For about a hundred grand, you can train for combat or engage in misanthropic virtual reality gaming in the Virtusphere “human hamster ball”. Or, you could go analog and Zorb in a Mega Ball for just a few hundred bucks.
If the time you spend Facebooking, watching Keyboard Cat on YouTube, and buying real estate on Second Life haven’t satisfied your need to completely isolate yourself from humanity, fear not – technological innovation will continually bring you new methods to embrace your inner misanthrope. The Virtusphere isn’t all that “new” in tech industry terms; it was first broadly featured in 2009 (see a Reuters video here), and received more exposure at last years’ tech shows. But somehow, it hasn’t grabbed as much press as one might expect. We suspect this is a result of an elaborate stealth marketing campaign the company has put together, using Zhu Zhu Pets to slowly acclimate the human population to the idea that playing all your favorite first-person shooter games will be much more fun if you’re wearing VR headgear and running around inside a giant hamster cage. Actually, although gaming and virtual tours are part of the company’s pitch for the product, as of this writing a visit to their web site makes it clear they’re probably more interested in the much more lucrative cash cow of recklessly padded US Defense contracts. Frankly, we find killing and war to be rather ass-backwards, Cro-magnon uses of emerging technologies, so we have a suggestion for this market segment. If you want to put soldiers in giant hamster balls so they can learn how to kill more effectively, why not just put REAL soldiers in the balls with live ammo and take cagefighting to the next level? You’ll create much more ruthless killing machines, while saving a crapload of money on the IT and programming budgets to develop all those glitchy combat scenes that look like they were created for a 1990′s arcade game. If you want to go with the recommended fully electronic version, visit their marketing site. Although they don’t mention pricing upfront, this review suggests the tab will be something like $50,000-$100,000 to (ahem) get rolling. Of course, if you have a smaller budget and don’t mind going analog, you could always get into Zorbing. A Mega Ball is only 379 bucks on Amazon. Vids below.
If the time you spend Facebooking, watching Keyboard Cat on YouTube, and buying real estate on Second Life haven’t satisfied your need to completely isolate yourself from humanity, fear not – technological innovation will continually bring you new methods to embrace your inner misanthrope. The Virtusphere isn’t all that “new” in tech industry terms; it was first broadly featured in 2009 (see a Reuters video here), and received more exposure at last years’ tech shows. But somehow, it hasn’t grabbed as much press as one might expect. We suspect this is a result of an elaborate stealth marketing campaign the company has put together, using Zhu Zhu Pets
