Voice-Activated Popcorn Machine

Once you pop, you just won't stop

Voice-Activated Popcorn Machine

The one thing we've always thought when eating popcorn is: "wow, this is just too much effort, if only someone could invent something so I didn't have to move to eat it".

Well, a US company called Popcorn Indiana has answered the calls of couch potatoes everywhere, by inventing a machine which fires a piece of popcorn towards anyone who triggers it by saying (of course) the word 'Pop'.

Using a binaural microphone, the 'Popinator' device calculates where in the room the 'call of snack' has come from, and shoots out the popcorn towards them.

At the moment, the device is simply a prototype, which the employees of the company are clearly having fun using, but there are seemingly plans afoot to release it commercially.

After that, what next? Coke fountains? Rolo machines? We can only imagine how the world's obesity problem will spin out of control if this gets on the market.

Image: Popcorn Indiana

Marc Chacksfield
Content Director

As Content Director of Shortlist, Marc likes nothing more than to compile endless lists of an evening by candlelight. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.