Today I got to play with a special toy at work 🙂

As part of the move into the new building, we had people zooming around on Segway’s welcoming the new people.

Naturally it was only a short period of time before I decided to try my luck at getting a go. Surprisingly, they seemed surprisingly willing to loan me a $8000 segway to play with to my hearts content.

For those that don’t know what a Segway is, its a simple two wheel scooter, except the wheels are side by side… It stays upright by using a series of complicated gyroscopes and some advanced computing power to control a pair of electric motors.

Easiest if explain I give a pic of one I think…

The Segway automatically stabalises itself by driving forward if it is tipped forward, and back if it is tipped back. This means that it can not only keep itself stable, but you can stand on it and ride around by simply leaning back and forth 🙂

Now the first thing I noticed was that if you step on it and its not turned on, you better be good at balancing on a wheeled object… the second thing was that I must have learn’t something about balancing while riding my unicycle!

Once I had it turned on, I was away. It felt erily like riding my unicycle, except no peddling required. But sure enough, the same basics applied, like ‘just think about where you want to go and it magically starts to go’, ‘if all else fails just relax and it will gradually right itself and slow down’ and ‘when a taxi pulls out in front of you try and fall over backwards to stop as quickly as possible’.

Anyway, all in all, it was fun to play with, but I dont really know how much use it would be. However I have found directions on the internet to build your own segway (for a lot less than the $8k they sell for) which is tempting…

Hmmm, I might have to approach this one carefully with Sarah 🙂