University of Washington professor Magnus Feil told his students to “push the boundaries of current upper-limb prosthetic design.”

Differently-abled

The students simulated life as an amputee by taping up one hand and soon realized that their restricted hand was still capable of simple tasks like bracing objects.

“That was an important discovery–that it doesn’t always make sense to recreate a hand or fingers,” said Feil. “It’s more important to look at the interaction between the working hand and the prosthesis so the two can be team players. By finding these interaction patterns, students had lots of clues for their final designs.”

The strangest of which was Kaylene Kau’s prosthetic tentacle. “The basic functions it does are holding things down, grasping and gripping. You can control the amount of curl it does, and it can curl around quite a few objects,” explains Kau.

But while combining amputees and tentacles may sound like a Japanese man’s wet dream, it’s uncertain exactly who would willing wear it. “It’s been a challenge seeing what people think,” admits Kau. “There’s people that think, ‘That is just too creepy to be on a human.’ And then you’ve got the people who really want it because it is that creepy and that strange,” Kau said.

See more creepy pictures @ Coroflot