Hasta La Gadget!

Growing up, few things on the planet would make me clean the house faster than a promise of Chuck E. Cheese for lunch after I was done with chores. Back in the day, Chuck E. Cheese was one of the biggest arcades around and you could eat pizza and spend coins on arcade games until you went broke.

The restaurant has announced that it will be trialing the Oculus Rift headset in a handful of locations for the next six weeks. Sadly, the trial doesn’t involve letting everyone try the VR gaming headset as a game. Rather it comes as part of a birthday package that puts kids into a virtual ticket booth rather than a real one.

In the virtual ticket grabbing booth, the kids will get to pick up virtual tickets to win prizes. The experience is built inside by the chain’s Ticket Blaster booths, which blow hundreds of tickets around that kids can catch and cash in, but instead of grabbing actual tickets, kids wearing the Oculus Rift grab virtual tickets with their head movements. This sounds like a pretty cool idea, though it’s too bad parents won’t get to try it out.

[via CNN]

We’ve seen all kinds of game controller plushies, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen one that can actually be used to play video games. Adafruit’s Becky Stern built the soft controller using their Flora Arduino-compatible platform and some conductive thread and fabric.

Even though Becky’s design looks like a squishy, oversize NES controller, your computer will recognize the plushie as a USB keyboard, so you can use it with any keyboard-based game. If you’re handy with stitching, perhaps you can modify Becky’s guide and make a plushie of your favorite controller. It would probably take a long time to build a full keyboard plushie though.

Make a plush browser and head to Adafruit for the full guide and parts list.

The tower of Pringles cans you’re looking at here isn’t the remnants of a week-long gaming marathon (though it could be). Instead, it’s a fully-functional musical instrument – assuming that you like slightly off-key, strange sounding tunes.

The functional sculpture was made by Brooklyn music production company Fall on Your Sword. It’s made of almost 250 green, red and yellow Pringles cans – and was rigged to play sounds when the containers are pressed on. It’s not clear how it works, but it sounds like it uses recorded sound samples, not steam. Here, check it out:

Okay, it’s not exactly the most ear-pleasing sound, but imagine what it would have sounded like if the cans still had potato chips in them.

[via designboom]

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.

(Video courtesy of Element14 and Newark)

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.

[via The Ben Heck Show via Ubergizmo]

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.

[via Fast Co. Design]