Certainly, it is the dream of every kid and a not-insignificant number of adults for their crude doodles of space monsters, stick figures and whatnot to suddenly spring to life. Imagine how much fun you would have if you could actually hang out with that stick figure you drew in third grade!
Let’s ignore the reality that said stick figure would probably just stare at you, handless arm extended towards you in silent accusation at how you gave it such terrible, unholy life. It would be pretty cool to just draw up a new friend to hang out with, or triceratops to ride or something just whenever, right?
Well, Takara Tomy Arts has kind of, sort of figured out a way to make dreams of bringing your drawings to life a reality, with Picturerium, an aquarium that you populate with your own doodles!
The Picturerium is a part-smartphone, part-voodoo-powered device shaped like a traditional hobbyist aquarium. Right out of the box, the Picterium is empty because you need to draw your own fish (and, let’s face it, at least one horrifically detailed, anatomically correct penis) to populate your new aquatic playground!
First, you’ll use specialized cards to draw fish, mermaids, THE KRAKEN, or whatever other vaguely-marine-animal-looking creation your twisted mind can come up with. These specialized cards, by the way, can be downloaded from Takara Tomy Arts’ homepage and printed out in case you run out.
Next, you’ll place your smartphone on top of the aquarium. Your smartphone here will act as both projector and magical drawing-reader device. Just wave your fish and/or wang drawings over your smartphone’s camera, and voila! your aquatic creations are now roaming around in your aquarium, happy as can be unless you drew them with one lame fin or a third eye or something.
But wait! Your fish won’t be content to just swim around, mostly ignoring your existence. You can actually interact with them in a limited way! Try bumping your smartphone and the fish will jump in surprise as though you’d just tapped forcefully on the glass of a real aquarium (please don’t do that, by the way). The fish will also follow your finger around or occasionally play with you, and you can even draw cake and chocolate bars and other stuff for your fish to eat (also, please don’t feed real fish chocolate bars).
You can even play around with the options in the included app without removing your phone from the aquarium by hovering your hand over your phone’s camera and swiping. You can also import selfies and photos of friends onto your fish drawings so you can watch that-idiot-Steve-from-HR-fish slowly die of starvation in the corner.
Not all of Takara Tomy Arts’ toys end up crossing the pond to the western world, but considering that the toys’ homepage features a fairly prominent English section, we think it’s a safe bet that the Picturerium will soon be available at a toy store near you!
Source: news.gamme.com.tw
Images: Takara Tomy Arts
Leave a Reply