The Intended Use vs. the Reality of Kinect

David Oxford — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:21:50 +0000

So there you are. Microsoft has finally released their controller-free peripheral, Kinect, into the mass market. You’ve just bought one for yourself and finished hooking it up, and invite all your friends and family to see what the future brings as you operate your Xbox 360 with nothing more than the sound of your voice…

…only to find out that every single one of them is a smart aleck who wants in on the action, shouting out all sorts of commands to either cancel each other out, or perhaps confuse and burn out your new investment.

And that’s just the beginning of the things that can– and likely will– go wrong. To see what other situations Microsoft may not have foreseen, check out the full chart of Kinect’s intended uses versus what will probably happen in at least one U.S. household over at Cracked.com.

But, on the bright side? At least no remotes will be thrown across the living room. At least, not until gramps gets fed up with not being able to get this new WiiStation 590 to show him the weather.

Geek Weapons Brought To Life

Dylan Duarte — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:14:21 +0000

You would think that videogames and cheesy 80’s sci-fi movies are the only places you’d find weapons like rail guns and lasers of death. Well, think again.

Cracked.com, web presence of the popular magazine, gives us a list of 5 crazy sci-fi weapons that are actually in production. Some of them aren’t too surprising but others feel like they’re straight out of a videogame. Once you hit the jump, you may never feel safe again.

The patriotic folks at Boeing, the giant aircraft manufacturer and defense corporation, are developing an advanced tactical laser that will be mounted onto transport planes. The laser will be silent, invisible, and be able to strike up to 100 targets in rapid succession from 10,000 feet up and nine miles away. Each beam will be 10 centimeters wide and have the heating power of a blowtorch, making the laser capable of slicing through metal.

Anybody who has ever played a sci-fi FPS or watched Battlestar Galactic knows what a railgun is. It’s a weapon that’s able to fire a metal slug at incredible speeds through the use of electromagnets. To get into specifics, the rail gun that’s being developed by the U.S. Navy can fire a slug over 230 miles at Mach 7, with a velocity of Mach 5 at impact. The plan is to install these babies on Navy ships for the purpose of putting a few holes in the enemy fleet.

Oh, and for an awesome bit of trivia, the air friction created by the fast-moving slug creates a fireball. Hadoken, bitches. Navy rail gun video below.

We’ve all know for a while now that children aren’t are future, robots are. Using robots in hostile situations is nothing new. We have robots mounted with assault rifles, robots that can defuse bombs, robots that can vacuum even the dustiest apartment – robots can do anything.

iRobot, the company that makes the aforementioned Roomba, is well aware of the power they wield so they’ve teamed up with Australian weapons company Metal Storm to produce Warrior, a robot fitted with Firestorm weapons system. The Firestorm uses electrical impulses to fire off 4,000 40mm grenades per second. The best part? Warriors are being given advanced software so that they can perform certain battlefield functions autonomously. Johnny Five is alive and he will wreck your shit.

What do you call an orbital weapons platform that drops telephone poled-sized tungsten rods at 36,000 feet per second that strike with the force of a tactical nuke? You call it “Rods from God.” The theoretical weapon would involve two satellites in orbit, one for targeting and one for launching space darts at the Earth. With nothing to propel them but gravity, the darts would travel at over 7,000 MPH, roughly the speed of a meteor. The US Space Command suggests that we keep an eye on the sky starting in 2025.

Modular Disc-Wing Urban Crutise Munitions. Sounds boring, right? How about remote-controlled frisbees that explode in a shower of armor-piercing shrapnel? Not so boring anymore, are they? These little babies are being developed for the Air Force by Triton Systems. The idea is to guide one of these devices into a heavily defended area and then detonate it, allowing us to destroy our enemies without getting our hands dirty. The explosive devices can also be rigged to form a single-targeted explosion in order to destroy heavy vehicles.

And there you have it! Before I’m dead I should see exploding frisbees, invisible Death Star lasers, railguns capable of puncturing steel ship hulls, robots that fire a bajillion grenades, and telephone poles supposedly thrown by the lord.

The future looks bright.

Sources: Cracked, Global Security, Live Science

RipTen Videogame Blog » cracked

The Intended Use vs. the Reality of Kinect

Geek Weapons Brought To Life