Ball's Plight, an iPhone and iPod Touch Game App by PriPri Games (plug for a former classmate) -and more games-related info....

Priyesh Dixit, a game developer has a free game app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. "Ball's Plight", can be downloaded from the iTunes Store. Here is the description:

"You are Ball, an alien with telekinetic powers and no limbs. An evil scientist has captured you and is forcing you to play his little game so he can unlock the secrets of your powers. You must survive in order to escape!"

"At its core, Ball's Plight is a classic game of ball and paddle. Touch the ball to the paddle to increase your score, reach the goal score to advance to the next level while earning points."


Priyesh was one of my classmates in Dr. Michael Youngblood's Artificial Intelligence for Game Design Class at UNC-Charlotte during the fall of 2006. He went on to work with Dr. Youngblood and Hunter Hale, a Ph.D. student, on the Common Games Understanding and Learning Toolkit (CGUL).

The mission of the CGUL project:

"To identify, develop, collect, and integrate a suite of tools and techniques for improving the understanding of interaction and behavior in all FPS/3PS games, incorporating knowledge as game artifacts, and learning how to advance game artificial intelligence through these mechanisms." (CJUL downloads)

About Priyesh:

Priyesh is a programmer at TimeGate Studios in Surgar Land, TX. He has a MS in Computer Science with a certificate in Game Design and Development.

Priyesh twitters as "madgamer7", if you'd like to follow him.


RELATED:


The Playground: UNC-Charlotte's Game Design and Development Program


UNC-Charlotte's Game Intelligence Group, lead by Dr. Michael Youngblood




UNC-Charlotte's Game2Learn Group, lead by Dr. Tiffany Barnes

Publication:
D.Hunter Hale, G. Micheal Youngblood, & Priyesh N. Dixit Automatically-generated Convex Region Decomposition for Real-time Spatial Agent Navigation in Virtual Worlds (pdf) Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
(Voted Most Infuential Game AI Publication of 2008)

Game:
Incursion, an Xbox game created by UNC-Charlotte Game Lab students,is available for download from the Xbox LIVE Marketplace website.

Zune HD Preview via Gizmodo

Zune HD Video Hands On from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

I need to give this some thought....like the iPhone, the Zune has an accelerometer.

Multi-player multi-touch: "NuMTyPysics", based on Tim Edmond's Numpty Physics (similar to Crayon Physics)

I have Numpty Physics on my Nokia n800 internet tablet, and Crayon Physics on my HP TouchSmart PC. Both are designed for single touch, and are fun to play. Since my TouchSmart can handle duo-touch input, I wondered what Crayon Physics might be like if it supported two players at once.



As you can see from the video, Thomas Perl and his colleagues have figured this out- at least with Numpty Physics!



The music is worth the watch. It's by Triplexity.

Numpty Physics and Crayon Physics both use the Box2D engine. Here is some information from the website:

"NuMTyPYsics are our enhancements to Tim Edmond's NumptyPhysics game. We added support for receiving TUIO messages from tbeta via PyTUIO by embedding an Python interpreter into the NumptyPhysics code. Currently, we simply emulate mouse input by pushing hand-crafted input events (SDL_Event) onto the SDL event queue (SDL_PushEvent). In the future, we plan to do bi-directional communication between the game engine (written in C++) and our multi-touch handling code, which will be written in Python." -Thomas Perl

Note:
I've use Crayon Physics Deluxe with several of the students I work with who have severe autism. It is amazing how well they can figure out solutions for the levels. It would be even better if it could be enabled for duo-touch. It supports joint attention, which is a very important social interaction skill for young people with autism to develop.

My Nabaztag:tag and Mir:ror Arrived!

I'll update this post after I've played with my new Wi-Fi and RFID toys.

For more information:

violet: Let All Things Be Connected
"The Internet of Things starts here"

GestureTek's "Cube": A compact Interactive Gesture-based Display System

GestureTek's "Cube"




From the GestureTek website:

"Introducing The Cube - a compact, turnkey, 'plug and play' interactive display unit that brings the power of gesture control to a variety of display spaces. Project the interactive 80” diagonal display onto almost any floor, wall, table or counter for branding, advertising, entertainment and product promotion. The Cube will engage customers, turn heads and drive business results."

Brochure (pdf)

Thorsten Blum and Johann Korndörfer's Multi-touch 360 Sphere for Art Installations- and Space Invaders!

I came across the Multi-touch 360 project today and I thought it would be the best surface for a prototype I worked on a couple of years ago. Multi-touch 360 would be great for travel planning and teaching geography. I could see one of these interactive spheres in the lobby of every cruise ship!

This


on this!

The Multi-touch 360 project is the work of Thorsten Blum and Johann Korndorfer, based on their previous work on the Space Invader's 360 game, featured later in this post. It is similar to Microsoft's Sphere project.

Multi-Touch 360 First Tests Video:




Picture Collage of Multi-Touch 360 In Process:

Multi-Touch Materials Research

SPACE INVADERS 360 VIDEO

SPACE INVADERS 360


Space Invaders 360: An Interactive Multplayer Gaming Installation That Makes You Move (pdf)
MindTrek 2008 October 6-9, 2008, Tampere, FINLAND ACM

ABSTRACT "Space Invaders 360 is a tribute to the video game Space Invaders designed by Tomohiro Nishikado in 1978. While the original version is a two-dimensional arcade shooter game, we have created an interactive gaming installation combin-ing the fun and thrill of the classic video game with experimental concepts of display technologies and new ways of user interaction.
Beside the technical aspects we also want to discuss the social aspects of our work. How does the gameplay change in the 21st century? What new ways of user interaction can be thought of? The success of Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS [7] shows the interest of professional and casual gamers in new methods of user interaction. While the last decades have been dominated by video games on fixed screens, over- sized gamepads and realistic graphics, gamers are now moving towards video gaming with a focus on physical interaction."


Thorsten maintains another blog, which is worth a look. I like the links he posts:

• Better Programmer Art
• How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days
• A Global Phenomenon: Andersson and Judd on Capcom/GRIN’s Bionic Commando
• The Megatrends of Game Design, Part 3

More about Microsoft's Sphere prototype:

"Our prototype device builds on a commercially available globe projection system (Global Imagination’s Magic Planet). We have added touch-sensing capabilities with an infrared camera that shares the optical path with the projector. This novel configuration permits us to enclose both the projection and the sensing mechanism in the base of the device and allows for easy 360 degrees access to the device and high degree of interactivity without shadowing or occlusion problems. We have also developed a custom graphics projection pipeline that solves the distortion problems and enables projected data to be correctly visualized on the curved surface.

The applications developed for Sphere currently include a picture and video browser, interactive globe visualization, finger painting, globe visualization, and an omni-directional video-conferencing application (360 degree panoramic video from Microsoft RoundTable device). These applications are designed for highly interactive public space environments (e.g., museums, lobbies, information booths) and highlight the appeal of the device as well as its visualization and interaction capabilities." Hrvoje Benko, Andy Wilson, Ravin Balakrishnan, Billy Chen

Note: Microsoft's RoundTable 360 video conferencing application is now known as the Polycom CX5000 Unified Conference Station, optimized for the Microsoft Office Communicator. More information can be found on the Polycom website.


Microsoft's Sphere