An NYU student at the Interactive Telecommunications Program has hacked The Force. Until now, we thought that only people with very high concentrations of Midichlorians in their blood were capable of being Jedi, but thanks to 3D printing and some creative uses of a Kinect, you too can pull Luke’s X-Wing out of the swamps of Dagobah.
ITP student Sagar Mohite has built something that nerds have been dreaming of for almost forty years. When you mix a 3D printed Incom T-65 X-Wing Fighter, a Star Wars fan with a knack for technology, a re-purposed Kinect and some magnets you create, as Mohite calls it, ethereal flight. He’s literally developed a way for you to move objects with a wave of your hand. Thanks to a clever mix of technology, all of us can extend our hand and move an X-Wing around just like our favorite pocket-sized Jedi Master.
It starts with a fake swamp, in this case a table, with an actuator motor connected to a magnetic levitation system built under it. The levitation system is a combination of electromagnets and permanent magnets that allow the law of gravity to be defied, and allowing the 3D printed X-Wing to seemingly float. While that alone is pretty cool, it get’s cooler. Mohite has connected the actuator motor under the table to a Kinect, so you can simply use motion control to cause the motor under the table to move in the direction that you are gesturing. This creates a pretty convincing image of someone moving an object with only their mind.
As you can see from the video, the whole set-up is pretty cool. I would almost call Mohite a genius, but I’m holding off on that until he proves that Han shot first. Until he does so, we’ll just call him really, REALLY clever. And I don’t know about you, but I’d love to see The Force set up at fan conventions all over the world so everyone can experience being a Jedi. Okay, so you wouldn’t be a Jedi, but you would, at the very least, be Jedi-adjacent. That is still really cool.
Visit Sagar’s blog you will. Learn more about The Force you should.
[Ed: Thank goodness I know enough about Star Wars not to mess with Yoda’s rules of language.]
