Façade would be great on Project Natal
The Milo and Kate game looks like really impressive technologically. But the setting of playing with a child and helping him with his homework isn’t the most interesting application for it.
Trip and Grace in their apartment in Facade
But back in 2005, a freeware PC game called Façade was released. They had similar ideas, but didn’t have such good technology.
Façade is a First Person Drama game. The aim of the game is to save the marriage of your friends Trip and Grace, while you are invited to their apartment for drinks. They will try to spend the whole night arguing with each other, and will normally get angry and want a divorce before the night is out.
You can walk around the 3D apartment with the arrow keys and look around. And you can interact with or pick up objects with the mouse. You can also hug, kiss or comfort either Trip or Grace by clicking in the appropriate place on their body.
But most importantly, you can talk to them by typing whatever you feel like saying. They will talk back to you with recorded voice samples like Milo does. Dialog is in real time, and you can interrupt other people if you want. At the start of the game you can choose your name from a list and then Grace and Trip will talk to you by name, the way Milo does. Unfortunately, “Claire” isn’t one of the names you can choose, and neither was my name: Carl. But strangely I could choose the Vietnamese name Khá, which is what half my friends call me anyway.
I found typing in real time to be too hard, especially since they don’t respond to the fact that you started typing, like a real person would when you start speaking. They wait until you press Enter. I also found they didn’t seem to respond as much to what I said as they should, and I didn’t seem as in control of what happened as I should. But it is a good effort, and it’s possible to have lots of different outcomes.
But this game would be great if Microsoft or Lionshead got together with the developers of this game and made a Project Natal version with proper speech recognition, along with tone of voice and facial expression recognition, and added more dialog possibilities. It could also do with better graphics.
You can download this game from http://www.interactivestory.net/ and experience a very different genre of gaming.
There was a research project at Georgia Tech a few years back that added additional interactivity to Facade. They built a room with similar dimensions, put an AR backpack with goggles on the user, and had the user speak aloud to interact with the characters. Now, there was an operator sitting in the room transcribing the user’s speech, but all of these aspects added up to one helluva interactive experience. More here: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/projects/arfacade/
Wow, thanks. I didn’t hear about that before. It looks like a lot of fun. I’ve only played Space Invaders in Augmented Reality before, and it only had very low resolution position tracking via GPS.
Unfortunately, the text parsing in Facade is done with word-spotting, which isn’t really supported by most speech recognition engines. And we don’t have a list of all the things you can say. So it’s hard to implement speech recognition for it on Windows.
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