What you’re staring at here is a giant Scrabble board, which measures in at nearly 49 square feet. It’s made by artist John Kahn, using Russian birch plywood, covered with galvanized steel and vinyl game graphics. Each one of the game’s 100 tiles is made from wood with a strong magnet inside, and measures a whopping 4-3/8″ square. The board also comes with two wall-mounted tile holders, and a pair of tile racks for game play – though it would have been nice for them to include two more – in case you want to play a four-player game.

Only nine of this gigantic Scrabble set are being made, and with a price tag of $12,000(USD), I can’t imagine they’ll all be snapped up quickly. But if you have enough enough capital to afford one, you can check it out over at Hammacher Schlemmer now.

[via SUATMM]

Now before you get too excited about carrying this thing in your backpack, the XM18 is more like a portable spotlight than a flashlight. That’s because it’s actually made up out of what amounts to 18 of 4Seven’s superbright LED flashlights. It almost looks like the composite eye of an insect. Of course, they couldn’t just tape 18 flashlights together – they built a completely custom case designed to optimize cooling, and it’s even got a cooling fan and inside. All told, this beast is powered by 32 rechargeable lithium batteries.

The guys over at GoingGear recently got to check out this giant LED light up close and personal, and shot some video footage showing off one of the very first production units:

See what I mean – it’s not exactly pocket-sized. But on the other hand, the idea of a battery-powered device that can blast out a blinding 15,000 Lumens of light is still damned impressive.

All of this cutting-edge flashlight tech comes at a price, though. 4Sevens has the XM18 listed at $2,495 on their website. Each one is built to order, so you’ll want to be absolutely sure you need to light something up before you plunk down your credit card.

The massive controller measures approximately 12ft (w) x 5 ft (d) 3 in x 1ft 8 in (h), and weighs in at a whopping 265 pounds. It was built by Ben Allen, along with Stephen van ‘t Hof and Michel Verhulst.

The controller cost over $6,000 (USD) to construct, and yes – it does play games. The thing is so big that it takes at least two people to play a game with it, as the armspan required to use the D-Pad at the same time as the A/B buttons is too wide for even the likes of Yao Ming. Hence, my comment about Co-Op mode in the title above.

The controller was shown off at London, England’s Liverpool Street Station in celebration of the release of Guiness World Records Gamer’s Edition 2012. And no, you can’t have it in your living room.

[via EGM]

But anyway, do you agree that the size of portraits are a reflection of the (figurative) size of a person’s spirit? If you do, then you might want to say that great minds think alike, because that’s what Dennis Manarchy thought of for his 35-foot long mammoth of a camera called the “Eye of America.”

Here’s some background on the plans for the camera and its design:

While the video shows what the finished camera will look like, it appears that Manarchy has already built a functional version in his studio – it’s not as finished as the images shown above, but it is fully-functional, and captures images of extraordinary detail.

Manarchy built the “Eye of America” camera for his project entitled Vanishing Cultures. Basically, it’s a series that will honor America’s people by capturing their images on huge negatives that measure 6 feet × 4.5 feet and subsequently onto prints that are two stories-high. Here’s more about Manarchy’s project:

FYI, Manarchy is a celebrity of his own right in the world of photography; in fact, he has been voted as the world’s best photographer – twice.

[via PetaPixel via Dvice]

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

God only knows what they will build next when they tire of playing with their robot spiders and snakes. I would say that these people need to be stopped, except that if I do say it, they will probably send these metal demons to my house and I will be slowly digested over 100 years in this snake’s belly.

One of the creators says that Titanoboa is supposed to make people contemplate historical climate change. No, that didn’t really work for me. It just makes me want to kill it and save humanity, even though I’d probably just hide in the corner and whimper when that failed.

[via TDW Geeks via Geekologie]

The screen in the shot above and in the video below measures 70″ (diagonally), but Crunchy Logistics can make even larger ones, up to 150″. Playing Angry Birds might be a form of exercise on a screen that big.

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That was awesome. Digital or not, I think board games really need a larger surface to shine. Playing Infinity Blade or Fruit Ninja on the Padzilla could get tedious though.

CEO Neil Dufva told TechCrunch that the 70″ Padzilla display will cost about $30,000 to $40,000 (USD). An iPad is included with the cost, but that’s a small consolation. Crunchy Logistics is willing to rent a Padzilla to people with shallower pockets though, I’m just not sure what the rates are. Check out the company’s website for more info.

[via Pocket-lint & TechCrunch ]

Towering over us mere mortals, metal-man Jack Sparrow measures nearly 9 feet-tall, and weigh almost 1000 pounds. He’s made from huge piles of scrap metal from old cars and machines by Krittayakorn Chaijit’s Kreatworks Studio, located in Bangkok, Thailand.

