there’s something really cool and exciting about fire and there’s something really cool and exciting about robots, and when you put the two together, it gets even better! friday night, caryn and i went to this interactive show put on by a group who builds large robot machinery. each of the displays that the group did, were interactive in some way so that an audience member could control the robots, and almost every single one of them involved fire in some way.
for example, one of them was a “flight simulator”. an audience member sits on this huge industrial sized metal thing where he can control it’s motion. it tilts in all sorts of crazy angles, spins around clockwise and counterclockwise, and basically simulated being in a plane. at the push of a button, a large fan on the contraption blows air at the guy. but the best part, is that there’s this massive flamethrower on the front, pointed just inches over the head of the guy riding it. this thing was blasting crazy flames *so* close to the guy’s head!!
another thing they had there was this smaller robot, that you could activate w/ a joystick. it looked like a little spider crawling around… err, that is, if a spider had a blowtorch on it’s head. here’s a photo:
also, here’s two short clips of video i took of the little spider thing:
*v