Pixelsumo is the blog of
Chris O'Shea, an artist and designer based in London.
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Playing with cubes
Posted October 19th 2007 under Games, Toys
The Cube was fictional film in 1997 in which people find they are trapped in a giant cube maze. Each cube room has 6 doors that leds to another room. This interactive architecture is full of sensors and actuators (flame throwsers, spikes etc causing considerable pain), and is essentially playing a game with the ‘inmates’, by shifting the room configurations around and the inmates trying to trick the architecture. Watch the trailer. I just wanted to mention the film in this post, as its actually a pretty good film.
I wanted to post 3 projects that use the cube as a gameplay format.
Julian Oliver is working on Levelhead, a augmented reality spatial memory game. Placing this cube infront of your webcam you will see into a 3D room. You have to tilt the cube and rotate it to make the person inside walk in different directions. The aim is that after a while you will need to remember which doors connect to which rooms and get your player to the exit in the final room. Once you reach the exit you will go to the next level (or cube).
The game is under development right now, is created using open source software and the game itself will be released as open source. Sony if you are listening, you should buy this for your PS3 downloadable games.
More Julian Oliver on Pixelsumo : Fijuu2 and q3apd
Andrew Fentem has just created the Fentix Cube, containing ultrabright colour LEDS and an electronic multitouch surface on all sides. This cube will contain a series of games, puzzles and effects. Andrew tells me it also features motion sensors, is rechargeable and will go on sale in limited editions at the Kinetica Museum. Hopefully in the future Andrew will allow people to program their own games for the device too.
At a workshop in 2005 I saw Takashi Matsumoto present the 2nd prototype of z-agon, a video display cube. Then it was using an led matrix, but now they are attempting to use tiny lcds from mobile phones. Video messages would be sent to the device via wifi and it also has motion sensors.
They’ve published many papers on the development.
Maybe one day we might see games like Levelhead delivered through an ldc cube like z-agon, along with our own development kits.
Comments
(February 5th 2008)
look, more crazy cube projects:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU7aeE_jggQ