It's not just a holiday for trick-or-treaters - dressing up for Halloween has become an annual challenge for many older enthusiasts. There are people who put weeks if not months of time and energy into designing elaborate costumes to impress their peers, and maybe even gain some online attention for their efforts. One group of designers, though, has decided to take advantage of their smartphones and tablets to make their offerings more extreme.

Mark Rober has achieved some minor annual fame over the last few years with his iPad based costumes. Using two iPads at either side of the costume, he managed to create the illusion of a 'gaping hole' in his zombie costume. Last year, he introduced the 'eye tracking' costume: a t-shirt with a moving eye (well, once you attached your smartphone to it).

Rober - who has quit his job at NASA to focus on building a business out of his designs - and his team have now pushed things even further, coming up with a whole range of particularly nasty and eerie costumes. There's the app that allows friends to 'rip out' the guts of the costume wearer, or the creepy full body morphsuits designed to imitate an inside-out body or the terrifying Slender Man. Smart phones and tablets can be used to add a disturbing extra layer to many of the costumes, even coming with a velcro pocket to make the whole process even easier.

Check out the video of some of Rober's efforts below - it might provide some inspiration of what to wear in three weeks time. That last minute witch costume won't really cut it when someone shows up in one of these. Just be warned, some of them are a little gruesome...

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)