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Geeky Gadgets for Halloween Parties?
Neurotoxic666 asks: "Like many others, my friends and I are going to hold a costumed party for Halloween, however we do not want it to be the typical haunt. We have some talent in computers and electronics, but we're short of ideas. Are there any good gadgets and props that the average geek can build to spice up the party? Of course, there will be the usual ambient sounds and decoration, but we're looking for more interactive, dynamic and techie stuff. One idea I've had is to use the living room computer on the TV and have white noise, ghosts and other creepy effects appear throughout the night. Does anyone have some suggestions, ideas we could build, effects that worked well in your parties? Anything from heart-beating books to special lightning to mad science devices is welcome!"
Everything looks cooler when lit with EL Wire from Benny at Cool Neon! -Chris
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if you have a multichannel setup (4+ speakers) you can always try and produce some creepy 3D audio, making it seem like it's from a moving source.
I'm having a major fight with temptation about the Singing Buck, which K-mart has for $120 and is supposed to go on sale for $100 even. I had them get the Mr Microphone part out and held it up to my pda. It was nice getting to see the buck read Andromeda Strain to me in the middle of K-mart.
Thankfully, I was able to get 200 Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy Badger" LiveCD+Installer CDs well before Halloween, so in addition to the delicious cheezy treats that I'll be handing out, I'll also be giving out the gift of open source. Is anyone else doing this?
-- @T4C
You're going to need a carved pumpkin with a lit candle in it, a hose of some sort, and some flour. Boar a hole in the back base of the pumpkin just big enough for your hose. Stick a small amount of flour in one end of the hose and insert the end into the hole of the pumpkin. Now stand back and blow into the other end of the hose and witness the fireball. Experiment with things to get maximum plumage. The hose can be pretty long, so you can really freak out kids while in the cover of stealth.
I bought a cheap smoke machine for $15. It comes with a switch on 6 Ft of cable. Press the button, you get smoke. So fine if your going to sit beside it all night but a not very useful otherwise. You can get a timer for $25, It will trun the smoke machine on and off for a set time ever so often.
But I came up with a much better idea. A montion sensor switch to trigger the smoke machine when someone approches.
I picked a "tomb stone" for $6 that has has a montion sensor. When the sensor is tripped it makes a sreaming noise and flashes some LED's. Open it up and disconnect the LED's, wire in a 5v reed relay, from Radio shack, in place of the LED's. Then wire the relay to the switch that came with the smoke machine (or use a separate cable).
Now when the sensor is activated the screams come on for 3 or 4 seconds and a the same time the smoke is on. Great to put just out side your door.
Cut your design in the pumpkin backwards, and set the pumpkin facing the wall. Insert a lit candle, and the silhouette is projected.
Kind of low tech, but cool nonetheless.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
Get a strobe onto some dripping milk. When the strobe is flicking at the same frequency as the driping it looks like the drops are suspended in time. Adjust the strobe frequency and you can watch the splashes form back into droplets and move back up into the spout they came from. I built something like this at a party once, in a darkened room, it was a big hit. Called it a "time machine".
Simon.
Hallowe'en is now the second-largest holiday cash generator for businesses, right behind Christmas.
People spend hundreds of bucks each on parties for ADULTS. Or go to any bar on Hallowe'en and try to say there isn't some serious coin being raked in.
It's #2 in terms of revenue, but its #1 in terms of profitability, because you don't see the wild discounting like you do weeks before Christmas.
You can always find something to buy on Christmas Eve - just TRY to find a costume the day before Hallowe'en - you'll be stuck wearing a "costume" you made from a roll of aluminium foil you scrounged from the pantry and some duct tape.
I have a good friend who is a geek and at times a bit of a bastard who is always comming up with things like this (not just for halloween) mostly because they live in a really creepy house anyway- but here are some ideas mostly from him.
Get a Y shaped fiberoptic cable and place it out of the way in a dark corner with two of the ends pointing away from the corner. Set up a red LED at the other end of a timer...instant glowing red eyes from the darkened corner.
You can set up a ghostly appirition by taking a box with a 1-way mirror facing into the box, fill it with some smoke from a fog machine, and have a projector shining in from the back. The image bounces off the mirror and hits the back of the box and the smoke gives an interesting halo effect to the whole image.
Edit a video file to include random static and ghostly images and burn to DVD or stream from your computer- pretend like it's just a regular movie (The original Night of the Living Dead is available as public domain from Archive.org if you don't want to worry about copyright infringement and was a good scary movie). This can work even better if you record a movie off the TV with commercials and all so that it may be less obvious what you are doing.
Set the Air Conditioner on a timer so certain rooms can develop "cold spots".
A lot of digital video camers will pick up Infra Red light from things like TV remotes- this is a good way to create fake "orbs" in photos or videos to spook out your guests.
A good, edible fake blood can be made with corn syrup, corn starch (to thicken it and make it less transparent) and red food coloring.
A few more general notes, remember that things are often a lot more freaksom if there is less of a setup, include some really hokey and poorly done tricks to put your guests at ease, this can make the good stuff more effective. Also remember that panick spreads- so make sure to act freaked out and assure your guests that you had nothing to do with your tricks- this can make the entire thing much more effective. Also try to make sure that things are less predictable, if a spooky noise sounds off every time someone walks down a hallway it can ruin the illusion.
Try to get a couple of other people "in" on the setup before hand- that way you have a pool of people who can set things up so that your guests don't learn to expect something every time you excuse yourself to the kitchen or bathroom.
