Hasta La Gadget!

This is the Catpanion Cube, a feline residence made by Instructables member/Aperture Science vet/cat slave Rachael Whitaker. I hear that when you place your cat inside, she’ll be simultaneously dead and alive, stuck inside the dimension that the Portal gun uses to generate shortcuts. When you place your dog inside, he’ll just poop in it.

Rachael made the Catpanion Cube out of foam padding and some fabric. She held the Cube’s walls together using pins and thread. The Cube doesn’t sing though.

Open a portal to Instructables to find out how to make your own Catpanion Cube. Your cat will know that you’ll incinerate her in her sleep if she ever misbehaves.

dominator24 moved to a new apartment and needed to do something about all the bare walls. They did what any geek would do, and decided to make something cool, instead of just buying another crummy IKEA fixture – a wall lamp based on the level signage from Portal’s test chambers.

It was a simple design since it had to be able to fit in the car (due to college, dominator24 moves every three months.) It also had to be cheap. He came up with the idea of using white cloth stretched over a wooden frame with LED rope backlighting.

The detailed drawings are made from cut out bits of duct tape – the black ones on front of the cloth, and the grey ones taped on back.. It’s a simple and cheap way to geek up your room. If you want to try making one for yourself, head on over to Instructables for the details.

[via geekcrafts]

Valve has a surprisingly varied staff roster. Mike Ambinder is the company’s very own experimental psychologist and he’s been outlining some of Valve’s work with biofeedback technology, including eye-motion controls for Portal 2 and perspiration-based gaming adjustments on Left 4 Dead. Mentioning these developments at the NeuroGaming Conference last week, Ambinder notes that both are still at an experimental stage, but that “there is potential on both sides of the equation, both for using physiological signals to quantify an emotion [and] what you can do when you incorporate physiological signals into the gameplay itself.”

In Left 4 Dead, test subjects had their sweat monitored, with values assigned to how much they were responding to the action. This data was fed back into the game, where designers attempted to modify (and improve) the experience. In a test where players had four minutes to shoot 100 enemies, calmer participants would progress normally, but if they got nervous, the game would speed up and they would have less time to shoot. When it came to the eye-tracking iteration of Portal 2, the new controls apparently worked well, but also necessitated separating aiming and viewpoint to ensure it worked. With Valve already involving itself in wearable computing, it should make both notions easier to accomplish if it decides to bring either experiment to fans. Venture Beat managed to record Ambinder’s opening address at the conference — we’ve added it after the break.

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Source: Venture Beat

I’ve been playing through BioShock: Infinite for the last couple of weeks, and one thought that kept popping into my head was what would happen if Elizabeth’s “tearing” ability let her access other video games? Well, illustrator Nick Minor (aka Radiant Grey) had the same thought, and came up with this Portal/BioShock Infinite mashup…

It really would be cool if you could hop through a tear and end up in a test chamber. Or better yet, escape from GLaDoS and Wheatley by jumping through to Columbia. Of course, then you’d have to deal with Mechanical Patriots and the Handyman, which make the enemies of Portal seem pretty tame by comparison.

Pick up an 11×17 print of this brilliant mashup over at Radiant Grey’s Etsy shop for $9.99(USD). Not that it really needs saying, but that version comes without the giant watermark in the middle of Elizabeth’s back.

3D printed items have become increasingly popular over the past couple of months as we recently have seen 3D printed guns, gummy versions of yourself and even a 3D printed skull implant. Today’s 3D printed item not only could be considered ridiculously cool for a large number of gamers, but it also doubles as a source of light, making it a complete necessity in your home.

A 3D printed version of Portal’s GlaDOS as a lamp was created by instructables user Dragonator. The 3D printing includes all of the wiring that will allow for the lamp to move around like GlaDOS would, although its kinks are still being worked out and instructions are available if you’d like to just have this as a lamp.

Unfortunately, in building this GlaDOS lamp, we’re pretty sure you’ll have many a sleepless night as you keep one eye open just in case it decides to abduct you to complete some tests for science. Hopefully you happen to have a 3D printed Portal Gun lying around, or else those tests could be a tad on the difficult side.

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