the onda

Everyone appears to love my little Japanese friend Tengu which I received as a belated birthday present from my sister and brother-in-law. Essentially a Tengu is a USB-powered set of LEDs that make faces depending on the ambient noise. So when you play music, Tengu "sings along" with you (as he is doing in the picture here).

It's an interesting reaction people have to it; upon first hearing what it does, almost everyone says "that's it!?!" surprised by the fact that it needs to plug into a computer at all (which sadly it only uses for power). But after watching it for a little while, observers become entranced in trying to determine the pattern of its various facial expressions. It speaks volume not only to good toy design (from what I can discern from the packaging it is Japanese only) but to the power of our natural anthropomorphic tendencies. When we see what we recognize as vaguely human, we tend to bond with it at an emotional level, no matter how silly the device is.

Having seen the mesmerizing power of the Tengu, I now want someone to build a Tengu does something more useful with its host's networking capabilities. What about taking a page out of Ambient's products and showing a happy Tengu when the market is up and a sad one when it is down? Or better yet, what about combining data from the Internet with some sort of locally derived sensor data to provide context-relevant mood swings?

Perhaps this is a perfect Arduino physical computing project...