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• Value gun - a racist gun that senses skin color (doesn't actually)

  Arya • 05/12/2017 at 15:46 • 0 comments

  Value Gun is a project that was created at Internet of Shit hackathon, a hackathon where people went to create the most useless or the most technologically harmful connected devices. In the same room as vaping machine controlled by Amazon Alexa, smoke detector tweeting pictures of fire instead of sounding alarms, and a rotary phone you could use as a Bluetooth keyboard, there were two guys designing and building a gun tht would detect a person's skin color and give directions on whether to shoot that person or not.

  I was the guy responsible for the electronic side of the gun. When I came to the hackathon, I remembered I had bought a Chinese RGB sensor breakout from eBay, and I was thinking about finally getting to play with it, so originally I pitched an idea of connected diapers, even describing my wish for a worldwide network of connected diapers that could paint the global map in different shades of brown. However, I was soon after approached by another guy, who had the "racist gun" idea, and so I went with it =)

  The concept is simple - there's a sensor that can determine the color of the object in front of it, essentially an one-pixel camera. By taking data from that pixel, we're likely to receive something that might be classified as a color of object before the sensor - once the result is filtered, averaged and the value is checked for sanity. Of course, conforming with the "Internet of Shit" designation, we weren't going to do any of that and so it would be as straightforward as possible. We went to the store, picked the first toy gun we found (not exactly a stereotypical Glock, but this will do) and started hacking.
  

  The idea is obviously a dig at current situation in America, as it's presented in American media and subsequently interpreted by people. I think most people have heard about George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin controversy, as well as all the statistics that support or refute the point that people of color are discriminated against by both police and ordinary people, often resulting in deaths and wrongful convictions. Moreover, it's a dig at the American gun culture stereotypes, as well as stereotypes about street gangs.
  

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