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[skronick]

Hey all,
I'm an artist who got hooked on Minecraft a while back. I spent the past few months pulling together some thoughts on how Minecraft (and video games in general) are related to the various games and utopian societies imagined by architects and artists of the past century. I made a video that explains some of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJMqzVnrI7gIt's kind of long and apologies if it sounds a little too serious or academic, but I hope some of you will find it interesting.


Some of the references:
http://www.google.com/images?q=yona+friedman
http://www.google.com/images?q=new+babylon
http://www.notbored.org/new-babylon.html
http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/collection/283-cedric-price-fun-palace

I'm also working on some augmented reality technology to fuse game worlds like Minecraft with the real world. How great would it be to hack away at and modify your city or school made of cubes? Let's talk if this stuff sounds interesting to you. I'd like to think that games like Minecraft can be more than, well, games :-)

[Nix]

This is a ridiculously fantastic idea. I am now incredibly excited about the prospect of building Minecraft-like worlds interspersed with the real world -- building "hidden universes" among reality that only others with the same "window" into that world are able to see and interact with. I'll be keeping my eye on you.

[Kuppo]

I'm also working on some augmented reality technology to fuse game worlds like Minecraft with the real world. How great would it be to hack away at and modify your city or school made of cubes? Let's talk if this stuff sounds interesting to you. I'd like to think that games like Minecraft can be more than, well, games :-)

This sounds like the best thing since the creation of the Universe, but it also seems like it would require some pretty exclusive technology, to figure out your location and where your looking.

[BoxedLunch]

don't forget griefers. great cities would become lands of pure dick.
i'd love to see the idea excecuted well. good luck!

[Paint by Numbers]

don't forget griefers. great cities would become lands of pure dick.

Looks like we're already getting there by the third picture.

Good luck on this, skronick! I wish you the best!

[skronick]

@Nix, that's exactly the idea... playing with alternate layers on top of real space, viewable through the window of your device of choice.

@Kuppo, fortunately most of the tech is out there, it just needs to be put together in a more meaningful way. See Layar: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b64_16K2e08 which uses GPS, compass, and accelerometers found on iPhone, Android, and many other phones. This is one kind of AR, but there's also camera- or vision-based AR, provided with frameworks like ARToolkit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M-oAmBDcZk . Qualcomm (which makes the guts for lots of cell phones) released an Augmented Reality SDK for Android: http://www.qualcomm.com/products_services/augmented_reality.html . This one recognizes images instead of just black and white fiducial markers. That's a step closer to recognizing the exteriors of buildings. But nothing at this point has combined location-based AR with vision-based AR, tuned for an urban experience (i.e. loading new streams of data as you move to new parts of a city, pulling building geometry and images from Google, etc), in a publicly available toolkit. This is what I'm working on putting together. Minecraft is just one cool example, but it could be used for any game, preexisting or not. I'd love to get more people on board.

@boxedlunch, griefers are part of the fun, but yes, it's something to consider in any open-ended game...

[Rob Lach]

I wish your talk was a bit more academic tbh.

Edit: Sry to rain D:. Love what you're talking about. I'm glad people are taking a more philosophical approach to games and understand game worlds.

[skronick]

@Pierog, haha, I used the word "juxtaposition" towards the end-- how much more elitist do you want me to sound? But honestly, would be interested to have a more "academic" conversation about your experience making games some time... Thanks for checking it out.

[Kit]

Very interesting concept. There's a PSP game that uses the PSP camera to do a similar thing to this. It projects images onto any surface you put a special card on (I think so the camera registers the x/y/z planes, and it's sortof like pokemon. You can battle on surfaces in the real world but the camera is like a window to see the creatures. You also capture them by searching for them with the camera.

In addition, many smart phones are starting to try this by integrating GPS so you can look through the camera and see details on buildings and restaurants and sites of interest.

I don't know how feasible this is, but it's certainly possible. And I think it would be very interesting.

[Xion]

Super interesting video and ideas. Don't have much to say besides that.

Hot stuff. 

[Nugsy]

Brilliant, and very clever! 

