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There’s nothing old fashioned about this pinball game! CT Light Concept projected a pinball game called “Urban Flipper” on the front of the Théâtre des Célestins in Lyon, France. The bumpers, kickers, and targets make use of the features on the theater’s facade.
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Pinball gets a new twist when you play on the street, with people as the balls and bumpers! This stop-motion video is from the 2011 Animation Block Party Film Festival in New York City. -via The Daily What
Manhattan as the sun goes down is re-imagined as a pinball machine. It was created in After Effects and was directed by Lizzie Oxby. It ‘stars’ John Taylor who also worked out the compositing details, set up the After Effects project and did the final grading. Perhaps this should be the first in a series of different world cities being given the same treatment. It would be fun to see which place would win the game!
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Love pinball? Then check out this LED pinball coffee table by Ryan McFarland of zieak and go full tilt in making one yourself: Link | Step by Step info at Instructables
Comments Off The Berlin Brain-Computer Interface uses signals picked up by an electroencephalogram (EEG) to give commands to machines:
While the player imagines left and right hand movements, algorithms decode his brain activity signals in realtime into control signals for the pinball machine. The demonstration shows the cutting edge performance of a brain-computer interface system with regard of timing precision of the control signal. Other (slower) applications are developed for communication needs of e.g. paralized patients.
There’s an article in Popular Mechanics describing the history of pinball. Did you know that pinball used to be illegal in many places in the United States?
Pinball was banned from the early 1940s to the mid-1970s in most of America’s big cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, where the game was born and where virtually all of its manufacturers have historically been located. The stated reason for the bans: pinball was a game of chance, not skill, and so it was a form of gambling. To be fair, pinball really did involve a lot less skill in the early years of the game—largely because the flipper wasn’t invented until 1947, five years after most of the bans were implemented (up until then, players would bump and tilt the machines in order to sway the ball’s gravity). Many lawmakers also believed pinball to be a mafia-run racket, and a time- and dime-waster for impressionable youth. (The machines robbed the “pockets of school children in the form of nickels and dimes given them as lunch money,” New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia wrote in a Supreme Court affidavit.)
