I've always been fascinated by Feynman, but had never seen an interview by him. That was incredibly interesting. Thanks for posting it.

http://www.phidgets.com/

I think phidgets (physcial widgets) may be what you're looking for. I've used them for a number of human-computer interaction projects at school and they aren't too hard to set up and are pretty durable. You can program them using VB.net or C#.