One type of game that I really enjoy are “god games”. Sim Earth, Black and White, these are just some games in that genre that I remember wasting countless of hours on. There’s just really something about creating your own world and shaping it the way you want it to be that I find very appealing. While there aren’t a lot of new games coming out in this genre anymore, I’m still secretly hoping that someone will do something new with the concept. This is why I was very excited and blown away when I saw this interactive augmented reality sandbox from the UC Davis W.M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences.
According to the YouTube page, the sandbox is “equipped with a Kinect 3D camera and a projector to project a real-time colored topographic map with contour lines onto the sand surface.” Virtual water is also able to flow over the surface “using a GPU-based simulation of the Saint-Venant set of shallow water equations.”
The sandbox will be used as an educational tool and will be set-up as a hands on exhibit in various science museums such as the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center and the Lawrence Hall of Science.
You can find out more about this amazing augmented reality + Kinect project on the link provided below.
Very nice. Could almost see a physical minecraft-style game too, digging for treasure and building things then sharing in a virtual environment. Hmm.