Many, many moons ago we brought you news of the Land Walker bi-pedal personal robot suit from Japanese company Sakakibara Kikai. Over the years it has served as a popular promotional tool for the company, and many people have had the chance to hop in the driver’s seat, except for kids. The company figured putting a kid behind the wheel (or control sticks or whatever) wasn’t the smartest of ideas, so instead of putting up one of those ‘You have to be at least this tall to pilot the giant mech’ signs, they went ahead and built a smaller version designed specifically for children!
Their Kid’s Walker comes in at around 5 1/4 feet tall (1.6 meters), weighs just under 400lbs and (thankfully!) features kid-friendly controls that limit the mech’s capabilities because let’s face it, you stick a kid in a powered exoskeleton suit and his problem with bullies are over. The Kid’s Walker technically doesn’t really ‘walk’ either, but shuffles along on a pair of wheel-equipped feet kind of like someone learning to use roller skates, but again, it’s all to keep kids safe. The cost of the suit is estimated to be around $21,000, though Sakakibara Kikai has no plans to put it into production. The last thing the world needs is shopping malls full of exoskeleton-equipped mallrats, that’s for sure.
Fold-out sofa beds are truly modern marvels of mechanical engineering, but if you spend many-a-night sleeping on the couch because you’re too lazy to get up and fold it out, you’ll love this design from Italian furniture maker Campeggi. Their WOW Sofa bed is completely automatic and can be converted from a sofa to a bed with just the push of a button. It even includes a set of clever fold-down night stands on either side, and I’m pretty sure you don’t even need to get up off the couch to convert it. That’s real progress people.
There are a lot of bike riders in the city where I reside. So many, that most of the main roads have special bike lanes for them to ride in. Thus, I see a lot of bikes in my daily life. For the most part they all look sort of the same, with nothing to really make one stand out from the rest. Sure, some are road bikes and others are mountain bikes, but those are the only real differences you see. So what does one have to do to really turn heads? You need to get this BOND bike.
While the name will inspire images of 007, it’s actually an acronym for Built of Notorious Deterrents (however, it likely isn’t a coincidence). It was designed after polling 800 cyclists about their least favorite parts of riding a bike. Thus, a flamethrower was added to keep cars from edging you off the road, an ejector seat to keep thieves from stealing your ride and a ski blade and an all-terrain caterpillar track on the rear wheel to get you through any environment.
This truly does seem like the most awesome bike on the road. Unforutnately, you’re not going to be able to purchase it. Something tells me you’d land in a bit of hot water with that flamethrower anyway. It was simply built as an art piece to raise awareness about cyclists.
Hooray! October 1st is finally here which means I can open the floodgates on crappy Halloween-themed gadgets for the 2nd best holiday of the year! Even though these days I don’t hand out candy, decorate, dress up or even go to costume parties, fond memories from my childhood coupled with giant boxes of miniature chocolate bars available at every store easily make this the best time of the year- second only to Christmas.
So let’s get things started with an old favorite that’s gotten a spooky Halloween makeover. This Vampire Bat Hunt game is really no different than the interactive Duck Hunter we first brought you a couple of years ago at CES. Except that while some people might find ducks cute and think twice about shooting one down, no one’s going to hesitate when it comes to blasting this vampire bat out of the sky since they’ve gone to great lengths to make it as evil looking as possible. I mean it almost looks like a flying Gremlin! The gameplay and mechanics are pretty much the same as Duck Hunter too, requiring 3 direct hits from the infrared gun (which also doubles as the charger) to knock it out of the sky, and then presumably you’ll just need to stab a wooden stake through its heart to finish it off. ~$30 from Hammacher Schlemmer.
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