They use the word “Steampunk” to describe him, but I’m not sure that’s the most accurate description. I suppose the gears and chains qualify, but I think this version of the pirate looks more like Ted Nugent and The Terminator got together and gave birth to the meanest looking Jack Sparrow ever. Actually, it doesn’t really look like Depp at all, but I don’t care. It’s still awesome.

You’ll have to crack open your treasure chest and cash in some of your gold if you want this. It’s currently selling for a whopping $7700 (USD) over on Etsy.

I have no idea how you’d get a half-ton, giant metal man from Thailand to other parts of the world, but Kreatworks says they can ship worldwide via EMS (for god-knows how much.) All I know is that I would not want to be the delivery driver on that route the day that Jack Sparrow turned up on my truck. I’m calling in sick that day.

This ginormous Pac-Man game was created by Soap Creative to show of the HTML5 capabilities of Internet Explorer 9. The massive map is actually made up of literally thousands (currently over 4000 to be exact) of interconnected Pac-Man mazes. So instead of looping back to itself when you exit a maze, you end up in another one. I’m pretty sure you could spend years trying to get through them all, what with the countless power pills and ghosts to consume. The cool thing is that the mazes are all unique, and you won’t always be able to use the standard arcade strategy to defeat them all.

Another cool feature is the global stats board. The game tracks the total number of dots eaten (at this point over 51 million), lives lost (over 249k), ghosts eaten (over 550k), as well as the number of mazes played and created. Yes, you read right – you can create your own mazes and contribute them to the world map, so the game will keep growing. Each maze maintains its own stats and bookmark-able URL too. Check out my very own Technabob map, complete with hairpin turns and precarious power pill placements (yes, I fixed that impossible-to-reach power pill #7 after I grabbed this screenshot):

Also, you don’t have to play it in Internet Explorer 9 if you don’t want. I managed to play just fine in Firefox 4, Chrome 10 and Safari 5 too. Just don’t tell Microsoft I said so. So what are you waiting for? Check out The World’s Biggest Pac-Man now.

[via Kotaku]

The giant curved touchscreen display was created by a team at the University of Groningen. Three computers handle the touch detection, while another processes all of the incoming touch-based inputs. The overall display relies on 6 cameras and 16 IR emitters, and has a total resolution of 4900 x 1700 pixels.

It can handle over 100 touch points at the same time. One of the great things about this touchscreen is that it doesn’t rely on any fancy new technology. It was basically put together with some PCs, video cameras, projectors and cheap infrared illuminators.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

[via Slashgear via PC World]

Yep, what you’re looking at is the Earth’s largest edible earthworm (a.k.a. the World’s largest gummy worm). At 128x larger than a “standard” gummy worm (is there such a thing as a “standard” for gummy worms?), it measures 26-inches long, weighs in at about 3 pounds, and will fill your tummy up with 4,000 calories of gooey worm gel.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Yep – eat a whole one, and you’ll instantly gain over a pound – even after digestion. Next time Matt Damon or Robert DeNiro need to gain weight for a movie role, they should eat some of these instead of donuts.

So what are you waiting for? The world’s largest gummy worm is available in five tasty flavor combinations over at Vat19 for $27.95 (USD).

[via Gizmodo via Nerdcore]

The massive video wall will sit between turns two and three and is designed to be viewed by spectators sitting in the turn four to turn one area of the track. It’s hard to fathom how massive the screen will be when finished. It will cover 16,000 square feet, which is larger than the grocery store up the street from me.

The behemoth will measure 200-feet wide by 80-feet tall and weigh 165,000 pounds. It will offer a 720p resolution image produced by 9 million LEDs. I don’t even want to think how much power the beast will draw. It will be used for all sorts of coverage of races and interactive content with construction starting next month and finishing in April 2011.

Arcadian Audio says that it took them 10 years to create these speakers. The design of the Pnoe is meant to “create the smoothest, roundest path for the sound wave front, without any obstructions, so that there are no sources of standing waves and spurious reflections.”
The speakers are made of fiberglass – Arcadian Audio describes the material as having a “friendly sonic signature” and are equipped with AER’s MD3 B drivers.  The Pnoe has a sensitivity of 100dB/W, a normal impedance of 16 ohms and frequency response from 42-21,000 kHz.

My god that thing is huge. I bet it feeds on small children. The Pnoe horn speakers are exclusively available from Arcadian Audio; if you want one you should contact them for more info and pricing.

[Arcadian Audio via BornRich]

The statue measures in at nearly 32 feet-tall, and weighs in at a staggering 4 tons! Incredibly, it’s almost entirely made from parts from an old truck. Other than some parts on his face and the sword, everything else is recycled truck junk.

The statue is supposed to be modeled not after any specific ‘bot from the Transformers, but based on the Chinese deity Guan Gong. Frankly, I don’t see the resemblance. Looks more like the cousin of Truckasaurus to me.

Who’s up for making one of these stateside? I’ll chip in $20 bucks towards the purchase of a  junkyard truck.

