Way back in the early days of the web I worked on, amongst other things, the Vauxhall car website. This was on an off for several years (we worked on multiple accounts in the early days). This was around 1997, a time when many of the things we wanted to do were not technically possible, or the web had not quite got where it needed to go. It was also at a time of CD-ROM experiences on magazines as opposed to downloads.You can see the sort of things that team was being done in 1996 here there were a number of advanced applications, traffic reports, screen savers and a touring car site, links to videos, later there were 360 quick times of the cars. It evolved in the next few years, around 98/99 into a personalised web site with login and buying capabilities and car configurations. These sorts of sites are common place now and so it is expected to be able to look at things online. Something we had all wanted to do was put the cars in a virtual experience, or game so you could drive them. At the time there were games like TOCA for touring cars so we could drive Vectra’s around, in the same livery as the touring car mini site we used. There was of course no link between the game, us and the car manufacturer, nor really the ability to make that happen. After all it was only a game, or only a website 😉
Now though the whorl has changed and this is a prime example. As a free download in the excellent Xbox driving experience Forza4 Hyundai has released a drivable, and explorable version of its new car the Veloster, both in road and race versions.
So this is really state of the art advertising. The car models are well known for their accuracy and quality in Forza. The ability to drive and experience the car inside and out, yet delivered for free makes this a very interesting experience. It doesn’t require the car manufacture to be a games developer, the game is a channel. Many people with Forza, probably everyone will at least download it as its free, new cars in game are exciting. Game challenges will pop up that are car specific too. Photos, videos etc will be created and distributed by fans online.
The physical and virtual world start to blend even more. It’s gaming but not gaming at the same time.
games
Use the Force (feedback) – Haptic Driving
For christmas I got the wonderful new Mad Catz Force feedback steering wheel and pedals for the xbox 360. You have to be careful buying steering wheels as many of them just regular controllers, i.e. the haptic feedback from them is merely a rumble.
This wheel (like the discontinued microsoft one before it and along with the very expensive other ones exploits the fact that the physics models in games are accurate enough to generate forces back out to devices. When you drive a real car different surfaces and different speeds generate a different load and feel on your control of the car. A force feedback wheel emulate some of that. The subtlety of such control may not be important for many gamers but for sheer enjoyment of car racing of any sort it really is a must.
Dirt 3 generates some amazing violent ruts and bumps as you hammer through the rally terrain, F1 2011 generates load on the corners and vibration in the dirty air of the cars in front and Forza 4 becomes an even more sublime experience.
Another key element is the separation of control of speed and braking (with your feet), which pedals allow a more obvious analogue travel, but even more important is the gear changing. Whilst I love driving games I can never really be bothered with manual gear changes on the joypads. This wheel has both flappy paddle and an interchangeable left or right gearstick. The gears are sequential, something most of us don’t have in cars but that works great in games.
This separation of control allows you to leave a car in higher (or lower) gear to control traction with the accelerator. In the higher end cars that spin out at moments notice driving with the gears can help find the balance.
Whilst sat on a sofa is not a recaro seat, and other things rare missing, actual speed and danger, lateral and vertical movement, it still elevates the experience.
I found my lap times dropped initially, but as I switched on my mental map of the joypad and patched in my driving brain they started to increase. I shaved seconds already from the excellent “star in a reasonably priced car” rivals challenge on Forza 4.
Now I have driven various fast car experiences, a bit of rally too and of course the higher end simulators like Pure Tech that we visited in series 2 of Cool Stuff Collective and I can say that this generation of console and force feedback wheel are pretty stunning, exciting and enjoyable.
We have of course had this sort of tech for ages, the PC fraternity have a dirty of controls. I had a sidewinder stick in the 90’s. However if tech gets more accessible and the games designers take account of it, or the engines do that for them, then some of our gaming experiences will be elevated even further.
The more the digital becomes physical and breaks that plane of the screen, distributes into real life the better.
Spot the difference – Kids virtual worlds
Predlet 1.0 introduced me to a new website/virtual world/game that her friends had been playing the other day. It is called Bin Weevils. There are clearly a lot of interesting things coming along all the time but I was struck but the almost complete similarity between this and Moshi Monsters
It has comedy and education linked, many quick brain training puzzles, maths and observation to generate the things you need for your character.
