Popular Science visited some toy fair the other day and ran an article on some of the snappier products. I thought I'd highlight a few here.
Let's start off with an easy one. This is one of those puzzles that's actually much easier to do than it sounds.
The object is to roll the ball through the obstacle course. Easy enough? The hitch is, you have to sit four feet away and you can't touch anything.
The answer?
Well, mind control, of course.
How else would you do it?
Mindflex was a great step forward in games, tracking your EEG waves through a headband to help you move a ball across the board. But who wants to play a game alone, right? Mattel's new MindFlex Duel is an upgraded two-player version in which you and a friend race to move the ball across the game board or through an obstacle course. It's a true battle of wits.
Sure, you'd like to hide a video camera in the girls' locker room. Who wouldn't? The problem is, the darn steam always fogs up the lens! Obviously, the answer is to secretly dash in, grab the vid, then dash back out before the lens gets fogged up.
As we say in the locker room biz, no sweat!
Get the car's-eye-view from a camera embedded in the hood of these three-inch racecars. Each 1:64 scale car can hold up to 12 minutes of VGA-quality video and has a one-inch LCD on its lower chassis for instant playback -- or you can load videos onto a computer to share online.
Most people like pets. I've raised tropical fish and exotic goldfish, dogs and cats, rats and rabbits. And many people would like to keep a small 'desk pet' at work, like a cute little hamster or guinea pig running around the desktop, keeping one company in the wee hours. Unfortunately, the cruel, merciless corporate plutocrats in their effort to keep us crushed beneath the imperialistic jackboot of authority have deemed this inappropriate.
Still, there's a simple answer. I present this more as a harbinger of things to come:
Set this palm-sized 'bot on its way on your desk without worrying that it will knock over the coffee cup in its path. When it's not being controlled by its accompanying iPhone app, the TankBot's autonomous mode relies on infrared sensors to see and avoid obstacles, so it won't make a mess of your workspace.
As for the future,
The mind reels!
