6 Childhood Toys That Got Hacked Into Grown Up Awesomeness

If you wanted a clear example of how much culture has changed in 30 years, there you go. We've gone from making toys that look like guns to making guns that look like toys. And these guys weren't the only ones. A month later, Precision Syndicate showed off another Nintendo-ized Glock on their Facebook page ...

... with the misfortune that this one went viral, prompting a deluge of comments pointing out that perhaps making an instrument of death look enticing to children isn't the best idea. Both companies clarified that the guns were one-time custom jobs for collectors -- hopefully not to duel with each other. To those of you thinking, "That would be awesome," shame on you. Nope, awesome would be if they dueled with Zappers retrofitted to shoot lasers, like the ones a Virginia company called North Street Labs created:

That blur was the Traxxas XO-1, the RC car that makes your car look like a baby walker. After all, when's the last time a vehicle you own left smoke trails for a reason other than to let you know the engine was falling apart? This one probably looks way slicker than yours, too:

In the time it will take you to read this sentence, the XO-1 can hit 60 miles per hour (at 2.3 seconds). Or, if you have the patience, it can break 100 mph in under five seconds. Other impressive capabilities include letting you tweak its performance through an app, having a removable top that was computer-designed for maximum aerodynamics, and making you $1,100 poorer. RC cars of this range won't make your enemies eat dust: They will literally send them to the hospital if you're not careful. Like this guy, who got flipped over by an OFNA DM-ONE going at 100 mph, presented here in slo-mo Zack-Snyder-vision:

Then again, buying one of these things may not be the wisest investment ever, given the number of YouTube videos of expensive RC cars crashing and exploding. Either they're flimsier than the official websites claim, or they turn you into a maniac who likes watching thousands of dollars go up in flames. At least when we threw our Matchbox cars against the wall, we didn't risk setting the whole neighborhood on fire.

Rober has a nine-year stint as a NASA engineer and a TED talk on his resume before age 36, and we say he's putting his skills to good use. Which is to say that, nope, his giant Nerf gun isn't a prop. It shoots giant Nerf darts, which hit damn hard ...

... and go damn long (they can cover 130 yards).

The darts are made from pool noodles and plungers, so they can really stick to things, while the gun itself is made out of 3D-printed materials and a whole lotta brass, pipes, and wood. Inside, Rober and his accomplices included a 3,000 psi (pounds per square inch) air tank, allowing for six 800 psi shots -- so each dart is like getting punched by an elite-level boxer. Somehow, this still wasn't potent enough for Rober, so his friends at the YouTube channel Eclectic Engineering replaced the air tank with a black powder cannon and the foam darts with wooden dowels. The result is frankly terrifying, especially if you're a watermelon:

We can only hope Rober goes back to NASA and gets them to arm all astronauts with these things. Fighting off Xenomorphs would look even cooler than in Aliens.

You're looking at a pit filled with nearly a million translucent plastic balls, which sounds like something the government would put together to catch the Godzilla-sized preschooler in a Honey, I Blew Up The Kid remake. This jumbo ball pit took up over 10,000 square feet of the National Building Museum of Washington, DC between July and September of last year as part of an art exhibit. Perhaps the most impressive part was that the balls had an anti-microbial coating, preventing the pit from turning into a Chernobyl of disease like the one at your local McDonald's.

The exhibit hasn't been back, but don't fret: There's also an itinerant "adult ball pit" that might one day come to your town if you're lucky.

Created by Pearlfisher, a British design agency, the 81,000-ball pit was originally a way to let the company's employees relax during the workday (without resorting to illegal substances, like most creatives). It was so popular that they made it open to the public and took it on the road. So far, it has visited London, Manchester, and NYC, and you can sign up for the company's newsletter if you want to know which city the balls' collective consciousness will decide to grace with its presence next. Oh, and the best part? Absolutely no small children allowed. You had your turn, you little shits.

That's Tomas Saraceno's On Space Time Foam, a world-famous exhibit representing Einstein's special relativity while providing adults with an excuse to bounce around like little maniacs. Special relativity is the idea that gravity has an impact on spacetime, like a ball on a blanket dragging other objects towards the center -- or, as in Saraceno's exhibit, human beings. The Space Time Foam trampoline, originally installed at the HangarBicocca contemporary art museum in Milan, basically turns you into Einstein's guinea pig. Visitors can crawl and tumble across various layers of plastic membrane suspended 65 feet into the air, and what people do in one layer will change not only the shape of the others, but also the air pressure and atmosphere inside. So it's kind of like living in a dorm, only with thicker walls and more privacy.

The exhibit, according to Saraceno, is about how "each step, each breath, modifies the entire space: it is a metaphor for how our interrelations affect the Earth and other universes." That sounds cool, and a little bit influenced by marijuana. In fact, even MIT thought the project was awesome, and invited Saraceno to do a residency with them. That or they wanted an excuse to bring the exhibit over and do this all day:

Yep, it's pretty much a real-life version of the mecha you used to see in anime while trying to catch a glimpse of cartoon boobs. Advertised as a toy, because in Japan that's a disturbingly broad category, Kuratas comes in at over five tons of metal carnage. Your new robo-BFF is powered by V-Sido software (which we're hoping is safer than the crap Skynet was running on), and you can control it from your iPhone and tell it where to go or who to step on. Or, if you don't mind getting your hands dirty, you can even sit inside the cockpit and pretend you're, uh ... you know, one of the characters from Voltron.

Those on-screen graphics aren't for show, by the way. You can hunt down your foes Terminator-style and shoot them with a Gatling gun that fires over 6,000 BB rounds per minute. The targeting system onboard Kuratas is ... "unique" (read: creepy). Once you've locked on a target, the pilot can tell Kuratas to shoot by simply smiling, because this robot is apparently infuriated by human happiness and will lose its shit at the sight of it. No way this can backfire.

If you're wondering if this thing is street legal, the answer is who cares (but here's some footage of one peacefully rolling down a Japanese avenue). Nonetheless, you can buy one right now from the company's website (or on Amazon Japan) for only a million bucks. When Kuratas was first announced, they immediately had around 3,000 orders put in, so expect road rage incidents in Japan to get a lot more interesting in the near future.

For more ridiculous toys we're ready to splurge on, check out 11 Bootleg Toys That Are Completely Insane and The 10 Most Unintentionally Hilarious Toys Exported By China.

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