I bet that every person who had not been living in a cave for past 4 years has seen a toy called Furby. It has amazed you at first. It was cute and interesting. It reacted to your touch by making totally idiotic, but funny sounds. It opened and blinked its eyes. It stuck its tongue out. After 15 minutes of hearing constant “wow”ing and “blabb”ing the only thing you wished for is a sledgehammer so that you could turn that little harmless innocent toy into a blob of mechanical waste.

    While you were thinking up the best way to annihilate your little sister’s furby, Kelly Heaton – a student from MIT has come up with cool, artistic, and interesting solution to furby over-population problem.

    She has bought 400 dolls [25$ each!], pried off their silly Santa Claus outfits and ripped out their eyes, mouths, speakers, and all the electronics from the now-defunct furbies.

    Next, along with her friends, Heaton has reprogrammed the “brains” of the abovementioned toys and has equipped all of them with infrared sensors. As a result, the robot’s ability to “wake up” from a direct contact has been substituted by ability to “wake up” just from heat impulse – any warm object.

    Being done with butchering the little bastards, Heaton has connected all 400 triangular faces onto a special wall six by six feet in size.

    What she’s got was a screen with a resolution of 20x20 dots, in which a role of pixels is played by small spheres, which resemble the shape of a water molecule, slightly protruding from the wall. As long as nothing disturbs the infrared sensors, the wall is blank. But once something warm – a human for example – appears in close proximity, the furby-pixels that are closest to the heat source come to life and the screen shows a picture outlining heat source’s silhouette. Moreover, the activated robots start opening their eyes and mouths and make the ever-so-pathetic noise resembling some alcoholic’s fruitless attempts to sing. You can hear the wall over at project's website.

    The attraction has been titled “Reflection Loop”. Currently Heaton’s final project – which quickly became a work of modern art – is located in the bitforms museum in New York. “Reflection loop is my attempt at creating a mirror for modern times, - Heaton has told USA Today. – You really are looking in the mirror – except that the mirror is looking at you too.