Digital Dining With Charged Chopsticks

August 16, 2018 by Brian McEvoy 14 Comments

You step out of the audience onto a stage, and a hypnotist hands you a potato chip. The chip is salty and crunchy and you are convinced the chip is genuine. Now, replace the ordinary potato chip with a low-sodium version and replace the hypnotist with an Arduino. [Nimesha Ranasinghe] at the University of Maine’s Multisensory Interactive Media Lab wants to trick people into eating food with less salt by telling our tongues that we taste more salt than the recipe calls for with the help of electrical pulses controlled by everyone’s (least) favorite microcontroller.

Eating Cheetos with chopsticks is a famous lifehack but eating unsalted popcorn could join the list if these chopsticks take hold and people want to reduce their blood pressure. Salt is a flavor enhancer, so in a way, this approach can supplement any savory dish.

Smelling is another popular machine hack in the kitchen, and naturally, touch is popular beyond phone screens. You have probably heard some good audio hacks here, and we are always seeing fascination stuff with video.

Need A Hand? How About Two?

December 5, 2017 by James Hobson 22 Comments

A helping hand goes a long way to accomplishing a task. Sometimes that comes in the form of a friend, and sometimes it’s a pair of robotic hands attached to your arm.

Italian startup [Youbionic] have developed this pair of 3D printed hands which aim to extend the user’s multi-tasking capacity. Strapped to the forearm and extending past the user’s natural hand, they are individually operated by flexing either the index or ring fingers. This motion is picked up by a pair of flex sensor strips — a sharp movement will close the fist, while a slower shift will close it halfway.

At present, the hands are limited in their use — they are fixed to the mounting plate and so are restricted to gripping tasks, but with a bit of practice could end up being quite handy. Check out the video of them in action after the break!

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The Most Immersive Pinball Machine: Project Supernova

April 8, 2016 by Moritz Walter 30 Comments

Over at [Truthlabs], a 30 year old pinball machine was diagnosed with a major flaw in its game design: It could only entertain one person at a time. [Dan] and his colleagues set out to change this, transforming the ol’ pinball legend “Firepower” into a spectacular, immersive gaming experience worthy of the 21st century.

A major limitation they wanted to overcome was screen size. A projector mounted to the ceiling should turn the entire wall behind the machine into a massive 15-foot playfield for anyone in the room to enjoy.

With so much space to fill, the team assembled a visual concept tailored to blend seamlessly with the original storyline of the arcade classic, studying the machine’s artwork and digging deep into the sci-fi archives. They then translated their ideas into 3D graphics utilizing Cinema4D and WebGL along with the usual designer’s toolbox. Lasers and explosions were added, ready to be triggered by game interactions on the machine.

To hook the augmentation into the pinball machine’s own game progress, they elaborated an elegant solution, incorporating OpenCV and OCR, to read all five of the machine’s 7 segment displays from a single webcam. An Arduino inside the machine taps into the numerous mechanical switches and indicator lamps, keeping a Node.js server updated about pressed buttons, hits, the “Lange Change” and plunged balls.

The result is the impressive demonstration of both passion and skill you can see in the video below. We really like the custom shader effects. How could we ever play pinball without them?

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CES: Augmented Reality

January 9, 2010 by James Munns 7 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB-kZmq0syc]

I got my hands on a set of augmented reality glasses that were displayed with a Monkey-Ball style game. This wasnt anything too new as far as the augmented reality goes, however the glasses that were used with the game featured stereo cameras on the center of the outside of the lens, which allowed a true 3D augmented vision that you wouldn’t have to stare into a screen for. These glasses were still in the demo stage, but if they ever make it out into retail, I think that they would be exactly what could bridge AR from a fun toy to a useful tool. Another review video after the break.

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Multixylophoniomnibus

November 20, 2009 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

[Ania] wrote in to let us know her team had finished the Multixylophoniomnibus and that they have posted an extensive writeup about it. We covered this augmented xylophone when it was still in development at the beginning of this month. Originally they wanted to use mallets wrapped in tinfoil as switches that close when they contact the metal keys, something akin to matchbox cars as a switch. This plan was thwarted when they realized the paint surface insulated the metal keys. At this point they switched to piezo sensors which turned into an odyssey of trial and error to achieve a reliable input for the Arduino to monitor. In the end they got it working with around forty lines of code, interfacing six boxes containing a different type of noisemaker.

See the finished instrument played in the video after the break. Alas, the addition of the piezo sensors do impede the resonance of the xylophone keys, but we still like it! There’s something reminiscent of the beginning of Pink Floyd’s Money when this is played.

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