More Real World Pacman
from the it's-gobbling-up-everything dept
The BBC is running an article about some researchers in Singapore who are creating a real world Pac Man game by overlaying the game on actual streets, and having people equipped with GPS receivers and wireless nodes to let a computer know where they are. This would be sort of cool, if researchers at NYU in New York hadn't already done this last year with Pacmanhattan. Of course, the article also mentions that other researchers in Australia have created an augmented reality version of the video game Quake, which seems a bit more impressive. Still, it makes you wonder: what is the best idea for augmented reality games? Is it really to take old video games and make them playable on the streets (and if so, where's the augmented reality version of Frogger?)? Or is that thinking too narrowly, when an augmented reality game has the potential to do much more?
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1) PacManhattan was people running around in suits, Human PacMan is a heads up display showing VR style overlay on reality. You see the normal background, but you also see virtual big yellow dots overlayed.
http://155.69.54.110//research/HP/HP_webpage/research-HP-infor.htm
2) The reason for using older games is so that current computer power can better handle the additional load of creating a game overlay. It takes serious horsepower to create a VR experience, and most of it doesn't go into the graphics. Hence using "old" games for a VR experience now, the processing power can handle the game and the additional computation without a worry
disclaimer: I work as Research Director of WIRED NextFest...
come see Human PacMan and a lot of other cool stuff over at WIREDD NextFest in Chicago June 24-26 at Navy Piers
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Frogger
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