Arcade Lounge

We’ve been extremely busy lately. We haven’t eaten, we haven’t slept, and none of our friends have seen us in months!

We’re now pleased to announce the launch of three new products. As with all other surface tension products, they are all produced in the UK.

First up is the Rubik’s Cube seat, which is also a table and a storage unit. Made from MDF, sprayed to a fine black finish and stickered with pantone-matched colours to give a real authentic over-sized feel… measuring 45cm³.
These are currently in manufacture and are available now for pre-order for Christmas delivery in the UK, Eire and Channel Islands only.

It has the old-skool retro Rubik’s logo on the side.

Everyone’s favourite colours!

Open it up and discreetly store all your junk before your friends come over.

Available now to pre-order for £199 from surface tension.

When the Rubik’s cube was launched in 1980 it was awarded the Best Puzzle of the year, to date it is still considered to be one of the top selling puzzles in the world. While many only aim to solve the puzzle there are others, including surface tension, who try to give it their personal touch.

Another of my childhood favourites were Lego blocks, even these days the fan following for both the Rubik’s cube and the Lego blocks is still huge. One such fan is Andreas Nortmann who has come up with this awesome fusion of both.

Take a look at his innovative idea and you will be amazed at the brains that have worked behind them. Both the creators of the Rubik’s and Lego would surely be proud of him.

Nortmann exchanged the stickers with 2X2 plates of Lego. Different colored plates for all the six sides. What you have here now is a Rubik’s cube with Lego blocks fixed all around them. You can not only solve the puzzle but also use it as a base for other creations.

The building technique being applied here is referred to as SNOT (Studs Not On Top). Since it is being applied with the Rubik’s and Lego it is termed as Rubik’s + Lego + SNOT and the result is ‘Awesome’. You simply have no other word for it.

Kudos to Nortmann for such a brilliant idea!!

You may have seen our pre-production Rubik’s Cube stool at R3play last year and it won’t be long before it becomes a reality. But we need some help deciding which should be the ‘missing’ colour.

Because it is storage and requires feet, it must have an orientation. So as a result, one colour must be lost But, we’re running a poll so you can help decide which colour that is!

Due to the design, each colour has a set opposing colour, so whatever colour you choose to get rid of, decides what colour you’ll be sitting on! Every silver lining has a cloud…

White is opposite Yellow, Blue is opposite Green and Red is opposite Orange. Or if you like images…

So, we’d love to hear your input on this one. You could leave us a message here, or better still, head over to our facebook page and just click on the choice of colours. If you’d like to join the page, we’d like that too.

Learning the Rubik’s cube is on my list of things to do before I die. Though there never seems to be the time.

Now, getting myself a robot that could do it for me would save a lot of time! Time enough to do the next thing on the list, whatever that may be. Luckily a bunch of students at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, have created such a labour-saving device!

(Click for some youtube action)

Ruby managed it in just over 10 seconds, which includes the time to analyse. This is the fastest recorded time for a robot to solve the puzzle, though it’s still a few seconds off the fastest human time of 6.24s.

via :: technabob