[via 163 via Cloned in China]

The elevators were made by Mitsubishi, and each one is about 12 feet wide, 9 feet long and 8.5 feet high. Now imagine every cubic inch of that space filled with sweaty businessmen, shoppers and screaming children. Almost makes you want to take the stairs doesn’t it?

[via Gizmag via Gizmodo]

The guys over at Ostendo are making these new CRVD displays, which not only offer a whopping 2880 by 900 pixel resolution, but are curved to engulf you in the action with a 90-degree field of vision. And when combined with ATI’s Eyefinity multi-display tech, you can set up multiple displays side-by-side to create a truly immersive gaming experience.

Each CRVD has a 43″ diagonal screen with an insane 32:10 widescreen ratio, backed by a bright, yet compact DLP rear projection system.

Somehow I overlooked these bad boys back when I was trolling the aisles at the CES show back in January, but from the looks of these sample video clips, I’m not sure how I could have.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

…and that’s just a single monitor. How about three?

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

So here’s the bad news. At $6499 (USD), you’ll need to take out a second mortgage to buy just one of these, and you’d probably have to sell a kidney on the black market to fund a triple-display rig like the one shown in the video.

[via NewLaunches]

This gigantic LEGO BlackBerry was created by LEGO sculptor Nathan Sawaya for the BlackBerry Developer Conference. The five-foot tall smartphone is based on the BlackBerry Tour 9360, and not only incorporates thousands of LEGO blocks, but also has a flat-screen LCD television built into the middle of it.

While it won’t actually send and receive messages or make phone calls, the enormous BlackBerry could be used to surf the web – if only Nathan were to connect a computer to the display.

[via Gearfuse]

At least the path has arrows. As far as I know (and that’s not a lot, believe me) each Superplexus Vortex was handmade by a man named Michael McGinnis (he’s the smiling bearded dude shown below).

The acrylic sphere containing the maze measures 36″ in diameter and can be tilted in any direction, and you’ll definitely do a lot of tilting (and swearing) as you try to roll the steel ball from the start to the end of the maze.

Here are some more daunting facts about the Superplexus Vortex: “The entire track laid out on a straight line is 31′ longer than a football field. In addition to the track, the ball must travel on a 1/16″ diameter stainless steel wire pathway at eight points along the journey… successful completion requires a minimum of 425 turns (plane changes) of the sphere–without letting the marble fall off the track.” In other words, you’ll never beat this puzzle.

But perhaps the most difficult aspect of the Superplexus Vortex is its price – Hammacher Schlemmer is selling it for $30,000 (USD). As a consolation, the store does claim that you can adjust the difficulty for your own Superplexus Vortex. Then again, what good is a $30,000 maze if you can solve it in a minute?

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

[pics via Michael's wife aka thesingingbird's photostream]

Star Wars fans may remember the Redemption, a classic EF76 Nebulon-B class rebel frigate featured in The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi. It was a medical frigate of the Rebel fleet.

This LEGO replica comes courtesy of Steef de Prouw. His model is big enough to dock the Millennium Falcon, as well as three X-Wing fighters. The frigate measures 172 studs in length. Prouw says that he had to spend days thinking about ways of handling each little part of the build.

I really like this project. I always wanted to get the full-sized ships as toys, but never really got any when I was a kid. I can remember someone having a bunch of ships and that always astounded me.

[via Gizmodo]

The enormous television gets its illumination not from LEDs, OLEDs or CCFL lamps, but from a 3-watt RGB laser light source. The lasers are projectred through a pair of 1080p LCOS imagers and the display can crank out images at an astounding 360 frames per second per color, which is said to produce an incredibly smooth and non-headache-inducing image. And yes, you’ll still have to wear those dorky-looking 3D glasses to see the effect.

HDi recently showed off a prototype of the display, and the San Jose Business Journal reports that HDi is now working with a manufacturer in China to produce the real deal. They expect to have a few units to show off by May 2010, and to ramp up to full production by next Christmas.

The HDi 3D Laser TV is expected to sell for somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000 when it ultimately hits stores, so you’d better start saving up your pennies now.

With Sony, Samsung, LG and others all racing towards delivering the “next big thing” with 3D television, it’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out over the next couple of years.

[via 3D Display Info, photo: NewTeeVee]

The mammoth LEGO Mario was created by Dirk VH, and is made up of over 40,000 individually placed bricks. All in all, Mario measures over 5-foot, 9-inches tall, and weighing in at over 110 pounds. That’s bigger than some people I know. And I know some small people! Check out the gallery below to see LEGO Mario as he came into being…

The guys over at Netherlands’ Game Mania commissioned Dirk to create this giant Mario for a good cause – The Ronald McDonald House. And all the bricks are glued together so you can actually count on Mario arriving in one piece. If you’ve got a ton of dough lying around, this amazing LEGO creation can now be yours, thanks to the charity auction going on now over on eBay.

[via 8bitfix]