Caleb Kraft used overlapping graham crackers and icing/glue to piece together a functional, edible Google Cardboard viewer whose only inedible components were the lenses (which Kraft says he could have made from edible material — sugar? — but lacked the time for).
His build/eat log is a nice exemplar of a maker ethos: getting a weird idea, looking around online for basic techniques and similar projects, iterating through multiple designs, then getting something usable and documenting it (and then eating it, of course).
Graham crackers are interesting building blocks. They're a bit brittle and crumbly, but a bit of icing applied to two large surface areas, which are pressed together firmly, holds pretty well. I recorded my entire build, simply placing things where I thought they should go. It looked as though it was going to work wonderfully.
When I picked it up the first time, it fell completely apart into pieces in my lap.
I wasn't going to give up though. I started over, trying to use large overlapping segments as much as possible. Version 2 held together when I picked it up! I then decorated it and turned on the camera to capture footage of me using it! You can't really tell in the video, but this thing actually worked. I could look all around and, aside from the icing getting on my face, it was pretty much the same as my google cardboard.
During the construction of this project, I kept wondering what would make this video amusing. How would people know it was edible and that I didn't just hot-glue my stuff together? Ultimately I decided to just eat the whole thing on camera. I wish I had thought of this at the beginning, because I had been snacking on all the extra bits that I would break off as I shaped pieces. I had been gorging myself on little icing and graham cracker sandwiches all morning before the time came to chow down on the real thing.
Making an Edible Virtual Reality Viewer for Your Phone
[Caleb Kraft/Make]
