From: gay@duggan.enet.dec.com (Eben Gay) Subject: APPS: Virtual game help requested Date: 3 MAR 92 18:34:04 Mar Organization: Industrial Research If you don't like the games that are available for Virtual Reality, here's your chance to help create one you do like! I'm building a virtual reality exhibit for The Computer Museum in Boston. I'm using Sense8's WorldToolkit running on a DEC 486 PC clone. The 486 is connected to an Amiga to generate four channel sound and voice. (I've been very pleased with how easy it has been to get interesting worlds up and running with this system). The exhibit has to be able to survive masses of people, so goggles and gloves are out, sigh. The prototype uses a spaceball and monitor, but testing has shown that some people have a very hard time using the spaceball. Strangely, on the average it's the techie types that have trouble with it. The non-computer users had the least trouble. (this is from the evaluation sheet I got back from the testing period, personally I find the spaceball very easy to understand). The museum has decided to build a chair that will have an encoder built into the swivel base to give rotational angle and will have some sort of handlebar or joystick controls for forward/back and possibly tilt/roll. Fixed to the front of the chair will be a monitor displaying what is virtually in front of the chair. Currently I have built several worlds to show what V.R. can be used for. The entrance is a room with a robot in it that explains what V.R. is. This room will be patterned on the actual room the exhibit is in as soon as that is built. As a side note, many people complained about the synthesized robot voice being too hard to understand, so I will probably go to sampled speech instead. From the entrance you can go through three doors. The first door leads to a model of a house, with accompanying explanation that this house was built in V.R. before it was built in the real world so its owners could look at it and make changes while they were cheap. (True, it is a model of our future house, currently under construction). The second door leads to a fractal landscape meant to demonstrate examining abstract data and/or inaccessable landscapes with V.R. I am going to replace or augment this with data for Mount Everest (now ANYONE can climb it!). If anyone has a simple database for Olympus Mons on Mars, that would be even better. I've looked at the NASA CD catalog but am not sure which disks would be interesting and don't have the time or money to go browsing. The third door leads "outside" to a totally virtual landscape that does not match anything in the real world. (no ground, buildings floating in space, etc.) "Underneath" these worlds is the first part of a dungeon. It is reached through a door in the mountain in the fractal landscape and through the door to the cellar in the virtual house. I am in the process of building an inside to the house that will let the user move furniture and change cloth types and wall coverings (Sense8's WorldToolkit allows scanned images to be mapped onto polygons, making this easy). So far this is all nice, but dull. For more user interaction I had been planning to put a monster in the dungeon and let the user battle it out with lasers or spears or some-such. Two things have been making me change my mind. First, the museum has decided to have this chair built. I'd like to design a game around it. Something that takes advantage of it's "chairness". Perhaps a car racing game or a virtual bobsled run. Second, there has been a rather active thread objecting to "violent boy-games". Ok, here's your chance to influence the creation of the games you would like to see in V.R. Give me some good ideas and I guarantee that it will influence a large number of people (thousands come through the museum and this is expected to be a popular exhibit). What can you do with a chair, throttle controls, and a few buttons (I have asked for four, but don't know how many I will get)? There is the strong possibility that a second system will be set up using a spaceball, so don't feel overly restricted by the chair. In case you haven't played with one, a spaceball allows totally movement (forward/back, side-to-side, up/down, turn, tilt, roll) and has 8 buttons. For what it's worth, I'm doing this on a volunteer basis so I won't be making scads of money off your ideas. (hey, I get to have a V.R. system at home for free, that's pay enough, until I can find a real job doing this!) Eben Gay gay@mr4dec.enet.dec.com Software engineering is my vocation, Virtual Reality design is my avocation "That's the trouble with Reality. It's taken far too seriously" Emotional Fish From davepat@olivej.ATC.Olivetti.Com Wed Mar 4 08:50:25 1992 Received: from bashful.u.washington.edu by milton.u.washington.edu (5.65/UW-NDC Revision: 2.22 ) id AA17686; Wed, 4 Mar 92 08:50:22 -0800 Received: from olivej.ATC.Olivetti.Com by bashful.u.washington.edu (5.65/UW-NDC Revision: 2.22 ) id AA17086; Wed, 4 Mar 92 08:50:00 -0800 Received: by olivej.ATC.Olivetti.Com (5.65/1.34) id AA08081; Wed, 4 Mar 92 08:49:43 -0800 Received: by olivej.ATC.Olivetti.Com (5.51/smail2.5/12-18-87) id AA08069; Wed, 4 Mar 92 08:49:35 PST Date: Wed, 4 Mar 92 08:49:35 PST From: davepat@olivej.ATC.Olivetti.Com (David Patterson) Message-Id: <9203041649.AA08069@olivej.ATC.Olivetti.Com> To: davepat@olivej.ATC.Olivetti.Com, hlab@u.washington.edu Subject: Re: Well, shucks. Status: R Okay! And put in a good word for me, too! :-) -Dave