Grad Student Creates His Own Working Spider-Man Suit

Who says you have to get bitten by a radioactive spider to get the power of Spider-Man? One student has used technology to acquire a spidey-sense. 

Victor Mateevitsi is a a computer science grad student at University of Illinois at Chicago. He hopes his invention, which takes a lot of inspiration from Marvel’s Spider-Man, could have applications for cyclists and the visually impaired. What does his special suit do exactly? It warns the wearer when something is near them. He calls it SpiderSense.

According to Discovery.com:

The suit is composed of small, robotic arms encased in microphone-equipped modules attached to one’s body. The mics send out and receive ultrasonic reflections from objects within one’s environment. If the ultrasound detects a person or thing moving closer to the mic, the robotic arms respond by putting pressure on the corresponding body section from wherever the “threat” is coming.

“When someone is punching Spider-Man, he feels the sensation and can avoid it. Our suit is the same concept,” Mateevitsi told New Scientist.

Mateevitsi tested the suit on fellow students who were able to sense an approach 95% of the time while blindfolded.

(via Discovery)

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Jill Pantozzi

Jill Pantozzi is a pop-culture journalist and host who writes about all things nerdy and beyond! She’s Editor in Chief of the geek girl culture site The Mary Sue (Abrams Media Network), and hosts her own blog “Has Boobs, Reads Comics” (TheNerdyBird.com). She co-hosts the Crazy Sexy Geeks podcast along with superhero historian Alan Kistler, contributed to a book of essays titled “Chicks Read Comics,” (Mad Norwegian Press) and had her first comic book story in the IDW anthology, “Womanthology.” In 2012, she was featured on National Geographic’s "Comic Store Heroes," a documentary on the lives of comic book fans and the following year she was one of many Batman fans profiled in the documentary, "Legends of the Knight."

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