A bunch of New York University students have developed a project they have called The Nintendo Amusement Park, which features a life-size obstacle course based on Super Mario Bros.
Check out the pics right here. Players get strapped into a bungee system and get to jump up to a whopping twelve feet into the air, smash Goombas, collect coins and chomp on magic mushrooms (not actual hallucinogenic ones, you understand).
The Nintendo Amusement Park is described on their website as: “A prototype and proposal for a new type of user-controlled interactive ride: Physically Augmented Reality…a real life obstacle course which a player jumps through using a power assist harness… There is nothing digital. There is nothing projected. There is nothing virtual… Both the power harness and the moving parts of the obstacle course are entirely mechanical, to give a player the true feeling of being inside a video game.”
The game comes out of NYU's Big Games class, formerly known as the guys responsible for PacManhattan, a real-life re-creation of Pac-Man on the streets of New York.
Check it out – along with its hilarious spoof Japanese Nintendo-style ad here!
A Wired journalist who tested out the game, had the following to say about it: “The game is a lot of fun and a serious workout. While I wasn't in physical pain, it felt like I'd run a couple of miles. Once you get the hang of the bouncing motion, it's a blast. At the height of a jump you get a weightless feeling, like a roller coaster about to descend. It's challenging and a bit frustrating -- in the same way video games can be.”
The students’ ultimate vision is of a 100-metre-long obstacle course where a "haptic winch" utilising predetermined algorithms can react to a player's movements and boost their physical abilities accordingly.
Dan Albritton, one of the students behind the project, told Wired magazine: "We could actually load video-game physics models into this winch and put them in the real world… once you have (the haptic winch) built, you can repurpose it for anything you want. You can have Excite Bike, a crazy Tony Hawk game, anything you want."
Outrageous copyright infringements aside, the students' ultimate goal is to persuade Nintendo to team with them to develop an advanced version of The Nintendo Amusement Park.
Albritton outlined the plan: "Nintendo with their game design and Disney with their ride engineering, those are the types of groups we can smash together to make this haptic winch real."
The team would like to build a version to be displayed at E3 2007 as part of a game company's booth, as they say on the site: "We have chosen to borrow the Nintendo name, and video game aesthetic, as they are the largest inspiration for this project, but we are interested in working with anyone who shares our vision."
Nintendo Amusement Park is actively seeking collaborators, sponsors, and investors for the next phases of the project. They are looking for contacts and investors in event promotions, trade shows, stunts, gaming, amusement parks, and haptic engineering.
SPOnG loves the idea. And whilst at this stage it sounds very much either like an art-world prank or the result of some over-enthusiastic and crazy fanboys taking too many REAL magic mushrooms, it's certainly an idea for future theme park ride developers to bear in mind. It might even be a way to keep fit, whilst enjoying yourself at the same time – the holy grail of ‘physical’ videogaming!
(source: Wired)
Check out the pics right here. Players get strapped into a bungee system and get to jump up to a whopping twelve feet into the air, smash Goombas, collect coins and chomp on magic mushrooms (not actual hallucinogenic ones, you understand).
The Nintendo Amusement Park is described on their website as: “A prototype and proposal for a new type of user-controlled interactive ride: Physically Augmented Reality…a real life obstacle course which a player jumps through using a power assist harness… There is nothing digital. There is nothing projected. There is nothing virtual… Both the power harness and the moving parts of the obstacle course are entirely mechanical, to give a player the true feeling of being inside a video game.”
The game comes out of NYU's Big Games class, formerly known as the guys responsible for PacManhattan, a real-life re-creation of Pac-Man on the streets of New York.
Check it out – along with its hilarious spoof Japanese Nintendo-style ad here!
A Wired journalist who tested out the game, had the following to say about it: “The game is a lot of fun and a serious workout. While I wasn't in physical pain, it felt like I'd run a couple of miles. Once you get the hang of the bouncing motion, it's a blast. At the height of a jump you get a weightless feeling, like a roller coaster about to descend. It's challenging and a bit frustrating -- in the same way video games can be.”
The students’ ultimate vision is of a 100-metre-long obstacle course where a "haptic winch" utilising predetermined algorithms can react to a player's movements and boost their physical abilities accordingly.
Dan Albritton, one of the students behind the project, told Wired magazine: "We could actually load video-game physics models into this winch and put them in the real world… once you have (the haptic winch) built, you can repurpose it for anything you want. You can have Excite Bike, a crazy Tony Hawk game, anything you want."
Outrageous copyright infringements aside, the students' ultimate goal is to persuade Nintendo to team with them to develop an advanced version of The Nintendo Amusement Park.
Albritton outlined the plan: "Nintendo with their game design and Disney with their ride engineering, those are the types of groups we can smash together to make this haptic winch real."
The team would like to build a version to be displayed at E3 2007 as part of a game company's booth, as they say on the site: "We have chosen to borrow the Nintendo name, and video game aesthetic, as they are the largest inspiration for this project, but we are interested in working with anyone who shares our vision."
Nintendo Amusement Park is actively seeking collaborators, sponsors, and investors for the next phases of the project. They are looking for contacts and investors in event promotions, trade shows, stunts, gaming, amusement parks, and haptic engineering.
SPOnG loves the idea. And whilst at this stage it sounds very much either like an art-world prank or the result of some over-enthusiastic and crazy fanboys taking too many REAL magic mushrooms, it's certainly an idea for future theme park ride developers to bear in mind. It might even be a way to keep fit, whilst enjoying yourself at the same time – the holy grail of ‘physical’ videogaming!
(source: Wired)