Hasta La Gadget!

The original Paperboy was ahead of its time. While other arcade games in the 80s featured spaceships or medieval warriors, Paperboy only had, well, a paperboy. So it’s fitting that this homage to the game uses cutting edge technology. PaperDude VR harnesses the powers of the Oculus Rift, the Kinect and the Kickr power trainer, even though you can achieve a more realistic experience with, I don’t know, a bicycle and rolls of paper.

PaperDude VR is a pet project of Globacore, a company that specializes in interactive installations. Globacore is making the game using Unity and Photoshop. The game requires you to throw virtual newspapers at mailboxes to score points. As with Paperboy, you have to do this without crashing your bicycle, only this time you’re actually pedaling on a bike. The Kickr detects your speed and can adjust the bike to make it easier or harder to pedal. The Oculus Rift provides 360º visibility and the Kinect tracks your hands and arms.

Globacore said they’re planning to improve PaperDude VR by adding features like obstacles and other nuisances to avoid, an online leaderboard and even a replica of the training course at the end of levels in Paperboy.

[via Prosthetic Knowledge]

Old school gamers will remember Paperboy, an arcade game — later ported to home systems like the NES and Atari ST — that let you savour the pleasure of virtually breaking your neighbours’ windows by tossing a rolled up newspaper through their front room as you powered past on your bike. Because that’s what passed for entertainment in 1984. Well, time and technology has moved on but creative tech company Globacore, which builds these sort of gaming mash-up installations, has decided to do an updated version of the Paperboy concept, because, well, why not?

PaperDude VR — as it’s called its updated creation — has been hacked together using an actual bike, a Wahoo Fitness KickR indoor resistance bike trainer, an Oculus Rift virtual reality head-set, and Microsoft’s gesture-recognising Kinect peripheral as the key parts of the puzzle. This set up — combined with a LEGO-esque 3D game world built in Unity — lets the PaperDude VR gamer actually pedal and actually toss (or at least make a throwing gesture) as they play the game.

What’s the point of all this? Well it’s mostly for the fun of it — and for Globacore to showcase what they can do — and it sure looks like a neat way to gamify a bike ride. But with the proliferation of connected and increasingly specialised gizmos, fuelled by crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, these sorts of reality simulations are only going to get easier and cheaper for people to hack together. Which is only a good thing for the creative future of gaming.

Microsoft’s Kinect has definitely come a long, long way, since its 2010 release (do check out our hands-on), and it has been hacked to be a boob tracker (of all things!), help out in sign language, and in more recent news, Kinect is even employed by the US Navy to address rape issues, now how about that? Well, since a picture speaks a thousand words, and a video does say a whole lot more than that as it contains a fair number of pictures being shown at a pretty fast rate per second, check out what is shown above. Apparently, Kinect has been employed to create this interesting looking pixel structure.

British artist Luke Jerram managed to come up with a pixel sculpture of Maya, his daughter, using an Xbox Kinect for a full body scan. From a distance away, there will be concerned passers-by who might just decide to question the lone girl, but when they approach ‘her’, she will distort into large pixels that are formed by aluminium and stickers.

Like It , +1 , Tweet It , Pin It | Kinect Used To Create Maya Pixel Sculpture original content from Ubergizmo.

When I look around the technology space, I can’t think of any single product that is so poorly associated with another device than Microsoft’s Kinect. The sensor, which is supposedly designed with gamers in mind, actually delivers very little value to gamers nowadays. In fact, the Kinect is designed for computers and entertainment – gaming is an afterthought.

Since its release years ago, the Kinect has been bundled with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and will make a showing in the Xbox One box. Microsoft, meanwhile, continues to pretend that the Kinect is a great tool for gamers who want to get more out of their titles.

Unfortunately, a few game developers have helped Microsoft extend this myth. Electronic Arts, for example, used the Kinect in all kinds of ways in its last version of Madden NFL. But after the novelty wore off and wives got tired of their husbands calling an audible in the middle of the night, gamers went back to their controller and stopped the nonsense.

Let me be clear: Microsoft’s Kinect is by no means a bad product. In fact, it’s arguably one of the most sophisticated devices on the market, and one that’s worth trying out for just about anyone. But to say that it’s a gaming product ignores the true value of the device and what it can offer to tech lovers around the world.

“To say that it’s a gaming product ignores the true value of the device.”

As Microsoft showed with its Xbox One presentation, the Kinect thrives as an entertainment device. Its support for voice commands means controlling devices and entertainment is simple. And with a few waves of a hand, the Kinect can perform all kinds of functions for those who need a more intuitive experience. Gaming, meanwhile, never comes into play.

On the PC side, the Kinect is even more compelling. The device is being used by developers in all kinds of interesting ways, including allowing folks who are used to the mouse and keyboard to enjoy a more intuitive experience when interacting with Windows. More entertaining developers have found ways to leverage its camera for all kinds of fun tricks.

Meanwhile, developers continue to bundle some Kinect functionality into their video games. However, the vast majority of those installations have proven to be unnecessary add-ons that lack innovation and uniqueness and seem like they were tacked on for the sake of placating Microsoft.

The Wii’s dramatic rise and fall should prove to us all that while motion gaming was fun for awhile, it’s yet another idea that has been ignored by savvy gamers.

Getting more out of consoles, however, is not something that savvy gamers mind. In fact, it’s what they’re coming to expect. And in that regard, the Kinect is delivering. The device is the ideal living room companion, the best alternative to a remote, and is quickly becoming a gateway to entertaining content.

In other words, the Kinect has less and less to do with gaming each passing day.

Let’s Stop Pretending the Kinect Is A Gaming Device is written by Don Reisinger & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Though early Kinect patents showed its potential for sign language translation, Microsoft quashed any notion early on that this would become a proper feature. However, that hasn’t stopped Redmond from continuing development of the idea. Microsoft Research Asia recently showed off software that allows the Kinect to read almost every American Sign Language gesture via hand tracking, even at conversational speeds. In addition to converting signs to text or speech, the software can also let a hearing person input text and “sign” it using an on-screen avatar. All of this is still confined to a lab so far, but the researchers hope that one day it’ll open up new lines of communication between the hearing and deaf — a patent development we could actually get behind. See its alacrity in the video after the break.

Filed under: Cameras, Science, Alt, Microsoft

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Via: Gizmodo

Source: Microsoft Research