You’ll never eat an ice cream cone again after learning this horrifying secret! Also: the top 5 flavors of ice cream from your childhood that are NO LONGER made!

The issue:

Sometimes, when you’re eating an ice cream out of a cone, you will suffer the indignity of having the ice cream drip onto yourself and/or the ground (see Fig. 1).

This is especially likely to occur if you are less than five years old.

This can be avoided by diligently rotating the cone to check for drips, but this is a labor-intensive process that is ripe for disruption through advanced in robotics and computer vision.

Fig. 1: The ice cream cone looks safe (left), but if you rotate it 180º, it is revealed that the ice cream is about to drip onto you (right).

Proposal:

A glove lined with rollers and a set of tiny cameras can automatically rotate the ice cream cone in such a way that you will always be eating the ice cream sectors that are most likely to drip.

The glove is diagramed in Figure 2.

Fig. 2: A glove with two motorized rollers to actually rotate the ice cream cone (highlighted in red) and a number of additional free-spinning rollers to allow the ice cream cone to spin freely. Not shown here is the computer vision component, which be integrated into the glove as miniature low-resolution cameras on the top of the index finger and thumb (to provide a 360° view of the ice cream under standard gripping conditions).

Fig. 3: The recommended glove-and-cone configuration for optimal application of the “ice cream glove.”

PROS: Prevents ice cream from dripping on you while you eat it. Saves mental energy that can be focused onto other tasks, such as promoting world peace.

CONS: Equipment malfunction may cause the rollers to spin out of control, “centrifuging” the ice cream scoop and flinging it everywhere.