Skip a stone on a mountain lake from your desk

1 hr.

John Roach

Stuck in a cubicle but wish you were in the mountains skipping stones? So do I. And now we can, sort of, thanks to a promotional robot sitting on the side of a lake in Sun Valley, Idaho, waiting for you to play with it.

To do so, surf over to www.stoneskippingrobot.com?and?tell Skippy how hard and what angle to fling the stone.?Skippy will do the rest. Just sit back and watch your stone skip across an idyllic mountain?lake.

Skippy was built by Eleven Inc., a San Francisco-based marketing firm hired?to help the resort town attract visitors.

"This place truly sells itself if you're here," Daniel Murphy, director of interactive production for Eleven, told me today via satellite phone from Sun Valley?where he is managing the Skip Town campaign.

"It is everything you imagined about the great American wilderness ... we just needed to bring it to the people."

That's how the idea for?Skippy was born.

The robot is "a heavily modified clay pigeon thrower," said?M David Low, a creative technologist for Eleven, who is also in Sun Valley.

Instead of clay pigeons, it throws stones, for one. Skippy is controlled by the Arduino platform. Users set the angle and power for their stone toss. Given the remoteness of Skippy's location (a private lake outside of Sun Valley), there's a slight lag in communications, Low noted.

The skips are all recorded in real time. As soon as your stone is skipped, you get kicked to a results page where you can relive and share the the video of your skip.

So far, "thousands" of people have skipped stones, Murphy said, and tens of thousands have visited the campaign website. Some of those visitors may not be skipping their own stones given the long line.

For those city folk too impatient to wait in line, you can watch Skippy skip the?stones of others or view the video below to learn more about the campaign.

The folks in Sun Valley, of course, want this experience to whet your appetite for a real mountain vacation. You can register to win a trip as you wait for your turn to skip. Having spent nearly a decade of my life there, I can say it's certainly worth a visit.

--Via Technabob?

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

Source: http://www.futureoftech.msnbc.msn.com/technology/futureoftech/skip-stone-mountain-lake-your-desk-876348

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