Janken Automaton is a simple rock-paper-scissors AI that works without electricity. Players can compete directly against the device.
The machine records the player's previous moves and chooses the hand with the highest probability of winning based on the player's tendencies. Players can also repeat a fixed pattern to see whether the device learns it, or simply watch where the ball rolls inside the mechanism. It was created by Yuki Tsuneyoshi of the Tokyo University of the Arts Graduate School of Film and New Media.
It is a rock-paper-scissors AI with no electricity, but playing to win is only one option: you can also test whether it learns your pattern or just watch the ball roll.
A system can use electrical signals from the body to control infrared appliances such as a television. Electrodes capture signals produced by blinks or muscle movements, Neuro PlayGround Lite detects them, and its ESP32-based hardware sends the corresponding infrared remote command.
The Neuro PlayGround Lite can measure small biopotential signals including EEG, EMG, ECG and EOG. In this example, the practical control is less science-fiction mind reading than turning eye and muscle signals into new physical input buttons. The project was demonstrated by Upside Down Labs.
Instead of looking for the remote, you first attach electrodes to your forehead. It adds a few steps, but turning a blink into a channel button still feels pleasantly futuristic.
Wormhole Display is an app that turns discontinued Meta Portal devices into wireless displays and speakers for Macs, iPhones and iPads. Once installed, a Portal appears as an AirPlay-compatible receiver and can be used for screen mirroring or as an extended Mac display, with audio through its built-in speakers.
Portal devices are Android-based, so the app is installed as an APK after enabling ADB. The project has been tested on Portal+, Portal Mini, Portal Go and Portal TV, and requires no special software on the sending Apple device. It was released by Piotr Godlewski.
Remove the abandoned service from a dedicated appliance and what remains is a surprisingly useful screen and speaker. The Portal may have become more versatile after its original job ended.
Researchers at the University of Waikato deliberately built a robot called Spike using traits that previous research associated with creepiness: an appearance that is hard to classify as human, animal or machine, plus spikes, unusual facial features, dark colors and unpredictable motion.
They showed Spike to 104 participants. Some described it as angry or unsettling, while others thought it was cool or even cute. The team concluded that there may be no universally creepy robot because perceptions vary strongly between people.
They deliberately combined features meant to make a robot creepy, and some people still called it cute. Apparently even engineered creepiness has a target-audience problem.
Maker Mirza Makes modified a television remote so its number and control buttons can be used as a computer keyboard. The remote is an input device rather than the computer itself, and it was demonstrated with a Raspberry Pi 5-based handheld PC.
Inside the remote, the membrane keypad is connected to an MCP23017 I/O expander, which sends the button states to the Raspberry Pi over I2C. Rather than appearing as a conventional USB keyboard, the remote's buttons are read directly and turned into computer input.
All those buttons that used to control a television have found a new job typing on a computer. A remote control is suddenly responsible for writing.
Since its 1993 release, DOOM has been ported to countless devices that were never intended to be game consoles, including digital cameras, printers and pregnancy-test hardware. The 1997 release of the game's source code, together with an architecture that made platform-specific parts relatively replaceable, helped turn porting DOOM into a widespread hacking tradition.
As unusual ports spread through YouTube and social media, getting DOOM to run became less a practical benchmark and more a trophy for technical ingenuity. Recent projects have connected the game to hardware as unlikely as satellites and models of a fly's nervous system, stretching even the question of what it means for a device to 'run DOOM.'
After more than 30 years, the answer to 'Why would you run DOOM on that?' has settled into a simple 'Because you can.' Predicting the next platform may now be harder than porting the game.
James' Programming built a physical illusion inspired by Portal: throw an object into one frame and a matching object appears to shoot out of the other. There is no video compositing; the entrance detects the incoming object while a flywheel launcher at the exit fires a duplicate.
Time-of-flight sensors detect the approaching object early enough to compensate for the launcher's mechanical delay. The build took about nine months, and the full detection and automatic realignment sequence was still finicky, succeeding roughly one time in twenty.
Instead of inventing teleportation, it catches the object at one end and aggressively launches a duplicate from the other. Portal, but fully compliant with physics.
A team including researchers at McGill University developed '3D necroprinting,' which repurposes the proboscis of a female mosquito as a high-resolution 3D-printing nozzle, and the work received the 2026 Ig Nobel Prize in Technology. The proboscis has an inner diameter of roughly 20–30 µm, and the system produced printed lines about 20 µm wide.
The researchers compared several biological dispensing structures, including stingers and fangs, before choosing the mosquito proboscis for its narrow, straight geometry and ability to support continuous flow. Demonstrations included honeycomb structures, a maple leaf, and bioscaffolds containing cells.
Instead of machining a finer nozzle, the researchers looked at a mosquito and realized nature had already attached one. It even won a prize.
In a Vals AI experiment testing long-horizon game-playing ability, OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra played Minecraft for 141 hours and 33 minutes. Over the run it built a base, farmed crops, tamed wolves, and reached the Nether while carrying goals across a very long session.
But after a Creeper explosion destroyed the chest holding its collected items and its bed, the model stopped making much progress and spent several hours doing almost nothing but farming potatoes. It also became more cautious about Creepers: when it spotted a tall green object, it explicitly checked that it was sugar cane rather than a Creeper.
After a Creeper blew up everything, the AI spent hours farming potatoes. It even checked that a tall green object was sugar cane rather than a Creeper, leaving a strangely specific behavioral trace from its 141-hour adventure.
Strange Inventions Lab's Fidget Spinner Synthesizer uses the rotation of a fidget spinner as a musical control. The maker describes it as turning motion into music, with the spinner physically moved as part of the performance.
Five signed units were made as a limited-edition instrument and offered through the maker's product page.
The toy for keeping idle fingers busy has become an instrument where spinning is now an actual responsibility. Fidgeting has acquired performance pressure.
Ayaka Yamashita's Binta Drums is an electronic instrument played by striking a character's cheeks from the left and right as if slapping its face. For Maker Faire Tokyo 2026, the work was rebuilt from scratch; the character now changes expression in response to the hits as well as lighting up its eyes.
A normal drum asks you to hit a drumhead. This one requires alternating slaps to a character's cheeks, so improved technique only makes the scene look more aggressive.
Peter's Homebrew 16 bit relay computer is a 16-bit CPU built from electromechanical relays. Running a program that calculates pi to two decimal places requires 1,377 instructions and a little over eight minutes. The creator calls it the 'slowest computer in the world.'
It has a 19-instruction set built around an accumulator, and in 2026 gained a 32×32 LED matrix connected as memory-mapped video output.
Three digits of pi take eight minutes, but at least every relay click provides an audible status update: yes, the computer is still computing.
It is a rock-paper-scissors AI with no electricity, but playing to win is only one option: you can also test whether it learns your pattern or just watch the ball roll.