7/21/11

Blue Ball Machine...

If you've ever seen the pictured animations online of the 'blue-ball machine,' you'll know it's like a big Rube Goldberg machine, where a long chain of objects react to perform a simple task. These online animations [two of which I found here, and here (click the 'here's) are similar in that they transport several blue balls around a map of arbitrary contraptions, and though no goal seems present like a Rube Goldberg, it is a continuous chain of events to move the balls. It's fun to follow a ball as it travels through the picture, but it's pretty disappointing when they roll off the screen (EDIT: Now I get why they roll on and off screen in random places - they are made to be tiled, so the gifs above are tiled and look a lot smoother like this . You can find others by just googling 'blue ball machine' or something).

Now to the reason I was posting this, YouTube user freddiew (who's videos have been posted here before) uploaded a real-life video to YouTube of a blue ball machine, and it was quite entertaining but short.
See it below.


-Abdul

P.S. We should have tumblred.