Who knew you could play Pac-Man against real crickets? Find that and the cockroach-controlled robot after the jump. Which one is your favorite?
Cricket-Controlled Pac Man
In this game, players “can play Pacman against real crickets,” which replace the standard “ghosts”.
The computer game we used for our experiment is “Pac-Man” (Namco, 1980). Instead of computer code, we want to have animals controlling the ghosts. To enable this, we built a real maze for the animals to walk around in, with its proportions and layout matching the maze of the computer game. The position of the animals in the maze is detected using colour-tracking via a camera, and linked to the ghosts in the game
Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot
Put simply, this “Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot” is one of the strangest creations we’ve seen. Basically, a Madagascan hissing cockroach controls a three wheeled robot by being placed atop a modified trackball. It was developed by Garnet Hertz, who specializes in “animal-machine-hybrids”.
This project was inspired by a number of different things, including thinking about biologically inspired (“biomimetic”) technologies and also seeing and thinking about scientific and artistic experiments in bio-hybrid/robotic systems
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