Punish Pigs With a Physical Slingshot Controller for Angry Birds

A couple of students in Copenhagen have taken Angry Birds to its logical extreme.

It’s not as if Angry Birds has a difficult control scheme. You sling the birds at the pigs and hopefully knock ’em down; job done! But there’s always room for innovation, and Hideaki Matsui in partnership with Andrew Spitz – postgraduate students at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design – have taken the control scheme to its logical extreme. Their physical slingshot and detonator are beautiful little things to look at, but the brilliance is in the design.

“Basically, the way we achieved this,” says Spitz, “is by drawing a force curve and storing the values in a table, then we send the current position of the slider through the table and extract the value to send to the motor that applies an opposing force.” The video has a little ‘how-to’ section with more detail, and the pair have published their work online if you want to have a gander for yourself. The ultimate intent is to create a device that not only looks like a slingshot, but – via force feedback – feels like one too. “You can control the pull,” says Spitz, “the angle, and of course trigger the special power of the bird.”

It’s not the first time these two have experimented with unusual technology applications. Both Matsui and Spitz have a lot of design experience, and together they’ve pulled off something special with this Angry Birds controller. I don’t even play Angry Birds, and my first reaction was “me want … “!

Source: Sound + Design via Joystiq