Insight VR

Looks like Obscura Digital has made their own version of Missile Command.  Instead of lasers and webcams their implementation uses a giant multi-touch screen.  It is very similar to the Insight VR missile command, but playing it looks like a different experience.  In terms of game play, both my implementation and Obsucra Digital’s are missing elements of the original arcade game.  Neither one limits the number of missiles you can launch.  Theirs is missing chain reaction effects.  Mine is missing the launching of your own missiles as an explosion occurs right where the laser was seen.

Given the similarity of the two projects, I really have to wonder if they came up with this idea after seeing or hearing about my demo.  But then again, if you sit down and try to think of a game that would be fun to play with either the laser or the multi-touch interface (which are very similar) Missile Command is the first thing that comes to mind…

I’ve been asked to discuss both the details of both how headtracking works and how I used the DarwiinRemote library. I hope to accomplish both in this post.

I became aware of the concept of headtracking when I saw the Johnny Chung Lee video describing his wiiMote headtracking project, which is amazing, as are all his projects. I realized that it would solve the primary problem that was facing me in furthering the development of my laser games: it gave me a way to allow players to move in a game world while holding a laser gun with both hands.

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I presented Marshie Attacks at PyCon 2008 today. This provided some motivation for getting the project posted online and whatnot. So I’ve put up this blog and also a very primitive project page at InsightVR.com to try to share this stuff.

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