x while dicking with settings.
If offered as a kit I would diffidently buy one or at least the software.
This has moved up to the top of my project list. Very well done! The response time is impressive. The durability of the bag would be my only concern.
nice response time, how does the bag hold up under repeated compressions? hope it doesn’t spring a leak.
I have half an idea it’d be better to use a bladder that variably fills with air, to displace water up and down the tube. That way the water isn’t held in a bag, it’s held in a solid tank at the bottom. If the bag breaks it just means the machine stops working, rather than flooding anything.
Music equalizer? couple of those tubes and ur set to go. Nice work Mike.
thats what i was thinking. i am thinking 7 of them. and in-between them putting a steady stream of water in a tube, with a speaker next to the stream, so you can see it… i don’t know how that would work thoe.
This is a really sweet effect. Nice build and very good video!
I love this.. I have been wanting to spruce up my office/battlestation.. going to build some lighted movie poster boxes to house some game posters… This would be awesome to mount under my desk so just the tube comes through.. I see he used an tconfig to get the health level from terraria.. but do the major game engines have a way to hook into them for this kind of information? or would I have to make profiles for each game I play and figure out where the health level is stored in RAM and monitor it there?
I bet you could do the monitoring with cheatengine somehow,
You could also make screenshots and figure out the amount of health by looking at the pixels or using ocr. Might not be as fast, but fast enough.
now…. only needs mana and stammina metters… =P
Awesome stuff!
But I can’t believe nobody asked that yet: What’s the name of the game in the video? :)
Terraria, it says it in the management ui he made.
Really, now I saw it. I just skipped through the video looking for subtitled info :)
Thank you!
Awesome… Can make it link to your bank and show how close to the red you are. For a video game its kind of hard to look away from the screen to see it, good visual in a game room, I would still do it. make it so your chair is at the right comfortable height when you have full health, and drop your seat as you loose health, this will make it really noticeable when you need to get health. plus autoit and pixelsearch function(to see if there is a color a certain spot), possible to get banned)
Reblogged this on Julio Della Flora.
How or did you set up your program to correspond with the health of all games?
Make it look like Diablo’s life and Mana bar, and I will buy.
awesome
I’d rather have a video-game-style bar that displayed how much real-life health I had.