[Rob Lach]

@Pierog, haha, I used the word "juxtaposition" towards the end-- how much more elitist do you want me to sound? But honestly, would be interested to have a more "academic" conversation about your experience making games some time... Thanks for checking it out.

I have no upper-bound to my elitism.

[Nix]

I'd love to get more people on board.

Well, if you want to turn this into a community project, then I would love to be involved. If only, at least, to watch all the great happenings going on. I would even contribute if there was a place for me, either in the "idea" sector or the development sector or both. Start a mailing list or something!

[Chromanoid]

ARQuake might be interesting for you. this is an interesting paper: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1316624.1316635

[PompiPompi]

You can't do (advanced)augmented reality without having the 3D geometry of the world. The simplest thing, a person walks by and occlude your virtual world, you need to figure out if this person is before some virtual object or behind.
You can't do this with a simple camera.
You can do this with a 3D camera, though.

[skronick]

You can't do (advanced)augmented reality without having the 3D geometry of the world. The simplest thing, a person walks by and occlude your virtual world, you need to figure out if this person is before some virtual object or behind.
You can't do this with a simple camera.
You can do this with a 3D camera, though.

You're right on all counts. For 3D geometry of buildings, etc, I'm imagining this would need to be modeled by developers/players at first. But this is what people are doing with Google Sketchup right now. Google Earth already has 3D buildings and is enslaving the masses to texture them for free: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwh/buildingmaker.html How long before we wise up and generate completely open data sets of building models for cities around the world?

Occlusion is a different problem, and you either need to live with it or find a way to infer depth data from your scene. Trees are a big problem because the detail of leaves makes them hard to crop with any technique, but at least they're static and this info could be cached. Moving people are, to me, less of a problem because they get out of the way eventually, but yes, a 3D camera is your best bet here. Which is why I will be running out to get me a Kinect soon as I can... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHhDUR06PfI)

ARQuake might be interesting for you.

AR Quake is fantastic, but hilariously outdated. We don't need to run around with a backpack stuffed with survey grade GPS gear to get something similar-- all that stuff's in your iPhone/Android today. Which gives me hope that yes, I may have to strap a Kinect onto an iPhone to get depth data today, but tomorrow why won't smartphones have 3D cameras built in?

[Chromanoid]

ARQuake might be interesting for you.

AR Quake is fantastic, but hilariously outdated. We don't need to run around with a backpack stuffed with survey grade GPS gear to get something similar-- all that stuff's in your iPhone/Android today. Which gives me hope that yes, I may have to strap a Kinect onto an iPhone to get depth data today, but tomorrow why won't smartphones have 3D cameras built in?

maybe the Nintendo 3DS will help to innovate the only thing it is missing is gps and maybe processing power.

[skronick]

An update on this:

Video demonstrating a prototype of the Minecraft Urban AR system: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQnk7-52EsM

I started a Google Group that I invite you to join if you want to get involved: http://groups.google.com/group/urban-ar-toolkit/

And another post on this in the Tech forum: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=16903.0 (I don't know the best place to put this here...)

[Movius]

ARQuake might be interesting for you.

AR Quake is fantastic, but hilariously outdated. We don't need to run around with a backpack stuffed with survey grade GPS gear to get something similar-- all that stuff's in your iPhone/Android today. Which gives me hope that yes, I may have to strap a Kinect onto an iPhone to get depth data today, but tomorrow why won't smartphones have 3D cameras built in?

I got my degree at the university where AR Quake was made. AR quake was 'out of date' even then (2003) but still pretty impressive. Though the departments other projects were more impressive.

One thing I was very impressed with was comparing the size of the first prototype backpack compared to the size once project co-sponsor DSTO (Defence Science and Technology Organisation) had got hold of it. No major changes to componentry and yet it was 1/2 the size.

[jotapeh]

An update on this:

Video demonstrating a prototype of the Minecraft Urban AR system: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQnk7-52EsM

I started a Google Group that I invite you to join if you want to get involved: http://groups.google.com/group/urban-ar-toolkit/

And another post on this in the Tech forum: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=16903.0 (I don't know the best place to put this here...)

Amazing. I am incredibly impressed by your talent and motivation.