Feb 13 2008Animal Sense Devices Are Awesome
Masters students at the Royal College of Art in London recently displayed their current projects in a show entitled Work In Progress. These Animal Sense Devices come from students Christ Woebken and Kenichi Okada.
Curiosity and exploration is one of the major desires of children. We believe reality is tune-able and we developed a series of sensory enhancements as experiential prototypes. Can you retrain lost senses and instincts? Can you create an experience of feeling like an animal, even as tiny as an ant? How would kids feel if they can transform through to adults on the same eye level?
The Ant was designed to make kids feel 50x smaller, the Bird to retrain the sense for magnetic fields, and the giraffe to allow children to see on the same eye-level as adults. The giraffe is pretty self explanatory, and the ant one has a little microscopic camera in the right mitt (the little black dot) so you see closeups of the grass and feel small as you crawl around. The bird one though, I don't know about that. I think it lets you know which way the north pole is or something. That or it makes you think you can fly. Which, as my cousin who I tossed off the roof can attest to, kids can't.
A closer picture of ant-girl after the jump.
Not What We Meant When We Said "Go Play Outside" [boingboinggadgets]
Reader Comments
1. monica - February 13, 2008 12:47 PM
Are you sure the idea of the project wasn't just to make kids look more retarded than they already do?
2. Sophie - February 13, 2008 12:59 PM
The only thing "retarded" is your comment monica..... WTF is that about?
Now they need to invent ones kids would use. Such as "pool toys". Dolphin, sea otter, yada yada yada.
Any kid seen using these in public will get beat up.
3. Beer and Golf - February 13, 2008 1:15 PM
how about a rainforest sense device that comprises of a straight jacket and a bunch of axe wielding midgets?
4. guate6 - February 13, 2008 1:34 PM
Neat concept...these are pretty much toys for kids, but a bit on the steep side. Oh and #1: Kids neither are, nor do they look retarded...if that's what your parents told you and no one else's parents told them that, then I fully understand why you said this.
5. lenoz - February 13, 2008 2:29 PM
been a while since I looked at any of the comments on geekologie... glad I did... it's nice to see people like #2 and #4 taking offence at the 'dumb readership' section... perhaps we are finally moving away from seeing idiots post "FIRST" and shit like that
6. martygras9 - February 13, 2008 2:30 PM
Great concept, but the ant one sounds like it'd make me sick. Crawling around on the ground and having to use my hand to "see"? It'd totally throw my equilibrium off and I'd fill my helmet with puke. Headlines would read:
"26 year old chokes to death on vomit while wearing children's toy."
7. SlowMonkey - February 13, 2008 3:46 PM
I need to have some of those! And for all of you who would make fun of me crawling around on my lawn - FINE - go get your own! When my animal senses have been fully reintegrated, I will track you down and pee around your house.
8. Mark - February 13, 2008 8:26 PM
If you want to make kids feel 50x smaller, just tell them there are useless.
9. laz - February 14, 2008 3:26 AM
i'm with #7...
shouldn't there be a camera in both ant mitts? or is it ant training pirate style?
10. jim - February 14, 2008 12:22 PM
RE: #9
If there were cameras in both mitts, when you had one hand back and the other forward your spatial orientation would be shot to shit. Talk about vertigo...
11. monica - February 14, 2008 5:38 PM
Woah, my comments were in no way meant to sound like I really think kids are retarded or look like retards (in fact, I do think the word retards itself is not very kosher). It was a joke, and that's it. I should have put a smiley face perhaps, or just used the word "silly".
The actual objects themselves are a pretty cool idea and I think that kids would LOVE it. When I was a kid, I would have killed to use some kind of weird toy that gave me the sense that I was eensy weensy or super tall.
12. NekoNeko - February 15, 2008 3:28 AM
Co-created by Christ? That's going to go over well with any religious groups. The ad can go "The power of Christ compels you... to try out our new animal sense devices!"
13. Yewtree - February 15, 2008 12:14 PM
It reminds me of the bit in The Once and Future King where Merlin turns the young Arthur into an ant.
Anyway, this sounds quite cool, I want one.