The team at Monobanda have been working on a sandbox game called Mimicry that uses a Kinect to read the terrain of a sandbox.
From the teaser video and press release, the eventual goal appears to be controlling both a character in the game and the environment simultaneously. By reading the terrain of the sandbox with a Kinect, the team was able to import that into the game world. The team says the game world is inhabited by tiny virtual characters that, “roll around, jump and glide through the Mimicry world.” Anyone playing Mimicry can create obstacles for these little creatures or build them a race track. The Monobandia team says the point of this game is, “to create your own games.” With a fully editable world and its ‘rolling ball’ inhabitants, we can’t wait to make our own custom Beyblade arena.
Since the release of the Kinect SDK a few weeks ago, we’ve been seeing some really amazing projects that should have been day-1 demos from Microsoft. We’ve been impressed with the projects we’ve seen so far, and can’t wait to see what others come up with next. If you have a neat build, be sure to send it into the tip line.
Check out a video testing the game mechanics after the break.
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/25665948%5D
This would be Awsome for a motocross game.
http://vimeo.com/25666910 (additional vid)
If you cross platform this and make the integration real-time… Perhaps on a public server for FPS. Could you get it to recognise drawings on a sheet of paper or the colors of certain objects to recognize for an out-of-bounds area… Like a brightly colored string.
I like it.
But one of the reasons I play sandbox video games is because it’s easier(and cleaner) than actually playing with a playbox full of sand.
This the sand-box is just for terrain editing and whatnot. Fit this on a server and you have seamless terrain integration! if you could do it with paper and different color markers, you could have the makings of an awesome FPS that changes every time you play it! I for one, am VERY excited about this tech.
This reminds me of the movie “The minds Eye” for some reason. This would be an awsome tool for schools.
I would love to see someone map out an area using kinect and save it as a game environment. So you could have races or war games in your own nabourhood.
Like having satnav that pulls data from google street view
(ahead of time in all directions so that there is no lag time whilst driving) then over lay road data like street names and the line of the route.
I smell a new scorched search terrain builder
Might be better if it was a claybox game instead of sand. Sand falls – clay sorta stays in place.
This needs to have Dungeons and Dragons support added, stat.
It also needs a method of detecting the players. Right now it incorrectly thinks they are part of the (very tall!) terrain.
@Hackerspacer: Moonsand would be perfect for this.
One of my colleagues and I actually did a similar project for a Micromachines style racing game, we have a video on youtube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7qbjGNyi88
It’d be interesting to see this integrated with objects as well, i.e. you could place blocks, toy cars, baddies, etc. and the software would render it while the character ran in a straight line.
Great base for a tower defence game. Control towers with augmented reality badges.
My cat would flip out if I installed something like this on her litter box.
haha would make an interesting new map maker for something like AOE
Lemmings in Mimicry for the win!
One word: Populous
This would be a cool way to make maps for tux racer.
An exhibit at Makerfaire UK in Newcastle earlier this year had something similar. A sandbox with small “insect” creatures video projected down into it from above
by carving out the terrain you could make path for the video insects to follow or build up terrain to block them
Sure this would be cool for games, but in a totally different area, this could be groundbreaking in robotics.
One major challenge that robots have is things like distinguising between a shadow and a hole – which this seems to handle quite well. I see a lot of potential here.