By: Aseem Gaurav on August 10, 2012
Have you ever wanted to add more realism to slingshot act in the popular iOS and Android app ‘Angry Birds?’ A couple of students have created a slingshot-style controller called the Super Angry Birds (SAB) controller, which will give you complete control over the angle and force used to fire the bird out of the slingshot. There’s even a detonator to use when you launch special birds.
The credit of developing the SAB controller goes to Hideaki Matsui and Andrew Spitz, who developed it for a course on haptics at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. The idea was to mimic the actual scene that happens in the game when you launch the birds over a structure. For this they used technology ranging from a motorized fader more commonly found in an audio mixing console, an electric motor, and an Arduino board.
To create the tension just like a slingshot, the students gave some resistance to the motorized feeder. So when pulled and released it would fling the birds across the screen in a natural way than touch controls or a mouse. They used an attached Arduino-based microcontroller to track the position and angle being applied to the bar, thus duplicating the actions in the game.
Although the finished controller looks almost retail-worthy, the duo has not mentioned about any plans to convert the device into a commercial product.
Have you ever wanted to add more realism to slingshot act in the popular iOS and Android app ‘Angry Birds?’ A couple of students have created a slingshot-style controller called the Super Angry Birds (SAB) controller, which will give you complete control over the angle and force used to fire the bird out of the slingshot. There’s even a detonator to use when you launch special birds.
The credit of developing the SAB controller goes to Hideaki Matsui and Andrew Spitz, who developed it for a course on haptics at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. The idea was to mimic the actual scene that happens in the game when you launch the birds over a structure. For this they used technology ranging from a motorized fader more commonly found in an audio mixing console, an electric motor, and an Arduino board.
To create the tension just like a slingshot, the students gave some resistance to the motorized feeder. So when pulled and released it would fling the birds across the screen in a natural way than touch controls or a mouse. They used an attached Arduino-based microcontroller to track the position and angle being applied to the bar, thus duplicating the actions in the game.
Although the finished controller looks almost retail-worthy, the duo has not mentioned about any plans to convert the device into a commercial product.
