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It’s been more than two years now, since those Angry Birds left the nest to battle their saboteur swine foes but no one’s quite played the mobile and desktop app game like this before!

As most of us know the Angry Birds game is played by launching feathered heroes from a massive catapult shaking and breaking the shoddily build fortresses of the egg-stealing piggies. A fellow by the name of Simon Ford has taken the basis of the game’s tried and tested method of play and manipulated it to combine real-life “physical” play with the app-based Angry Birds.

He’s done it by hooking up an actual catapult with a microcontroller, three-axis accelerometer (some physics thing which measures acceleration, to us laymen) and a stretch sensor. On plugging in the makeshift weapon via his laptop’s USB port these elements can record all the tweaks and pulls made on the catapult, as well as all the angles and trajectories and translates them to onscreen clicks (or touches on mobile devices) and drags of the launcher in the game. Releasing the elastic lets the feathers fly, and launches the bird into the air!

Ford offers a guide to how to make your own unofficial Angry Birds catapult at mbed.org/cookbook/Slingshot - But we’d have advised the chap to approach Rovio directly and get this one patented right away!

Did you see the footage leaked from NASA that shows the discovery of a huge catapult on the surface of the moon?? Of course it’s all just publicity for the upcoming Angry Birds Space game arriving on March 22nd. Check out the Gadget Helpline’s latest coverage – Here.

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