An augmented reality game you can play with your brain
This little game was inspired by a short story by William Gibson and Michael Swanwick called Dogfight.
In the story the main character plays a game called Spads and Fokkers in which the players control virtual airplanes projected into the reality using a brain-computer interface as the controller.
In other words they're playing with virtual objects projected in the real world and controlled by their brain.
Nowadays we almost got the technology to make such stuffs so I thought "let's see if I can actually make something like that".
Projecting stuffs into the reality is still a problem, but augmented reality is a buzzword in these days and so I chose to use that approach to make the airplanes appear into reality.
The tech choice has fallen upon osgART, a very flexible and full-featured toolkit to build interactive 3D augmented reality contents. It's the combination of the well known ARToolkit with the less known, but very powerful OpenSceneGraph.
As for the control mechanism, we actually have some devices that are able to read brianwaves and infere what the user is thinking about, so the choice was easy.
The newest and most promising headset for thought control is the epoc, not yet on the market, but with a free SDK I can play with.
With this technologies I was actually able to develop something that works and doesn't need any special stuffs you can't buy off the shelf.
In the story, the players controls 3 airplane each, but in practice it was too hard to simultaneusly control 3 airplanes, so I reduced the number to a single airplane for each player.
Furthermore, since the airplanes are not projected into the real world, it's suggested you wear a HMD.
Features
- augmented reality 3d game
- human vs. human realtime dogfight
- control the game with your brain
- keyboard control fallback
- non-intrusive HUD with player stats
Demo video
What do I need to run this?
- a modern pc with windows or linux (linux support should be ok again)
- webcam of sort
- keyboard
- a printer to print out the fiducial marker
- optionally, the epoc to play with thoughts (only on windows, until emotiv releses some linux drivers of sort)
- fix epoc support (needs more tests, but should work) - fix linux support (currently broken)
- find a 3D model of an actual Spad. Please help me with this =)
- 3D sound, makes the game even more immersive.
- network capabilities, so you can play remotely with another human opponent in the entire world.
- some sort of GUI to make the game more user friendly (is this actually needed?).
A: hey, this site sucks!
Me: I know... do you want to contribute with a better site? got suggestions? thanks