Kuan Huang sent me one of his piece, which seems to be quite intriguing. His project entitled "Space Invaders 2006 (done by Computer Science Department and Interactive Telecommunications Program). The project page is informative and explain the whole process (I like when people explain how they are doing what they're doing like "Since it's a thesis project, the most critical thing is that I need to have a working demo to present in the last week of school. So finding a location is the first step.")

In the past one year, some testings and experiements were conducted within NYU campus. For our thesis projects, we decided to put together all the experience and lessons that we learned from previous testings and make an outdoor playable video game in three months.

Space Invaders 2006 is an outdoor video game that takes advantage of real world architecture spaces and transforms them into a game playground. Basically, the video game is projected onto a building. The player has to move left or right to control the motion of the aircraft. Whenever the player jumps, the aircraft shoots out a bullet.

The playground:

Why do I blog this? yet another example of using the real world as the interface. Of course, the analysis is a bit too rough (testing... surveys...) but it's interesting to read about how they thought about that. I am curious about this location thing, what is a good location for pervasive game, what constraints designers can think about? what about the spatial topology? Look at what Ken highlighted as constraints:

here are some technical issues that I can't solve in a short time: - I am not allowed to climb high to mount a camera onto one of the light stands in the park. - I need an at least 30 meters long power strip to get power supply from a building across the street. - There are some drug dealers hanging around the park after 9PM. It is kind of scary if I carry a laptop, a projector, a video camera at that time. - Too much ambient lights in that space which is bad for large-scale projection.