Creative App MakeGo Turns iPhone Into Children’s Racing Car

We’ve seen the iPhone being turned into things it was never designed for, a robot, a controller for a robotic ball, a way of serving beer via Siri. Turning it into a children’s toy vehicle wouldn’t be the first thing that would come to mind if you wanted to distract them, giving them Angry Birds to play with would be the better option, yet one designer has created a novel use for the smartphone, designed to keep younger users occupied.

Makego, designed by British artist and designer Chris O’Shea, lets you transform your iPhone into one of three different vehicles, a race car, an ice-cream truck, and a river boat. While you build the vehicle itself and then insert the iPhone into it, the app turns the phone into an interactive vehicle. So for a race car, you can add fuel and it provides the ‘vrrrumm!’ noise (so you don’t have to), while for the other vehicles, you can play games and interact with your vehicle through animations and sound.

The only problems behind this app is that you have to be either very trusting if you’re give your iPhone to a child to play with, or have a great insurance policy for it as the chances of it getting dented, scraped, smashed, broken, chipped etc. will probably happen more often than you’d expect. However, it’s definitely an interesting experiment that could spin-off into its own selection of toys, if touchscreen technology came down in price, similar toys such as these could be developed. If that ever happens then hopefully such toys will show the same creativity as this.