By Andrew Liszewski
Part of the challenge and excitement of setting up a domino chain is being careful not to accidentally knock one over, which will quickly undo all of your hard work. So when I first read about this Esper concept toy, which is basically a set of dominoes that can independently fall over and wirelessly trigger the next one in the chain to do the same, I thought it would take all the fun out of it. But after watching this video which demonstrates some of the unique ways the Esper dominoes can be played with, including being mixed in with traditional dominoes, I’m completely enamored with the concept.
I particularly like the ordering methodology where you simply shake each domino to ‘set’ its number, and they’ll always fall in order from the lowest number to the highest. And that dominoes with the same number will always fall at the same time. Unfortunately it seems the Esper Domino was developed by Jarashi Suki and the IAMAS Ubiquitous Interaction Research Group way back in 2009, which makes me a little less hopeful that we’ll ever see them go into production given it’s been 2 years already.
[ Esper Domino ] VIA [ Japan Trends ]
Very cute and creative product…but pretty useless none-the-less. 😛
This is so creative! I never thought of that in college! Damn! Why is it just now that this was made! LOL Really fun to play with, I guess. Is this available in the US market already.