Babycastles is Turning the Hayden Planetarium into a Giant Videogame

http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/1/24/babycastles-is-turning-the-hayden-planetarium-into-a-giant-videogame

Remember your first visit to the planetarium? Neil DeGrasse Tyson does — it was what inspired him to become an astrophysicist in the first place. That same planetarium, now under Tyson’s direction, is currently undergoing a transformation the likes of which Neil’s young self couldn’t have possibly imagined: It’s becoming a giant videogame.

Space Cruiser is the most ambitious project yet from NYC developer Ivan Safrin and DIYgames collective Babycastles: An interactive installation designed for 100-200 participants that turns the Hayden Planetarium dome into a giant virtual spacecraft. Together, players will collaborate to navigate a virtual ship through asteroid belts and other dangers — kind of like a massively-multiplayer version of Carl Sagan’s imaginary space vessel from Cosmos.

“Space Cruiser is using Ivan Safrin’s creative coding platform ‘Polycode’ to render his game on a 6-projector 4500×4500 pixel screen. Each projector is hooked up to a separate PC running an instance of Polycode and rendering part of the screen,” says Babycastles impresario Syed Salahuddin of the enormous installation, which premieres for one night only this Thursday at the Museum of Natural History in New York.

Some other space-related indie games will also be reporting for duty: Osmos, a surreal space simulator from Hemisphere Games, Kerbal Space Program, a build-your-own spaceship game, and Bit Pilot, the previously-exhibited minimalist shooter by Zach Gage. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be on an unscripted episode of Star Trek with 200 other people, you can get tickets (use code ‘BEYOND’ for half off) at the museum’s website.

Sony executives believe emotion reading games possible in 10 years

http://www.gamergaia.com/home/gaming-news/45-industrial/1778-sony-executives-believe-emotion-reading-games-possible-in-10-years.html


"Having a camera being able to study a player’s biometrics and movements [is possible] so perhaps you can play a detective game that decides whether you’re lying due to what it reads from your face. In ten years’ time I’d like to think we’ll be able to form a map of the player, combining other sorts of sensory data together, from facial expressions to heart rate. You can see how, over a period of time, you can form a map of the player and their emotional state, whether they’re sad or happy. Maybe people in their social network can comment on it. The more accurate that map can become, the more we can tailor it to the experience."

How the Nintendo 3DS Might Handle 3D Display

From Slashdot:  How the Nintendo 3DS Might Handle 3D Display
"Blogger Peter Smith weighs in with some possibilities for how the new Nintendo 3DS handheld gaming system will provide 3D gaming without the need for 3D glasses. The DSi has cameras, which means the 3DS will have to have them too if it's going to be backwards compatible. We've also heard rumors that the "next DS" will have tilt-sensors better than the iPhone. With either the camera or tilt-sensors either of these 'faux 3D' systems would work. But since we've seen the DSi do this already, it doesn't seem likely that the new hardware will rely on the same old trick. Enter our friends at Engadget, who uncovered some details from Japanese newspapers. If they're right, the Nintendo 3DS will incorporate parallax barrier LCD screens from Sharp (see also this explanation of dynamic parallax barrier screens). This is the same technology used in a few "3D Laptops.""

lowest end video source.

Wow, they have really made some progress since I last looked.
Video totally software generated.

http://www.rickard.gunee.com/projects/video/sx/gamesys.php

> Isn't this just 1983 all over again?

in 1983 they needed a lot of chips to make the video.
some of the CPU's were less then 1 Mhz even!

But these microchips are 20 Mhz and up.
They can literally generate video by "Bit banging" or toggling the digital output lines fast enough to approximate a video signal.

At this point it good enough to run a game while generating video on the same CPU.

This literally is the equivalent of taking a printer port wiring a few resistors and creating a video signal out using software.

Something that me and a friend Terje Oseberg did on a PC once just playing around 8 years ago or so using one of my old Audio Bytes.

More info:
Howto on generating video signals using PIC.


What is really impressive is I have seen some projects doing a really simple video overlay using an LM1881 to seperate the video sync and drive a cpu to output the video overlay.

Below is an example
Closed-Caption Decoder

I have also seen where an atmel 2051 was using and a cd4021 shift register. So like 3 chips costing $5 to generate a video overlay!