Imagine this: It's your kid's birthday, a particularly special one. You present her cake, hand her a wand, and ask her to wave it ... and Tinkerbell goes flying around the cake, leaving a trail of pixie dust behind.

Sounds pretty cool? It may someday be coming to a birthday party near you. Disney has patented a kind of interactive cake, which has a pico-projector (a kind of tiny laser projector) inside. It treats the surface of the a cake as a screen on which it projects a moving image, and can immediately react to changes to the surface of the cake. For example, if you cut a slice where an image of a lake appears, it can sense that and create an image of a waterfall where the lake was.

Sensors inside can detect motion outside the cake with specially coded props or utensils, triggering Tink's flight or, say, Lighting McQueen zooming away. And the processor inside can also make decorations move.

How cool would this be? And how insanely expensive?

I was hoping the recession would put an end to the over-the-top child's birthday party, but you know this will become the total "it" thing for the wealthy competitive parent. No longer would just having Duff Goldman make your 1-year-old's birthday cake be enough, no, now the cake would have to show movies. Interactive movies at that.

But seriously ...Tinkerbell flying on a birthday cake? Super cool. That might be worth some serious coin.

 

Image from Disney Patent Application via Stitchkingdom.com