Here’s cosplayer Nona Neon with her badass Gipsy Danger costume. As you can see Nona adapted the hunky form of Pacific Rim’s lead mecha to suit her body. She made the suit out of EVA foam plus various household objects, including a strainer for the chest piece.
Nona said she based the EVA foam parts on papercraft templates posted by members of the prop maker community The 405th Infantry Division, modifying them as needed. She also made a replica of Gipsy Danger’s chain sword. It took her a total of six months, a lot of trial and error, and about $175 (USD) to finish the costume.
Link with your partner and pilot your browser to Nona’s Facebook page for more on her cosplay.
Japanese urban art shop Mountain Graphics pays tribute to its country’s honored tradition of shoot ‘em ups with this in your face amalgam. How many games can you identify? I see Twinbee, Star Force, Gradius and Xevious. Are Raiden and DoDonPachi here somewhere?
Mountain Graphics is selling the Star Soldius t-shirt for ¥4,500 (~$44 USD). I’m not sure if the shop ships its items outside Japan, but if it doesn’t you can always use middlemen like White Rabbit Express to get the shirt for you.
After preparing the deceased crow’s body through procedures that would make Saw look like Teletubbies had the bird been alive, Allis cut a hole on the bird’s head, set a third crow eye on the exposed skull with clay and then made an eye ring using Apoxie Sculpt. As a final touch, she had the crow perch on a copy of A Feast for Crows.
Warg this way to Imgur to see Allis’ grisly photos of her process. If you don’t want to see the icky parts, work your way down the gallery slowly. You’ll know when to stop, because you’ll hear yourself screaming.
A few years ago Ben Heck made a breath-operated controller to substitute for the kick drum pedal of the Guitar Hero drum set, allowing a wheelchair-bound player to rock out. This time, the master modder made his own USB-based pedals to give him added control options when playing video games on the PC.
Ben’s pedals are run by a Teensy board. His computer will recognize them as a keyboard, making it easy to map commands in games. Ben made it so he can map up to two commands per pedal: the first command is activated with a slight press and the second command is triggered by pressing harder on the pedal.
Watch Ben build them the video below. Skip to around 15:25 to see the finished pedals.
Don’t have Ben’s hands to help your feet? Don’t worry. There are commercially available PC foot pedals like the Stinkyboard, the Fragpedal and the Alto Edge Infinity.
Prove that you’re an Ace Attorney fan with Fangamer’s Objection! t-shirt. Designed by Maximo Lorenzo, the shirt features a silhouette of Phoenix Wright doing what he does best. It also comes with a 1″ button that resembles the game’s all-important attorney’s badge. It shows that you are a defense attorney…’s friend.
Present $23 (USD) at Fangamer to get the t-shirt and button. Get the Attorney Pin from the store as well if you want a more realistic replica of the badge.
Last year we saw a drone camera system that streamed live 3D video that can be viewed through the Oculus Rift headset. Diego Araos wrote a program that not only lets you use the Rift to view the feed from a Parrot AR.Drone 2′s camera, it also uses control the drone through the headset.
Diego’s program OculusDrone taps into the Rift’s head tracking feature to control the AR.Drone 2 remotely. However, you need to use a keyboard command to order the AR.Drone to takeoff (Enter) and land (Escape).
Nick’s replicas may not be exactly the same as their virtual counterparts – Nick made the pistol and the rifle months before Titanfall came out – but they still look awesome and even have a few moving or detachable parts.
Have a closer look at Nick’s arsenal in these videos:
Call in a browser and head to Nick’s Flickr page for more shots of the weapons.
Just because virtual reality displays let us interact with 3D interfaces doesn’t mean there isn’t room for the ol’ two-dimensional view inside of them. Oliver Kreylos, a developer who’s been working with 3D software for nearly 30 years, recently demonstrated a Virtual Network Computing (VNC) client that sends a 2D feed of a desktop computer to a 3D virtual reality environment.
Oliver’s VNC client allows him to open and interact with any number of 2D desktops on a virtual reality environment. Why would you want to do this? Well for one, you can reverse telecommute: imagine working in an island paradise environment while you’re actually in the office. Because you can (theoretically) open multiple desktops at once, the setup also supercharges multitasking and group meetings. You can watch a video walkthrough while playing a 3D game, look at a hundred fullscreen documents at once, have multiple large video chat screens like they do in science fiction flicks and more.
As you’ll see in Oliver’s demo video, developers can also make 2D applications that interact with the 3D environment. In his demo he measured a table that was in his virtual space and then used a Razer Hydra to send those measurements to Microsoft Excel on his 2D desktop.
We really don’t know how far the rabbit hole goes with this one. Note that the video below may cause dizziness because of the constant change in perspective. It almost made me throw up to be honest. I’m ill-equipped for the future.
Head to Oliver’s blog for more on his custom program. I wonder if you can emulate this feature on the same computer that’s running the VR environment. That would be more useful, although it would probably take a beefy computer to pull it off. Also, watching Oliver’s demo, I can almost – almost! – visualize a four-dimensional space, where you can fit infinite 3D environments. Now I’m really dizzy.
We can’t enter the digital world like the Flynns did just yet, but thanks to the Oculus Rift, you may be able to experience what it’s like to duke it out in a light cycle. Custom video game machine maker Luis Sobral aka The Arcade Man made an arcade game featuring Tron’s famous vehicles based on the virtual reality headset.
Luis calls his project RiftCycles, a game where players take part in an “immersive virtual reality light cycle battle, fighting in an arena with their bikes until “deresolution”.” To make the experience more authentic, Luis also built two light cycle models out of cardboard and metal for players to ride on.
Watch out for CLU and head to Luis’ website for more on RiftCycles.
Here’s a worthy weapon to bring to a pillow fight, an officially-licensed Thwomp pillow. If you’re wondering why Nintendo would bother releasing a merchandise for a semi-living obstacle, remember that in some Mario games these dudes are flat out invincible. If they could move Bowser wouldn’t be king.
You can order the Thwomp pillow from ThinkGeek for about $35 (USD) or from Amazon for $25. Or you could always just paint a cinder block and sit on that instead.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
