Posts Tagged ‘PC’

Kinect Star Wars

The best Kinect (Project Natal) game that has been demoed so far at E3 2010 is an unnamed Star Wars game that will be released in 2011 by LucasArts. It looks like an on-rails lightsaber and force powers game specially for the Project Natal.

Here’s the Star Wars Kinect Trailer:

LucasArts weren’t brave enough to actually demo the gameplay live, so instead Cirque Du Soleil mimed along to the prerecorded trailer. Here is a short clip (the only one I could find):

Unfortunately the above clip focuses on the part that is impossible with Kinect: pushing against your opponent’s light saber. As Newton’s third law of motion tells us, you can’t push against something unless it is also pushing back against you an equal amount. And empty air won’t do that. Fortunately, that law of physics doesn’t apply to the Force, so I’m looking forward to Force Push gestures, Force Speed gestures, and other force powers. And deflecting laser beams and slicing up Storm Troopers also looks fun, since it makes sense that Storm Troopers wouldn’t offer much physical resistance to a light saber. But light sabers aren’t supposed to be able to go through other light sabers, so there’s going to be a limit to how well light saber combat will work.

Why is it on rails? Well, so far nobody has shown how people will navigate in a Kinect game without a controller. Oops. Kind of an important oversight. Sony’s PlayStation Move also had that exact same problem, which they only solved by introducing the Move SubController, which is basically a Nunchuk.

Personally I think navigation would be one of the most fun parts of Project Natal. There are several ways I imagine it could be done. You could walk or run on the spot to walk. You could turn by turning the upper half of your body, or by swinging your arms around your body in the direction you want. Or you could just turn your feet, or one foot. You could lean in the direction you want to go. You could move one leg in the direction you want to go. You could stand on different parts of the floor like a virtual dance mat. There are lots of possibilities and I hope someone looks into it.

Anyway, this will be a great Star Wars game to look forward to next year.

Two other Star Wars games are being shown at E3.

The Force Unleashed 2. The original game made a big deal about motion controls, so I’m surprised there’s been no word yet on Kinect or PlayStation Move compatability. It will be released a week before Kinect. It would be a shame if this only supports Wii Motion plus.
Here’s the E3 2010 cinematic trailer (betrayal):

The Old Republic. This is a Massively Multiplayer Online game set a few thousand years before the Star Wars period we are more familiar with. Currently it’s only for the PC, which is unfortunate. However online games have a longer life than other games and are more likely to receive large updates.
Here’s the E3 2010 cinematic trailer:

Augmented Reality Façade

This is a follow up to Façade would be great on Project Natal.

For those of you who don’t read the comments, Ryan Burke informed me about an Augmented Reality version of Façade that they made at Georgia Tech in 2006. They recreated Grace and Trip’s apartment in real life, and you walk around it with an eMagin Z800 Virtual Reality visor and camera on your head and can see Grace and Trip superimposed on the real world. You can thus walk around naturally and talk to them naturally. It does Voice Recognition the cheating way, by having a human type what you say into a computer. You can even pick up the objects around the apartment and have Grace and Trip react to it. Apparently it is very immersive.

So let’s hope Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern get together with Microsoft and make Façade for Xbox 360’s Project Natal.

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.

VisionPlay brings motion tracking to PC

VisionPlay are trying to cash in on the Project Natal craze with their own full-body tracking system for the PC. It is designed to work just with any webcam, but still track the position and orientation of your body parts. They are working on a Tennis game called VisionTennis.

Unlike Natal, they don’t have a 3D camera or an array microphone to work with, so they are doing things the hard, and error-prone way. Which means this probably won’t work anywhere near as well as Natal. But if what they say in the video is true, it will still be very impressive. Personally, I think they should have used simple props in a tennis game rather than hand gestures that look like handball though.

See http://trendyent.com/projects/visionplay.