Archive for the ‘Videogames’ Category
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During the past 3 weeks we’ve been teaching a workshop inspired by old school video games. The idea behind the workshop was to modify an Atari 2600′s video games adding a simple twist to it. It could be by changing part of the playability of the game or by using other inputs than just buttons.
The students came up with 3 final pieces: Barreño, Beatlaw and Indy 501. Please visit the workshop website to play them, download the source code or get more info about the workshop process of work.
This workshop was created by Aer Studio for IDAT, with Cristobal Castilla and David Dalmazzo as tutors
Some years ago, he did it again, he left Barcelona with the hope of finding an even brighter stone some place far away. And it seems that he has found something, we don’t know yet the details but the expectation is high. Steph’s new iPhone (and iPad?) game, Faraway will be released this fall… until then take a look at the video teaser above and check his twitter for updates.
More info in Faraway website and Creative Applications.
Probably you have heard a lot of things about Kinect the last days but not from official sources, kinect drivers have been developed for using in our computers and soon all creative frameworks, like openFrameworks or Processing, have begun to make their own modules to make it work.
For all the people who still don’t know about Kinect, just say it is a device developed by Microsoft which allow us to play with our own body as controller. It is composed of serveral microphones, a regular webcam and, the most important thing, an infrared proyection of a mesh captured by an IR camera which allows depth measures, in other words: a real and very cheap 3D camera in real time.
Since the drivers were released by @marcan42 a.k.a. Héctor Martín in response to Adafruit contest, all the creative coding scene has been trying to improve and make some experiments with the new toy. You can see a detailed timeline in Creative Applications, an article I strongly recommend to read.
And this is only the beginning of what is coming. I remember the days when the Wii was very popular, everybody wanted to have ther Wii controller in their installations but nowadays wiimote is not used anymore and we realized it is not so exciting as we thought in a first term. But what is the different with Kinect? Why so movement in the opensource community?
From my point of view, Kinect is completely different. It is not a new technology (in fact what is new? The new is how we combine them). Depth cameras used to cost about thousands of euros but now Kinect is a very cheap device (149.95€), obviously it not so good but it does the trick. But why it is so important? Just imagine what a device like this can be done in the game industry then what can be done in the art and show industry?
You can combine depth data with real imaginery to make a 3D real time composition. You can combine real footage with virtual animations in real 3D space. We had augmented reality but now we are going to have augmented space or augmented environment.
But the most surprising thing is, again, the movement of people, the kinetics of opensource and how the things can be developed all around the world in just a few days. And I am pretty sure the discovers the community is going to make will be more astonishing than microsoft. But the real success is going to be when game developers start to copy community developers for their games
Thanks Microsoft (for not closing the device at all and make it affordable), thanks community (for all your unconsidered efforts), and thanks you (because you are going to enjoy and move your body).
F = m · a
update: Now wireless!
