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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!"
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.
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.
UV lights are also good. Anything drinkable that glows is very cool, and extra geek points are achieved if you can drink said glowing liquid from a conical flask or a test tube. Even without the UV, Aftershock (preferably green) in a conical flask looks very mad scientisty. The markings on the flask let you see how many shots go in there too.
Dry ice rocks, you can do all kinds of mad scientist effects with that stuff. A cool one is to put some pH indicator in water and then add the dry ice - lots of bubbles, thick white smoke rolling down the sides and the liquid changes colour as it becomes acidic. Lots of flash from a very simple reaction. You might need to do some creative googling to find sources of dry ice, but last time I was looking it was fairly cheap; in the region of £15 for 10kg of pellets.
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"
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!