It is abstract in its reference to the character too, i.e. its a pet not an avatar proxy for the user. It is tied into CN/Nick Tv too and has a free to play with an enticing subscriber model.
It is also visual similar, to the point I can’t help thinking this is a white label moshi?
I have not come across any pop star baiting yet in Bin weevils but I am sure that humour will be there too.
They are both UK based too which is interesting in its own right.
It used to take a day to render a cube! CAR
I remember when….. Seriously, it used to take ages for us back last century to do anything remotely interesting with computer graphics. Ray tracing applications and hidden line removals used to take hours and hours of rendering time. Now a home console like the Xbox 360 can produce this in minutes. I know there is some “cheating” going on with lighting etc but this still amazes me. I tried creating one of the special hi rez shots of a car on the top gear text track. The general images are 1024 wide and about 0.9Mp but this is a 8Mp (3840 x 2160) image (if you look at the full sizes available you will see the monster image)
Just rendered on a home console, on my TV, sent to the web wirelessly for all to see.
The trajectory is clearly going the right direction for more tools to allow us to create better and better images and merge photo realistic and also interesting non photo realistic art styles into a cohesive digital view of the the world.
Cohesive Augmented Reality? CAR – that’s a convenient name 🙂
Gaming CAVE – Omnidirectional Treadmills.
The guys over at the Gadget Show look like they have put some great tech together here with a Battlefield3 CAVE with position sensing gun and an omnidirectional treadmill.
There have been a few of these doing the rounds, quite often in the virtual world space. Of course hooking up to an high end, very popular commercial game is one of those things that elevates the tech to commercial interest.
Ways to move in space without moving are really the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle of interaction. If we move out bodies, as we do with kinect, we are still restricted by the fixed screen. Or we have to wear headset screens in which case we can move around and be sensed moving by are restricted by the physical space around us.
So unless everyone learns the mime walking against the wind gesture we need something a bit more fancy to allow us to walk naturally.
It looks like this setup has some other haptic feedback, probably with the compressed air bullet hit jacket.*Correction as pointed out by Uncommon below, its actually rigged to fire paintballs as the player for haptic feedback. It looks very cool and exciting!.
Back to the screens with real/virtual crossover and pie
The first show of Series 3 of The Cool Stuff Collective just aired (it will run all week 🙂 ) and there are a lot of changes.
We are now filming live in schools with an audience. This is great as the show if for kids we get to hear and see if they really do like what we do. (Good news on that front so far!). We have changed from a comedy character and sketch basis to a live interaction vibe. This has some interesting challenges as the production team have to create a TV recording setup in situ. Which is no mean feat. Lighting and sound are no longer a known quantity as in a TV studio.
We also have two new front of house presenters. Vicky Letch and The Blowfish, who add to the live dynamic with their interactions with one another and the audience.
I still turn up to do future tech and this week I showed Vicky the Skylanders game and hardware. I have blogged about this before. What I wanted to show, and hopefully there will be some more like this, is the interaction between real and virtual environments.
Skylanders has physical toys with NFC chips in. When you select an actual toy it in turn selects that character in game. An important thing is that the toy also acts as the memory card for that characters levelling up. Data flows form the game to the toy. If you take that character collectible and take it to another persons house to play the game you are carrying your progress with you.
I love the mixed mode real/virtual concept and I had wanted a similar real to virtual product in the mix of the piece, but sometimes trying to show future developments seems to bump into regional marketing PR madness. Something may be out in one country, even all over the web, but the physical thing can’t be shown in another country for reasons best known only to themselves 🙂
One of the extra bit I end up having to do is strop off at the end of my enthusing about future tech when Vicky asks a complicated question about a field that I am not part of. This is nearly acting 🙂 I try and keep a sulky face on
My other (favourite) part is when, during the voting of chillies hot or pants not, when the crowd vote on a toy brought in by one of the kids, and a verdict of pants is reached there is a call out to super geek. I get to enter (stage right darlings) with a white lab coat and some safety goggles to custard pie the unlucky volunteer. This is the sort of saturday morning I grew up with watching Tiswas! Another ambition ticked off the list then 🙂
The team at Archie Productions (check out the end titles of the show for all the names) do a brilliant job making this show and it’s great working with them. We have filmed 4 so far and have another 8 to go 🙂
On the road with The Cool Stuff Collective
This week saw the start of filming series 3 of The Cool Stuff Collective. I can’t say much about it until it airs but it was very different to be on location and staying away for 2 nights at a Premier Inn with the entire crew.
