Tengu is a nifty little gadget – it doesn’t really do anything practical and, if you only ever read about Tengu, you might not really appreciate it so I’ll be tagging on some youtube videos to help you understand.

Tengu is a little pixelated character that lives by your computer. He gets his name from characters from Japanese folklore but he looks like an over-sized ‘demonstration-tooth’ from the dentists office. Of course I have a well documented love of catchy Japanese wierdnes, so naturally, I picked one of these babies up just as soon as they drifted in the door.

So just what does Tengu do for you?
Well, besides looking like the evil encarnation of the iPod shuffle, Tengu is surprisingly efficient at looking hysterically cute. Blow on his face to wake him up and he’ll yawn and blink. Once he hears some music he’ll begin to lip-synch along – even to regular conversation.

Tengu has over a dozen facial expressions and he will step through them every time you blow on his face. Each face has a different way of visualising your music or whatever other sounds are going on nearby.

My personal preference is for his ‘Square mouth’ face – mostly because of the song it mimes along to in the demo video.

Tengu Demo Video