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Award-winning designer Martin Frey created a device based on the classic arcade game.
As we all know, Snake is an old favourite, where a creature that, funnily enough, resembles a snake is guided around the screen by a user and has to be fed bite-size pieces of “food”. With each ingestion, the snake appears longer and longer, with the aim of the game being to eat as much as possible without get tangled in its own tail.
Traditionally, the player controlled the snake’s movements using a joystick or a keyboard. In Frey’s invention, the user holds the container filled with ferrofluid (the “oil” that reacts to magnets) and controls the direction of the flow by slightly tilting in the desired direction: hence the name SnOil.
The “come and go” appearance of the snake and food pieces in SnOil is triggered by switching the flow of an electric current. Directly underneath the outer layer of SnOil lies a series of 144 (12 by 12) electromagnets. Underneath the electro magnets lies the electronic components that trigger the magnets on several layers of circuit boards. SnOil is therefore able to be enlarged to a desired size.
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