Waterloo Labs makes Mario Kart an awesome reality

Perhaps I’m alone in this, but maybe not. You’re driving on the highway and a bit of that road rage seeps into your existence. You want nothing more than to fire a green shell at the car in front of you or quite as effectively leave a trail of bananas in your tracks. After all, you want to get in front – but not in front enough to get nailed by that wicked spiked shell.

The Waterloo Labs of Austin have crafted your everyday go-karts into Mario Kart vehicles via wrenches and science. They rigged four of these track ready karts and then actually raced them. By hanging mystery item boxes above the track on a line, the drivers can grab them – such as green shells and bananas. These items have RFID tags in them and the karts have RFID readers aboard. If the driver uses a star, he’ll get a speed boost and when coming near other karts they will stop.

The amount of mechanical know how and determination to make Mario Kart is downright impressive here. The created a green shell cannon on these karts! What else could you ask for? As long as Waterloo Labs sticks to Mario games and doesn’t start getting into recreating something like Resident Evil… we’ll all be fine.

Do yourself a favor and watch the video below:

[NBCNews] via [TechCrunch]