Pixelsumo is a blog about interaction, with an emphasis on play, installation, video game culture, playgrounds and toys. Written by Chris O'Shea.
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Posted July 26th 2007 under Alternative Reality, Toys
Following on from my previous posts on alternative perspectives, I am pleased to see the work in progress so far on Animal Superpowers (link 1, link 2) from RCA students Kenichi Okada and Chris Woebken.
“Experimental series of toys as sensory enhancements for kids to experience animal superpowers. Those 5 devices are special tools allowing kids to feel how like an animal or experience special extra qualities how they perceive the environment.”
“We believe curiosity and exploration is one of the major desires of children and our goal is not just to create a series of devices for exploration and curiosity that might be just fun for one afternoon. Much more we are interested in providing tools seeing the world through a different lens and to learn more about ourselves. We believe those devices could possibly create empathy with animals, experiencing what they experience as well as providing an interface to communicate with them”.
The toy devices are…
Bird - sense of direction with a head mounted solenoid compass
Ant - feeling like an ant seeing 50x through microscope antennas on your hands
Giraffe - a child to adult concerter changing your voice & perspective
Elephant - shoes picking up transmitting vibrations from fellows
Electric Eel - enhanced spatial vision through head mounted Theremin
At the moment they are early stage prototypes. Here are some photos. I hope that the work continues and I look forward to trying them out, if I can fit inside. Will report fully once I do.
More from Kenichi : Traces & Pixel Factory, EtchASound (with Seulki)
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