Home phone News

Would a telephone made from a real banana appeal to you?

Wednesday 4 January, 2012

By Kelvin Goodson

The technology used to turn an everyday banana into a telephone wins the grand prize at an international virtual reality conference.

Taking a call could become a far fruitier experience with the emergence of technology that can turn a real banana into a telephone.

The technology, which superimposes computer features onto another object and allows people to interact with it, won the grand prize at Laval Virtual, an international virtual reality and converging technologies exhibition.

Alvaro Cassinelli, an assistant professor at the Ishikawa Oku Laboratory, University of Tokyo, and his partner, creative engineer Alexis Zerroug, also used the technology - known as “invoked computing” - to turn a pizza box into a laptop.

Cassinelli told The Guardian that he and Zerroug had chosen to turn a banana into a telephone because they are “pervasive in the real world” and so “operate in a similar way to icons in a computer operating system”.

He went onto explain that invoked computing uses physical gestures to bring everyday objects to life: “In the case of the banana phone, a real handset is not really required, only something that suggests the action of calling on a phone”.

According to Cassinelli, if invoked computing were made commercially available it could remove the need to buy a new device because an old one is dying by making the old one “work from the outside.”

However, this could pose a problem for some of technology’s big hitters, he added: “Instead of an iPhone, you would just have cardboard or a deck of cards, so it would change the way people relate to objects. We'll see what happens.”

Photo by bark