If you have ever played Portal, you’re probably a fan of automated turrets

If you have ever played Portal, you’re probably a fan of automated turrets. If you use the internet in 2013, you probably either have a Twitter account, or at least encounter tweets from various people in your daily news cycle. iStrategyLabs, essentially a social media and digital ad agency, created an automated turret that fires paintballs when you tweet at it. It doesn’t sing in soothing tones like the turrets from Portal, but it allows you to shoot a gun from across the internet, if you’re so inclined.

Dubbed PaintBot, the gun (perhaps unfortunately) is set up in the office of iStrategyLabs, rather than placed in the bedroom of that jerk who doesn’t stop tweeting obnoxious retorts to everything you send over Twitter. The paintball gun is mounted on a tripod and shoved between some steadying wood, and hooked up to an Arduino. When someone tweets with the hashtag “#ISLPaint” the rig responds by firing a paintball at a canvas.

Sadly, though, there is much interactivity left to be desired. You can’t aim the gun, so you can’t potentially draw something on the canvas using paintball pellets as your brush, and there also isn’t a livestream, so you can’t watch your tweet shoot a gun. In fact, there’s really no way to tell if your tweet was even registered and did anything. iStrategyLabs does state that it is working on making improvements to the gun, so hopefully some aiming features and a livestream will be added in the future.