Real Life QWOP Probably Stings A Fair Bit

QWOP was a flashgame released by [Bennett Foddy] in the distant past. Players would use individual keys to trigger muscle spasms in their character’s legs, attempting to sprint as far as possible without hitting the ground. Hackaday alumus [The Hacksmith] wanted to recreate this in real life, and set to …read more

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You’ll Be Shocked At This Way To Improve Your Video Game High Score

What if you could play video games perfectly? Would you be one of the greats, raking in millions of dollars simply by playing competitive Fortnite? That’s what Twitch does. Twitch plays video games for you. The irony of this name should not be lost on you.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Peter] built a device that shocks you into playing a computer game perfectly. These experiments began with a transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulator (TENS), or basically a device that makes you… twitch. This device, however, is connected to four buttons, representing up, down, left, and right. This is a video …read more

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Medium Machine Mediates Microcontroller Messages

Connecting computers to human brains is currently limited to the scope of science fiction and a few cutting-edge laboratories. Tapping into some nerves farther from our central wetware is possible and [Peter Buczkowski] shows us his stylish machine for implanting a pattern into our brains without actively having to memorize anything.

His Medium Machine leverages a TENS unit to activate forearm muscles in a pattern programmed into an Arduino. Users place their forearm across two aluminum electrodes mounted on a tasteful wooden platform and extend a single finger over a button. Electrical impulses trigger the muscles which press the button. …read more

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Neural Network Electrocutes You to Take Better Photographs

It’s ridiculously easy to take a bad photograph. Your brain is a far better Photoshop than Photoshop, and the amount of editing it does on the scenes your eyes capture often results in marked and disappointing differences between what you saw and what you shot.

Taking your brain out of the photography loop is the goal of [Peter Buczkowski]’s “prosthetic photographer.” The idea is to use a neural network to constantly analyze a scene until maximal aesthetic value is achieved, at which point the user unconsciously takes the photograph.

But the human-computer interface is the interesting bit — the device …read more

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