A motor-free, semi-automatic playing-card launcher fires one card each time its trigger is pulled. It uses a suction cup of the kind found on toy projectiles to pick up a single card at a time.
A catapult-style mechanism launches the cards, which are positioned at a slight angle to help them fly straight. Creator tekelili refined the design through several prototypes and demonstrated a card sticking into a cucumber.
An entire mechanism picks up and launches individual playing cards, all without a motor. A harmless deck of cards has somehow acquired the machinery of a projectile launcher.
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.
An entire mechanism picks up and launches individual playing cards, all without a motor. A harmless deck of cards has somehow acquired the machinery of a projectile launcher.