If you’ve always wished you could step inside an old 8-bit game or computer, outfitting yourself and your home in these pixelated designs is about as close as you’re likely to get. Make your own post-it mural, throw on a pair of extra-geeky glasses, strap a clock icon watch to your wrist and even assemble a real-life replica of an early Microsoft Windows trash can.

8-Bit Fashion by Kunihilo Morinage

Designer Kunihilo Morinage of Anrealage unveiled a collection of 8-bit fashions at Tokyo’s Japan Fashion Week in 2012, featuring pixelated dresses, tights, shoes, masks, jackets and more. As the models walked at the show, a pianist played music reminiscent of ‘80s video games.

Key Holder and Hanger

Meninos Design offers a hand-shaped 8-bit hanger and magnetic key holder for under $20.

Superhero Mural Made of Sticky Notes

A group of employees at an office used 8,024 colorful post-it notes to create a series of 8-bit portraits of superheroes and comic book characters including Batman, Captain America and Wonder Woman. The use of sticky notes makes it look as if the murals are made of tiles from afar, but get close up and you’ll see that they’re actually paper. This idea would be easy to reproduce at home, if you’e so inclined.

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If you happened to notice a USB stick poking out of a brick wall in an urban space, would you be brave enough to connect your computer to it just to see what it might contain? Will it dump a bunch of malicious software onto your machine, or reveal something amazing? You just never know. The Dead Drops offline peer-to-peer file sharing project has been called “the nerd equivalent to glory holes,” bringing the sense of anonymity provided by the internet into the real world in a way that feels conspicuously sketchy.

Berlin-based artist Aram Bartholl took inspiration from the methods spies used to transfer information in a secret location. The process of accessing or distributing files on these networks is anonymous, you can share anything you want, and actually plugging your laptop or tablet into the drive sometimes requires bending at awkward angles or doing something that looks vaguely suspicious.

Bartholl notes that the ‘danger’ of participating in the project is no different from that of sharing files on the internet – the veracity of that claim has not been verified, however. People typically share photographs, art, poetry and videos. The drives range from 64 megabytes to a whopping 120 gigabytes. To install one of your own, just find or create a hole in a wall or other urban surface, remove the thumb drive’s plastic case and wrap the memory board with waterproof tape, place it in the hole with just the port exposed and cement it in with fast-setting concrete.

The project started in 2010 and has since grown to thousands of locations worldwide, according to a database that tracks where they’ve been installed. Some can be found in the busiest areas of cities like New York, while others are in abandoned buildings off the beaten track. You can find out whether there are any near you, or create one of your own using the Dead Drops site’s instructions. To be safe, consider using a secondary or otherwise spare laptop for such adventures.

If your hand has ever molded into a claw from typing on a conventional keyboard for too long, or you’re in the habit of hovering over your workspace with a bowl of noodles, pay attention. These 15 unusual keyboard designs include built-in bowls, flip-out panels for the fat-fingered, virtual displays and one-handed grips.

Keyboard-Plate Combo

Our computer keyboards are known to be among the most germ-ridden places known to man, but that doesn’t stop most of us from hovering over them as we eat our meals (thus, making the problem even worse.) This keyboard/plate combo by Dutch designer Hella Jongerius aims to solve that problem by adding a bowl to the center. Unfortunately, as much as gamers, students and over-achievers would probably love this to be a real product, it’s just a tongue-in-cheek concept.

Virtual Laser Keyboard

The future of keyboards is almost certainly virtual, with lasers projected onto a flat surface and optics that track the movement of your fingers. Keyboards like this still seem futuristic to many people, but they’re already available. This model goes for $119.99 at Brookstone.

Inside-Out Keyboard

The Inside-Out keyboard by designer Min Koo Yeo might just be a peek at what gesture-based keyboards will look like just a few years from now. While the front side is a standard keyboard with its own mini track pad, the back side is one big “smart” track pad for a greater range of gesture-based commands.

Wearable Sensors as Keyboards

The tiny keyboards on mobile devices can be frustrating for anyone with larger fingers. What if you could just cuff a couple devices onto your hands and ‘type’ on a flat surface instead? AirType detects the movement of your fingers and translates them into alphanumerical input. According to the creators, the device will learn from you, adapting to your personal typing style and habits.