The first morning of filming was a difficult choice of wardrobe. Blue or Green? 😉
As resident “Super Geek” my mini sub brand marches on 🙂
It was good to see John Marley (the shows creator and boss of archie productions had his game face on too)
I also hope I did not worry housekeeping at the hotel too much with my day before prep of an item
The show will air in mid October (AFAIK) and I think its a cracker of a show.
Watch this space 🙂
Streets ahead (nearly) with Driver SF
Driver: San Francisco came out a few days ago and as a fan of all things cars, and in particular the original version it was a must get game. I still remember the buzz of seeing those original camera angles and seeing the hubcaps fly off as the old american car lurched around the corner, great attention to detail back then. I was concerned, having played the demo, that the weird astral projection jumping around cars element was going to detract from the good honest car chasing, burnout, doughnut, drifting and jumping that was after the point of the game.
I was also interested in what opportunities there were to use the film director side. Driver was one of the first games I remember having the power to edit the replays from your driving. Driver SF has included this feature and it just keeps recording as you play. At any point you jump to film director where you can change camer cuts, make slo-mo replays etc. it is not completely full featured but it does let you start to explore making a car sequence.
Where Ubisoft fall down though is with their web interface for the results of the game. Yes they have put in the ability to send to facebook and twitter as you play, which is nice an forward thinking but if you start to publish your driving masterpieces it all gets a bit clunky. Unlike Dirt3 which pushes clips you make straight to youtube this game seeks to make a portal that you visit to collate all your info and film clips. The trouble is you cant do much with them. The short videos you make are player with the flovision player and the layout doesn’t seem to work very well if you have more than 3 videos. Each video has a great download button, which gives you a non-descript raw data file. My Mac with all its codecs, perian etc had no idea what to do with it. So the video above was just a screen cap one from the website. I am sure they are going to improve that over time. Though there was not answer on the ubisoft forum or response on a facebook request so who knows if they know.
So here is a game that I really like, had some great fun driving around a mirror world version of San Fran, in real branded cars doing loopy stunts, the I get to the more creative side of things that could offer so much so quickly and get stopped in my tracks. Well you can’t have everything.
One very cool plot point though, (not really a spoiler) is that the original, and irritatingly hard at the time, training level for Driver has been included. It is also linked to a retro reference with an iconic film car and it opening up was a very cool aha moment that more games should have.
The other brilliant film references are a set of movie chases that you gradually unlock. They are nods to some of the best car chases ever on film and the things I grew up watching. Bullit, The French Connection, Starsky and Hutch etc. I was hammering around the jumps in SF shouting I am Steve McQueen. This caused some consternation with predlet 2.0 as he said “no dad it’s Lightning Mcqueen”.
Anyway, if you were brought up on old car chase movies, and like racing games… well this is worth a go. If you want to make machinima, just wait until they decide to offer some more features I would suggest. So those 210 miles of road will just have to be a more personal experience too.
There is a link to my Driver SF page including a few more clips but I am not sure how many you get to store
Sparkling on Kinect with 3d finger drawing
Now that I realize I can quicklaunch the Kinect Fun Labs apps individually and do not have to go through the uncharacteristic lockups caused by the Fun Labs launcher app I am getting to see some more of the gadgets.
This one is called sparkler and its results are interesting. You draw in 3d on a backdrop that is made from a foreground and and a background shot. What is really great is this is using slightly more precision on the kinect. To draw you hold up two fingers as a pointer and stop drawing by clenching your fist. Up to now all games have treated your hands as dots at the end of your arms.
The video is very short but it is what is generates along with stills for sharing on Kinect Share.
I am waiting on my call for the next Marvel super hero film 🙂 I can be g33kspark or something 🙂
Talking careers, games, TV, BCS and Virtual worlds in 5 mins
At the Develop conference this year I was asked if I minded doing a quick interview for http://www.gamecareers.biz/ so I popped along and this is the result.
We had a very quick chat before and then we just blasted through in 1 take 🙂
I am in good company if you look at the actual site here
Between Colin Anderson of Denki and Mick Hocking of Sony.
The BCS and its role in careers may be of interest or resonate with some games industry people looking for some structure.
I am pleased with the points I got across too. Thanks to @davidsmithuk for putting this together and asking such good questions in the interview.