Popinator fires popcorn into your mouth, is probably a PR stunt

Popcorn Indiana, the same company that manufactures the bags of kettle corn you might find in a convenience store, posted a project on their website called The Popinator. It’s a device you fill with popcorn, turn on, and responds to the word, ‘pop’ by firing a piece of popcorn into your mouth. Details on this build are scant, most likely because The Popinator doesn’t operate exactly as described in the video demo for the Popinator project.

We’re going to call this build a figment of the imagination of one of Popcorn Indiana marketing drones, but the idea behind the project is actually fairly interesting. The idea of using voice recognition to determine when the word ‘pop’ is said to turn on the machine is very cool. Using time of flight to calculate where someone’s head is puts this build into a category of awesome we’ve rarely seen before.

Despite all that coolness, we can’t help but think this project is simply an attempt to “go viral” and get a ton of publicity from random tech blogs using only a video camera and a few hours in Final Cut Pro. You’re welcome, Popcorn Indiana.

Surely there will be a ton of comments for this post arguing the merits of this build. You can check out those comments after the break, along with the official Popinator video.

Filed under: cooking hacks