Super Angry Birds: Amazing peripheral makes Rovio classic real

How do you continue to flog a horse when you’ve already done so beyond its timely demise? Easy – add a few accessories. The same’s true for games, you know. And that’s probably the thinking behind Super Angry Birds, a brilliant little project by students at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design that literally drags Rovio’s game into the  physical realm…

Super Angry Birds is a simple idea, executed through incredibly complex programming. Students Hideaki Matsui and Andrew Spitz have managed to rig the titular app up to a physical controller comprised of a mock slingshot and detonator.

See the playable Angry Birds cake!

The USB-connected add-ons bring physical feedback to a game that’s traditionally been a fingers-only affair. A motorised slider is hooked up to a physics algorithm that attaches a value to both its trajectory and the amount of pull back. The result being this:

Clever stuff. Sadly, this isn’t likely to leave the confines of the CIID lab any time soon. Or not unless Rovio spies a money-making scheme and snaps up the Super Angry birds controller for a tidy fee.

Either way, it says that there are at least as many ways to flog a dead horse as there are to skin a cat. Or lob some birds. Or something.