Yesterday was the chance for third-year Computer Science students at the University of Bristol to show off their games projects, and there were some amazing ones to see.
The groups, made up of five or six students, had three or four months to develop the games. Their target was to make the most ‘enjoyable’, ‘playable’ and novel game they could. Each year the students get a range of resources to work with, including three gigantic displays, motion pods, spatially aware devices, etc. All very cool.
Off your trolley? — Wiimotes and megascreens
The concept behind a game called ‘Off Your Trolley!’ was to ride down Park Street (in Bristol) in a trolly. They digitally modelled all of Park Street and the Clifton Triangle perfectly, with painstaking detail, and even wrote their own physics engine to manage the racing.
The controls were simple - sit on a padded platform, with handles there to recreate that ‘trolley’ experience, and lean from side to side to steer. It was incredibly fun and easy to play, although you quickly tire yourself out from the steering.
On the technical side, they had placed a Nintendo Wii remote horizontally on the front of the controlling platform, the signals from which were picked up by a Bluetooth dongle and decoded for game. It’s very tricky to get that working on Linux, in which they wrote the game, but they managed very well nonetheless. On Windows there is a library which makes it trivial, apparently.
Grunts — home-made multi-touch that works
Another game, Grunts, presented an even more interesting hardware setup. They had developed their own multi-touch display table for this worms/lemmings-like game, the multi-touch component allowing multiple people to play it at once.
The display itself was made in very much the ‘Jeff Han’ style. A sheet of acrylic formed the display itself, which had images projected onto it from underneath. On the multi-touch input side of things, infrared light was pummped into the acrylic from little diodes situated all around the fabric.
Total internal reflection ensures the infrared light doesn’t escape downwards, unless the acrylic is pressed on (by a finger), in which case total internal fustration occurs and the infrared light escapes downwards.
Below all of this is an industrial strength high-FPS infrared camera, which takes a movie of the touches and sends them to a computer for analysis.
Obviously all of this is backed up by some strong analysis of the footage coming in. It’s safe to say the implementation was excellent, and all manner of touches and gestures were properly and smoothly converted into game interactions.
Needless to say, though, that the implementation (which cost c. £600, including £300 for the camera) was great to see, and very exciting, too. It works. Well.