Paper Keyboard

The Verbatim Virtual Keyboard by designer Florian Kraeutli turns a simple piece of paper printed with letters into a fully functioning keyboard. It puts the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer to work measuring and identifying the location of letters on the paper. At 80% accuracy, the concept still needs work, but it’s an intriguing start.

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Feel the wind on your face and smell the pine sap of the forest as you gaze down at the scenery far below – without ever leaving the ground. ‘Birdly’ is a new machine developed by the Zurich University of the Arts that simulates flight using an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, a motor-powered machine that mimics flying movements, a fan to fake the feeling of wind and even olfactory feedback tailored to the landscape of your choice.

The creators studied the movement of the Red Kite bird and translated it to a sensory-motor coupling that enables you to flap your ‘wings’ as if you’re really flying. The movement of your arms directly correlates to the flying sensation you experience through the Oculus Rift headset.

Once strapped in, you’re embedded in a virtual landscape as if you were the Red Kite itself for the closest possible simulation of flight that’s possible without ever actually going into the air. The faster you go, the stronger the air pushed out by the fan positioned right in front of your head.

While it’s easy to imagine Birdly becoming a fixture at amusement parks, so far, it’s just an art installation, with no plans for commercialization. The creators say there are a few tweaks still needed to keep users from getting sick during the flight experience. This device is just the latest in an intriguing line of creations using Oculus Rift to bend reality, like a recent Gender Swap experiment that allows the user to switch to the point of view of someone of a different gender.

Touch input has already almost entirely eliminated the need for physical keyboards and mouses, but soon, it won’t even be confined to a screen. Researchers are developing systems that can register and translate hand movements in thin air, or even replicate the sensation of three-dimensional objects and textures. Here are 13 intriguing touch tech inventions.

Touch Tech for Artificial Limbs

Prosthetics allow amputees to do all sorts of things they wouldn’t be able to do otherwise, but they’ve been missing one very crucial thing: the sense of touch. That could change, with experiments at the University of Chicago developing a moldable plastic material containing piezoelectric powder that can sense pressure at any point on a surface by turning it into an electric voltage. They were able to translate those electric signals to the human nervous system, so they can be interpreted by the brain as touch. The next challenge is adapting this touchscreen technology, borrowed from smartphones, to the soft and curved surfaces of prostheses.

Feeling Objects in Thin Air

Imagine being able to touch something that’s not really there. A new kind of touch technology being developed by the research wing of the Walt Disney Company allows users to feel textures on a touchscreen as well as touching holographic objects projected into space, as through an Xbox Kinect. Called ‘haptic technology,’ it works by blowing small rings of air at a user to simulate texture, movement or collisions with objects. It could potentially revolutionize the gaming experience, and also be useful in medical settings.

Board Transforms Touch into Sound

Developed by London-based studio Bare Conductive, the ‘Touch Board’ translates touch into sound. Any conductive material can be turned into an interface; in this case, electrically conductive paint is applied to a surface. You connect the touch board to a speaker, and plug it into a micro USB cable. Interaction with any of the electrodes cause an MP3 player to play an associated track from the card.

Transmit Audio Messages With the Touch of a Finger

What if you could hear through someone’s finger? ‘Ishen-Den-Shin’ technology (named for a Japanese phrase meaning “what the mind thinks, the heart translates”) uses the human body as a sound transmitter. A handheld microphone connected to a computer records as soon as it hears a person speak and transforms it into a sound loop which is converted into a harmless high-voltage inaudible signal transmitted to the microphone’s conductive casing. That means whoever holds the microphone becomes a human sound emitter. If they touch an object or another person’s ear with their finger, the small sound vibrations can be heard.

Augmented Reality Touchscreen Interface

An augmented reality touchscreen interface from Fujitsu Laboratories can turn any surface into a touch screen using off-the-shelf cameras an projectors. Users can trace their fingers across a document on a table, copy it as digital data, and display it virtually. The camera measures irregularly shaped objects on a table, and automatically adjusts the coordinate systems that make it possible to match finger movements and touching of objects to the digital display projected onto physical objects.

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