Equipped with light sensors and LED strips, a team of ambitious geeks and gamers animated the space drones and arranged them in a game formation using a specially developed autonomous flight software.

On the ground the player sits on the laser gunner station which moves across rails and shoots laser beams. After 5 hits, the drones were taken down and out of the game.

The crew: Studio TinMan, Adam Bar-Niv, Elad Segal, Rotem Stahl, Ran Nachmany and Uri Harduf led by ForReal Team, Avi Ostfeld and VHive. “SpacedOut was finalised and first presented over the GeekCon 2016 hackathon which took place in Israel.”

“A team of 13 coders, designers, and makers were involved in the development of this ambitious project. It was an enormous effort to pull this off, and it took a diverse group of creative individuals who took part in this project”

The post Spaced Out: Real-Life Space Invaders Game Uses Drones first appeared on Gajitz.

In a stellar series of simple animations, you can watch some of the world’s most famous scientific minds execute video game moves based on their areas of discovery and expertise. Above, you can see Hawking’s special move: Wormhole. Below, Einstein dishes out some Special Relativity.

Darwin can dazzle you with his Evolution (above), then follow it up with a spin of Natural Selection (below).

Other key characters in this creative series include Marie Curie (below) with her Plutonium Punch, but also Pythagoras, who can hit you with his Pythagorean Theorem (a triangle formed by jumping up and angling back down). Newton packs Gravity and Tesla, of course, a Coil. All that remains, really, is for someone to turn this ingenious idea into an actual game – players would line up for a shot at this.

From creator Diego Sanches: “Seven famous scientists whose significant discoveries and inventions changed the world have been given superpowers based on their contributions to the field … including Stephen Hawking, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein,  Isaac Newton, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie and Pythagoras as part of the ‘science combat’ series for Brazilian publication Superinteressante magazine. The playable figures each have ‘basic’ and ‘special’ attacks, with the latter linking to his or her discovery in the field of chemistry, medicine, mathematics or physics.” Click here to see more in the series.

The post Watch 7 Famous Scientists Fight as Superpowered 8-Bit Gifs first appeared on Gajitz.

In the beginning, virtual reality was all about the visual: being able to look around and see all of the virtual world you were immersed in. Then we wanted to be able to control our movements in that imaginary space, so inventors created motion machines that let us walk in real life to move around in VR. Now, the sense of touch is joining the party.

The UnlimitedHand from Japanese group H2L is a simple device that wraps around the forearm. It contains a haptic sensor and a bunch of electronic muscle stimulators. The tiny EMS cluster sends out little electric shocks into your arm, simulating certain sensations like encountering resistance when you touch virtual objects. A small vibration motor makes the feeling more robust and realistic.

The haptic sensor tracks your arm’s movement, letting you move that limb freely and in real time in your virtual world. Even your hand movements are tracked so you can grasp and interact with objects while feeling them as though they were actually in front of you.

According to the creators, the small electrical pulses from UnlimitedHand pose no danger to users’ health. They plan to offer the device on an open platform to allow developers to integrate their own applications. Of course, this kind of high-tech toy doesn’t come cheap: the price starts at $188. But once you invest in an immersive VR system like Oculus Rift, chances are you’ll want the most realistic experience possible. UnlimitedHand seems to be the perfect way to give you that awesome experience.

The post Feel Out the Virtual World With This Haptic Arm Band first appeared on Gajitz.

What started as an April Fool’s joke targeted to nostalgic gamers, this physical accessory that turns your smartphone into a Gameboy is now actually being pursued as an actual commercial product by the company behind it.

Hyperkin, the company behind the spoof-turned-project, is an veteran accessories developer with the means to make this happen, and after the overwhelming response on April 1st is now committed to doing just that. “Originally a planned April Fool’s Joke – now a full fledged project for consumer release – the currently named Smartboy will attach to the iPhone 6 Plus, turning the phone into a handheld gaming device compatible with Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges.”

Effectively, the device itself would just be the display portion of the equation – the keypad and computing are all part of the addition, working around Apple’s tendency to dislike other devices taking over their smartphones. Whether the project will clear with Nintendo is, of course, another matter entirely, but given its popularity so far they would be fools to pass up the opportunity.

The post Smart Boy: Gameboy iPhone Add-On Really in Development first appeared on Gajitz.

The quest to create the perfect virtual reality movement control has led to some pretty interesting ideas. The 3DRudder is another cool gadget that could help you get around in video games, but unlike most others we’ve seen, this one lets you sit down while you navigate the virtual world.

3DRudder looks a lot like the exercise balance boards that you stand on to improve core strength. But to use it, you sit in a chair and put one foot on either side of center. The motions are fairly intuitive: you tilt forward to move forward, back to move back, and left or right to move in either direction.

The balance board-type controller also lets you rotate your feet to look all around you in  the game environment. It more or less takes over the movement function of your keyboard or game controller to free up your hands for different aspects of the game. And when you’re trying to run through a sniper-infested minefield while simultaneously picking off baddies, this can make a huge difference in the way you game.

A controller that uses your feet and frees your hands up for other actions would probably be most obviously beneficial in a first-person shooter game. But Oculus Rift and other VR headsets are poised to make it almost a necessity to traverse virtual worlds easily, so products like 3DRudder could give the experience a little more realism than you would get from using a hand-held controller for all of your actions.

The post Rocking Controller Takes Gaming Movement to the Feet first appeared on Gajitz.