Halloween Tech
How can technology help you celebrate Halloween? Read on for Tech Talker’s 5 awesome ideas for techy costumes and haunted house gadgets.
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Halloween Tech
It’s that time of year when we start planning our Halloween costumes and, if we’re really ambitious, our haunted houses.
Every year I have a ton of great ideas for a rockin’ Halloween costume. Unfortunately, those ideas usually come too late in the month for me to create a killer costume. But not this year. For Halloween 2014 I am not procrastinating. I’ve rounded up some ideas for awesomely nerdy costumes or great additions to any haunted house.
So put on your witch hat and check out how technology can help you make the best costume and decor this Halloween!
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Halloween Idea #1: iHole
One of my all-time favorite Halloween costumes is a pair of iPads that are rigged up to make it appear as if you have a hole in your body! It works like this: You harness two iPads to your body, one on the front and the other on the back with the screens facing out. Next you download the iHole app and follow the instructions. The app uses the forward facing camera to transmit video of a gaping hole to the opposite iPad screen. This makes it seem as if there is a hole going right through you.
What’s great is that it is a live feed and it works both ways (front to back and back to front). So people can walk behind you and wave their hand to the other side of your body. Its creepy and cool at the same time.
The only problem with this costume is that it requires two Apple devices. Obviously this would cost quite a bit of money if you had to go out and buy them. However if you can borrow an iPad or two, it will definitely be one of the best costumes of the night!
Halloween Idea #2: Tech Celebrity
If you’re pressed for time there are a few easy, last minute costumes you can throw together from stuff that you already have around the house.
For example, you can sport a pair of jeans, black turtleneck, some sneakers, and a pair of glasses and you have an instant Steve Jobs costume. Bonus points if you shave your head and carry around an iPad!
If you and a friend want to do a costume together, a newsy yet easy one to pull off would be an Edward Snowden and an NSA agent. The agent would dress in the standard black suit and black tie with sunglasses and a fake ear piece. He could also be handing out “Wanted” or “Contact Authorities” pages with a picture of the other person dressed as Edward Snowden printed on it.
The Edward Snowden costume would consist of a short beard (fake or otherwise), a pair of glasses, and a laptop or tablet with the website hackertyper.net open. If you’re not familiar with hackertyper.net, it’s a joke website where you can type literally anything on a keyboard and it will appear as if you’re typing lines of code incredibly fast.
Halloween Idea #3: The Cloud
If you have a shirt you don’t mind destroying you can simply glue a bunch of cotton balls to it and print out the colorful logos of internet companies such as Google, Amazon, Dropbox (pick your favorites) and voila – you’re the cloud! If you have any spare internet cables lying around the house, you could also attach those as extra accessories.
Halloween Idea #4: Scare Camera
Throughout the years of celebrating Halloween, I’ve been roped into creating many haunted house setups. I’ve built plenty of scary props, both technical and non-technical. However, one of my favorite aspects of a haunted house isn’t scary at all – it’s a scare camera.
A scare camera is basically a camera that films one particularly scary spot of the haunted house and then projects people’s reactions to the scary thing onto a screen that is positioned outside, where folks are lined up to enter the house next. So while waiting your turn to enter the haunted house, you can see people’s reactions to the stuff in the house, but not the thing that scares them. It helps to build the suspence – plus it’s hilarious.
Setting up a scare camera is really easy. All you need is a security camera which you can pick up for under a $100 on Amazon. The camera is wireless and comes equipped with night vision out of the box.
Simply use the instructions to view the camera from a laptop and position your screen to display outside the haunted house. This is a great way to boost attention if your haunted house is somewhere public or at a Halloween carnival!
Halloween Idea #5: Motion Sensor Pumpkin
This final idea might entail some Googling, but it’s well worth the effort.
In recent years I’ve had issues with people sneaking up and stealing pumpkins off my porch. To remedy this, I’ve added a bit of tech to my pumpkins with some security built in.
Basically it’s a little motion sensor hooked up to a speaker. When someone comes up to snatch the pumpkin, the sensor would detect the person and say “Boo!” (or something else I had preprogrammed) and scare the living daylights out of the intruder.
I didn’t realize it until I was writing this episode, but it turns out that someone made a product version of this with themed characters you can carve into your pumpkin! Check it out in this YouTube video.
If you want to have even more fun with it, you can rig up your motion sensing pumpkin to shoot Silly String. This will take a bit more work, but luckily Instructables.com has an easy guide to help you build your own Silly String shooting pumpkin this Halloween.
Well, that’s it for today. Be sure to check out all my earlier episodes at quickanddirtytips tech-talker. And if you have further questions about this podcast or want to make a suggestion for a future episode, post them on Facebook QDTtechtalker.
Until next time, I’m the Tech Talker, keeping technology simple!
Boo graphic courtesy of Shutterstock. iHole costume image courtesy of iTunes.