Above all, keep in mind that the scariest things are generally unseen or heavily veiled, props that are too goesh (grammar nazis, I tried to find the correct spelling of this word to no avail, anyone care to help?) often turn out to be humerous instead of scary.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
The "time tunnel" effect is always a crowd pleaser. Drill a hole in a penny and press it onto the shaft of a small DC motor. (It needs to be almost, but not perfectly, perpendicular to the shaft.) Glue a small mirror (1" square or less) onto the penny. Turn on the motor and bounce the beam off the spinning mirror. Add some fog to the room and dim the lights, and you've got a very cool effect indeed. (Wrap a rubber band around the barrel of the laser pointer to keep it on, and tape it into position near the spinning mirror.)
Or you can build two spinning mirror assemblies and generate lissajous patterns. (Think: Spirograph)
Or use some hot glue to tack a tiny mirror onto your speaker's woofer. Bounce the laser off the mirror while you play loud music, and you'll get all sorts of wierd patterns.
Or lay a CD-ROM on your turntable (you do still have one, right?) with the reflective surface up, and bounce the laser off the disc. (The narrow tracks act like a diffraction grating, splitting a single beam into multiple beams.) Slowly rotate the turntable platter (especially with the disc slightly offset from center) to get more effects.
Have a look at my site for some idea of the types of effects you can produce.
Here are a few other sites that might give you more ideas:
LaserFx.com
Sam's Laser Faq
If you can get access to some two-way mirror you're in for an easy, yet awesome, effect. Here's what you'll need:
Wood, paint (grey and black), a single lightbulb and fixture, 12x12" two-way mirror and a 12x12" regular mirror.
Create a cube using the wood with the regular mirror at the bottom of the box. Paint the insides to look like stone and attach the lightbulb on one of the 'stone' sides.
When you put the two-way mirror on top of the box (mirror side facing inside the box), it creates an endless reflection that makes it look like a reaaaaallllyyyy long tunnel (lit all the way by single bulbs)
This effect is really creepy, especially if you add the right sound effects (think: a little girl/boy's voice saying "help me!" and crying alot...)
In my old house I hooked up a camera, speakers and a strobe light to my front doorstep. When guests arrive the speakers would blast a scream and the strobe would go off. The camera would take a photo that resulted in a unique souviner that costumers could take home - a photo of themselves scared s**tless!
Title says it all. If you stir liquid nitrogen into a bowl of white russian you can turn it into ice cream. It looks really cool when you do it (similar to dry ice effects) and tastes amazing.
I've decided to go a little nuts this year. At the office, we are decorating the conference rooms, and allowing kids to come in for trick or treat. Our room's theme is "dialogs in the hall of the pumpkin king."
Since we work with kids who have developmental disabilities (and children of parents with developmental disabilities), we can't do anything with strobe lights (a lot of the kids would go into seizures.) or anything very scary. (Where "very scary" literally means anything that would bother a mentally hadicapped five year old...)
So, I decided it would be fun to write a "performance animation" program. Basically, there will be a 3D pumpkin character projected on one of the walls. He will have a background that appears perspective-correct to a person standing in the right spot, thanks to a two-pass rendering algorithm. The character will have a set of triggerable animations and gestures for his hands, and several facial morphs so that he can appear to talk. I will be in another room controlling the animation of the pumpkin king over VNC, and doing the voice, while I watch the kids on a hidden web cam in the room.
It should be pretty slick as soon as I get afew more things finished. It parses and displays the hand animation just fine - still need to add image loading, get texture coordinates from the object files, and add a bit of extra glue for my facial morphing code.
When all is said and done (friday), the kids will be able to have a complete interactiveconversation with a large friendly vegetable.
Of courtse, I would like a chance to work on the "soul stealing vertigo inferno" that I would do if this were for older, less challenged people. I wouldn't want to do it alone though. It would be way more work.
For the vertigo inferno, I wanted to have a few cameras, and some image processing code tied into the renderer, so that it would track the approximate position of the head of the person, and screw with the perspective projection. Given enough projectors to cover most of the visual field, and enough time, I'm pretty sure I could get just about anybody to lose their balance apon entering the room, if they kept their eyes open. Then the zombies would start to get mean...
Oh, the things I could do with a massive budget and a team of ten graphics programmers, modellers, and animators!
Another neat little thing you can do is get some kind of laser (brighter is better) and then affix a mirror to the cone or dustcap of a bass speaker (one that you don't particularly care about) so that it projects onto the ceiling. Get spooky patterns with your spooky music as the vibrating mirror projects moving light onto your ceiling or wall.
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Cool ideas!
I do like reusing technology for additional purposes - a few years ago I hacked up the motion sensors from a mouse into each pivot of a double pendulum (worked like a treat actually). It was a simple effective means to an end.
For more modern control systems, something like this might be better suited.
Plugs directly into the USB and has upto 16 digital I/O lines, or alternative systems with 8 each analog inputs/digital IO.
Nice price as well, around $80.
Depending on what you need it for, theres also things like Lego Mindstorms type kits where you can program up the motions and upload to the system.
liqbase
That would be a "Terpsitone" - originally built in the 1930's. Bob Moog helped a group of students at Harvard build a new one a few years ago.
Essentially, the software monitors 5 switches fed into the parallel port. When the state of one of those switches is set, the software respons by firing any of 8 relays tied to the parallel port. Scripting is supported.
In our current setup, I use a weird setup of old PC's, relay cards, input boards, etc, to switch 110VAC, 12VDC, and 24VAC. We tie these lines to our air valves, lights, and whatnot. The software can also play audio files, so it is pretty trivial to create Thunder and Lighting effects.
And, along the effect lines, check out the super-easy to make light flicker circuit. Go fetch a standard extension cord, cut one of the sides (as if you were going to install a switch), and install a 4 watt flourscent lamp starter. Plug a low-wattage lamp into the cord, and the cord into the wall. You will get a nice flicker effect.
Things to note:
Have fun, good luck!
-- I