So, this guy gutted an Outrun arcade cabinet, jammed it on a go-kart and, in the name of university research, assembled a contraption that drives 15 mph in the real world while displaying it as an 8-bit virtual one.
"In terms of getting a video game cabinet to roll down the street, I haven't seen it before," says the researcher's supervisor at the University of California-Irvine.
Yeah, that's a given.
Meet Garnet Hertz's rolling video game, for lack of a better word, and I'm at a loss for how to describe it. Essentially, as you drive in the game, you also drive in the real world, but what you're looking at - if you're looking at the screen anyway - is the road course rendered as a driving game. Hertz got the idea after going to an arcade in 2008.
Not exactly practical as a video game, but as a proof-of-concept for other applications, it might have some legs. Hertz also drew inspiration from stories of people so focused on their GPS directions that they ended up driving into a river. So what he's working on - the camera component anyway - could function like a HUD overlay, both processing the surroundings while popping up visual information over it.
That's fine and dandy, but I just like the idea of a motorized arcade cabinet. You see one of those pull up next to you at the stoplight, no matter how fast it goes, I guarantee it gets a wide berth.
[Orange County Local News Network. Pic also by OCLNN.]
It Will Drive You Out of Your Mind: UCI Develops Rolling Video Game