Hasta La Gadget!

Jedi trainees can stop wandering the neighborhood looking for a kindly old man or frog-like hermit to train them in the ways of the force. Uncle Milton’s new Star Wars The Force Trainer can help them hone their mind-object control skills. I’m no longer a kid, but I grew up with Star Wars and still secretly (well not so secretly now) wish I had Jedi mind skills.

The $99 product arrived in our offices last week, and I took it for a test drive earlier today. It takes AA batteries and three AAAs, but otherwise set-up is a no-brainer (get it?). The double AAs go in the base, which uses a fan to push a decorated ping-pong ball up a transparent tube. It communicates wirelessly with the adjustable headset, which features three sensors that ostensibly read your brainwaves and transmit the information back to the base. With the right kind of concentration (sit still, don’t hold your breath, and think about making the ball rise), you can make the fan blow harder (or softer) and send the ball up and down the tube. Training takes you from Padawan level to Jedi Master–Yoda is your audio coach throughout.

Virtually all promotion pictures and video show a boy with his hand stretched toward the device. This isn’t necessary, but a fair amount of concentration is. I didn’t break a sweat during the test drive, but I believe I may have, with Yoda’s help (he coaches you throughout), finally become a Jedi. The proof is in the video.

Check it out, after the jump.

Ever wanted to touch pudding without getting your hands yucky?

Back in 2007 we were the first to break the news on Bandai’s PuchiPuchi (プチプチ) toy. Puchipuchi in Japanese is the sound of a little pop as well as the name for bubble wrap, so the toy basically named itself! Designed to mimic both the sound and feeling of popping little plastic bubbles, the PuchiPuchi can be carried around as a key chain for popping.

Now Epoch, a kids’ toys company, has produced the “Sound-Touch Pudding” (サウンド触感・ツンドコプリン), a toy which kids can touch on the top and get the soft feeling of pudding without the mess. But as the name suggests, this is not just a tactile experience but an oral one too – touching the “pudding” triggers a cute female voice.

It comes in four colors/”flavours”, each one with a different voice, and is aimed at kids aged six and over. On sale from November 21, priced 680 yen ($7.40).

It’s taken nine whole months for this mental-stresser to go from CES show-stopper to household mainstay, but at long last, the only Mattel product we could ever recommend (with a straight face) to those with an age larger than 12 is finally shipping. In short, the Mindflex forces your brain — as in, that hunk of meat between your ears — to keep a ball suspended in the air, and if you’re thinking Matrix, you’re thinking correctly. Sort of. Hit the read link to get your own for $79.99, and make sure you do so before these things sell out and break the $1,000 mark on eBay. It’s almost the holidays, don’tcha know?

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Mattel’s Mindflex: now stressing brain muscles for $80 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Things have changed since I was a kid. Back at the end of the 1970s, while my brother was singing into a hairbrush in front of the mirror (thankfully he manned-up later in life), I was watching a Saturday morning TV spot on Industrial Light and Magic, the FX team behind Star Wars, demonstrating blue-screen shooting*.

Fast-forward thirty-something years and not only have hairbrushes become passé, but blue screens turned green and this magnificent future-tech is now available at home. Yoostar is a green-screen kit which comes complete with “studio-grade webcam” (whatever that is), green-screen, stand and remote control. Now, you could use this to make your own amazing films, but instead Yoostar wants you to defile the memories of great movies in your own virtual hairbrush/microphone game, and to this despicable end 12 movies scenes are included for your insertion pleasure.

Further, once you are bored of these, there is a whole marketplace where you can buy extra clips for $2 each. This appears to be very much like the cellphone ringtone market: overpaying for snippets. The Yoostar kit will cost $170 and has one saving feature. There are clips available from the best movie ever made, a movie I have seen almost 50 times. A movie whose dialog I know backwards. What is it? Here’s your clue:

Oh well, he’s very popular, Ed. The sportos and motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, dickheads – they all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude.

Product page [Yoostar via Uncrate]

*Yes, Saturday morning TV was a lot better back then.

There are probably two arguments to make about the Ratata. One is that kids shouldn’t play with guns, not even gun-shaped toys. The other is that kids are going to pretend to shoot each other anyway, and it’s better to do it with a rather lovely set of wooden blocks, out in the sun, than with an XBox controller locked away in a dark musty bedroom.

Ratata, by Tomm Velthuis, comes as a playset; eleven chunks of precision-cut wood in a box. These slot together to make a “full-sized machine gun”. I would have loved this as a kid. As it was I was always disappointed that my toy guns didn’t come apart so I could copy the guys in movies and “strip my piece” in the jungle. In the end, I always did manage to break the toys into pieces, but they would never go back together quite the same way. Available soon.

Product page [By Tomm via Oh Gizmo!]