The x-chopper is a project worked on by Boaz Mendel, Arthur Brutter
and myself.
The
x-chopper’s idea is based on a memory that all of us had from childhood:
dreaming we could fly.
Back
then, before flight simulators and video games, all we needed to do to fly was
spread our hands out wide,
close our eyes and run around the house imagining we
were in a plane gliding high above.
When
we thought of how we can recreate that same feeling in an interactive way,
we
decided to alter the controls of a complicated toy helicopter and make it as
simple as spreading your hand wide and flying.
In practice, what we did was a sort of reverse engineering
on the existing remote control by translating the movement of the joystick to accelerometers, one for each hand, using a simple algorithm