Let's face it: our nation's students are running out of grad projects. Hundreds of years of institutionalized university education guarantees that all of the best ideas have already been taken. So what's today's grad student — exhausted after eight consecutive years of beer bong blasting — to do?
A good rule of thumb is to make up a question no one's asked, then go for all the cool points you can with your answer. So meet Wim van Eck, who dared to ask the question 'Is it possible to replace the computer code for the ghosts in Pac-Man with crickets?'
Instead of computer code, I wanted to have animals controlling the ghosts. To enable this, I built a real maze for the animals to walk around in, with its proportions and layout matching the maze of the computer game. The position of the animals in the maze is detected using colour-tracking via a camera, and linked to the ghosts in the game. This way, the real animals are directly controlling the virtual ghosts.
Regrettably, there's no video, but Wim van Eck's Amazing Cricket Pac-Man has finally given me an idea on how to merge my graduate project with the endless stream of cockroaches that keep on scurrying forth from the drain of my bathroom sink.
Follow graduate projects on Kotaku 