Enjoy playing rock, paper, scissors, but having trouble finding worthy opponents to play it with? Need to improve your game for that upcoming world tournament? Well, then, you will certainly appreciate Steve Hoefer’s rock paper scissors playing glove. Thanks to the built-in accelerometer and bend sensors, all you have to do to play is play the game, and the computer will tell you what it’s move was, and keep track of who won. It’s a funny project, and it includes some cool features, such as using edge-lit plastic for the display. Well done!
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Don Sturrok made this loungy, immerse computer gaming rig out of an Ikea chair, aluminum pipe, and Kee Klamp and Kee Lite fittings from Simplified Building Concepts.
Computer Gaming Chair Becomes Reality
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From Boing Boing:
Matt sez, “With that rocks-for-brains reporter in Boston trying to link campus shooter Amy Bishop’s crimes to Dungeons & Dragons, I thought I’d take an opportunity to look at the good D&D has done for several writers I know. This is that article. By the way, I’ve been a D&D player for almost thirty years now, and have been a happier, more productive person for it.”
And Cory adds:
I haven’t played since my early 20s (late teens?) but D&D was an enormously positive influence on my life and imagination.
And I would add: Me too! D&D helped me as a writer, storyteller, project organizer, and was also one of my entrees into making. When I started with D&D, my friends and I were too poor for miniatures, so we made our own from clay, and our dungeons and scenery were constructed out of paper, cardboard, and foam. I got my first Dremel tool to help me make gaming components. And it was my first heavy, multi-application use for my first computers (writing scenarios, player handouts, drawing maps, keeping character databases, and hanging out on D&D BBSes).
Not to mention, as someone who has dyslexia, it helped me with my number/math skills and in seeing the utility of applying math to something that was hugely fun and creative.
Writers reminisce about Dungeons & Dragons
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Wandering through the MAKE Flickr pool the other day, I saw what appeared to be custom-made game controlling guitars. Taking a closer look, I saw that they were actually using Scratch Sensor Board controllers. The Scratch Board is a neat device with four inputs for custom built sensors. On the board itself are a potentiometer, light sensor, sound sensor and a push button. Your program can look for user generated input on each of these, which can change your program or game based on the sensor input.
Chris, whose photostream the picture was in told me a bit about the project:
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Wolfgang Baur, former editor of the immortal D&D magazine DRAGON and current publisher of a new, independent D&D magazine Kobold Quarterly had a chance to play around with the second edition of MS Surface-based SurfaceScapes D&D game. There are a lot of cool developments, like being able to load your character sheet onto a smartphone and have it continually updated as you take wounds. Here are Wolfgang’s impressions:
- Movement and line of sight work great. In fact, a clever DM can distract the players, then move an orc from one patch of cover to another, where he again becomes invisible — right until the moment a PC gets line of sight on it.
- It’s still a demo. They’ve got a TON of work to do to integrate more powers, but the newest build for PAX East covers up to 5th level PCs, plus area attacks. Lots of basics still aren’t implemented, like say a charge or anything outside the 1st PHB half-Heroic tier.
- The sound effects. Subtle, but powerful. Each attack comes with a sound. Dropping a dragon figure on the surface generates a roar and cloud of smoke. I could get used to this. What does a beholder sound like, I wonder?
- The Infinite Map. Being able to scroll the map under the figures is nice; it makes the table infinitely large. Not news for Fantasy Grounds players, but obviously useful. When the map scrolls, colored lines connect your figures to their new positions to make them easy to shift.
- Figures and Screens Together. The combination of real and virtual PCs and NPCs worked much better than I expected. There’s been some hard work done on the interface design which takes me to …..
- At Your Fingertips. Overall, the interface is intuitive and easy to learn. You can pull up your PC’s powers on the table. Frankly there’s no reason this couldn’t be integrated with the DDI if that’s the direction the team wanted to go.
- 4E-Only. I asked about Pathfinder or generic game support. It ain’t happening; this is specifically meant to handle 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. A generic system would probably be less valuable to gamers than one that handles specific rules.
See Wolfgang’s post for a lot more details of his experience.
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Jeri’s Star Trek Next Generation Pinball Modifications – Trouble with Tribbles. Nice!
Modifications to a Williams Star Trek Next Generation pinball. Added lasers to the cannons, custom-etched flipper bats and added animatronic tribble for replays.
The end of the video has some great tribble action.
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Touchscreen and computer vision interfaces are slowly starting to replace the traditional game controllers in next generation systems. Today’s Wiimote will be tomorrow’s joystick. Speaking of joysticks, the guys over at Retro Thing are producing some pretty cool classic Atari-style joysticks using clear plastic and a USB interface. Besides being an awesome retro game controller, the USB controller board is fully hackable and comes with labeled solder points to connect up to 8 additional controllers (buttons, switches). Perfect for a homebrew MAME cabinet or tabletop build.
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Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to get up to go do something, but didn’t want to leave a game for fear your system would go to sleep while you were away and you couldn’t use a software hack to nudge the system? Maker Todd Harrison had a similar issue and decided to build a device that closes a circuit every 25 seconds inside a Wiimote shaped candy tin.
It’s just a simple timing circuit made of discreet elements that engages a reed relay ever 25 sec. This relay in turn closes a circuit in my keyboard for the left arrow key. Being this external circuit is self powered I can simply turn it on when I want a game or application to think I’m at my computer when I’m not. I know there are software hacks that can do this and I did try a lot of them but this particular on line game I play had a way to block such software hacks. I had to go old school, which is not hard for an old guy, and do it with hardware.
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Twitter user orkboi, also known as Tony Dowler, has created some humorous mini D&D dungeons for his new website microdungeons.com, where he plans to publish three a week in 2010. My favorite is the bird-shaped dungeon in the style of cartoonist Ape Lad’s Twitter avatars.
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Looking for something fun to do with that special gamer in your life? Well, you might want to try Ed Keeble’s Pong Prom, which combines the formerly disparate activities of slow dancing and pong. LED displays embedded on the front of each garment show your partner’s side of the pong game, and you play by swinging them around. Instructions aren’t provided yet, however a how-to is promised soon. [via technabob]
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