In what can only be termed awesome, the folks at Chaotic Moon Labs decided to prove how much smarter they are than the rest of us by connecting a Kinect–Microsoft Xbox 360’s motion sensitive gaming controller camera–to a specialized skateboard body. In what looks to be a cross between a itty bitty dune buggy and a Segway, the Board of Awesomeness appeals to young skater in all of us.
Says Ben Lamm, CEO of Chaotic Moon Studios: “The labs team has clearly demonstrated that with the ‘Board of Awesomeness,’ we can transform an interface previously confined to your living room and make it fun and useful for transportation in the outside world.”
The Kinect transmits video recognition, speech recognition, location data, and accelerometer data to a Samsung Windows 8 tablet strapped to the top front of the board to control the speed of the attached electric motor, which can attain speeds of up to 32 miles per hour. That’s pretty fast–better wear a helmet. It’s obviously time for some video:
Looks pretty sweet, right? The skateboard Kinect combination is being revealed at CES in Vegas today, and really shows just how far we’ve come in terms of hacking interfaces initially meant for one device onto completely different devices and in completely different environments.
“Traditionally we’ve considered mobile computing to simply mean information provided to us on a device away from our desktops or work areas,” says Phil Wheat, Manager of Chaotic Moon Labs. “But this project shows that a computing environment can provide additional information and controls on the move as well as a completely different take on user experience.”
Chaotic Moon Labs is a mobile media and application studio comprised of a diverse array of, in their words, “award winners, Open Source thought leaders, iPhoneDevCamp founders, and even doctors.” They helped develop mobile brands for News Corps’s The Daily, The Discovery Channel, Groupon and Best Buy, among others They can be found online at their website and on Twitter.