Wii Curling

In the second year of my Interaction Design BA I worked on a project where the intention was to create installations based on the notion of augmented reality. The instillations were built for show at Rave on air, A student-run event held at Ravensbourne College. In Wii curling there is a long projection on the floor (made with projectors hung from the ceiling) at one end of the pojection a target, and at the other end the stones or kettles wait to be thrown. A camera (also hung from the ceiling) is looking for a bright colour that is stuck on the end of the WiiMote and is using that to move the player’s stone left and right when the player moves thier WiiMote. Then, just like in Wii Bowling, the player holds the trigger pulls back and swings forward, letting go of the trigger (not the remote!). Data about the swing is sent via bluetooth to a computer which is then assessing the data for strength of throw, direction and spin. This determines the initial path of the stone along the ice. Other players would stand holding brooms that have a bright colour on the head and a Wii remote attached to the handle. The location of the brooms would be tracked with cameras and the speed of their sweeping would be measured by the Wii remote. The game would show where sweeping had happened by changing the colour of the ice in that location. The kettle would then move faster or spin through ice that had been recently swept.

video

This video shows me explaining WiiCurling at Rave on air, (I hate seeing and hearing myself on camera).

Augmented Reality gaming

I had heard of a version of pacman that could be played on a group of hand held devices that were networked via bluetooth, the person controlling the pacman would have to venture of his or her screen on to an opponents screen to collect dots. The opponent holding that screen could then run away out of bluetooth range and the pacman would be lost to the opponents screen, out of control. I like this idea of combining the virtual space in the computer and the real space that the players are in and building a game that makes uses of both spaces (augmented reality). The Wii also does this; the movements of the players in the real space (the controller they are holding) relates to events happening in a virtual space. However, the Wii is only aware of relative movement in real space and not of location; the Wii remote can work out how it is being moved but not where it is. Therefore the console does not know where the players are in real space relative to each other or the screen that they are interacting through. I wanted to explore what possibilities there are for a game that combines Wii like games and a spatial element. WiiCurling did explore augmented reality, however, all it did was recreate something in the virtual world that already exists in the real world. The real potential and challenge for augmented reality game design is building a game that takes both the strength of real world gaming (movement in space, physical exertion, etc) and virtual gaming (the internet, long tail economies, etc).

How it was done.

The game was built using a Matrox DualHead2Go that allows you to split one video image over two screens (projectors in this case). The game visuals and logic were built in Flash, and the WiiMote data was received via Max/MSP/Jitter and the aka.WiiRemote object and the location tracking was done with jitter. That Wii data was then sent via the Flashserver object to Flash where it was used in the game.