Snake-the-Planet Makes A Game Board Out Of Your Surroundings

It’s Friday night and these guys are driving around town looking for a good spot to play a head-to-head game of Snake. It’s not that they need somewhere to sit (they travel with a couch and floor lamp for that purpose) it’s that they’re using a projector and camera to make a game out of their surroundings.

A white Mystery-Machine-style van has room for everything they need to make the traveling arcade happen. A mobile power supply provides juice to the camera and projector. To get started, the system takes a high-contrast black and white photo of the surface in front of it. Everything that appears below the white threshold becomes a wall on the game board, everything else is a playable area. Obstacles are formed by windows, doorways, pipes, signs, pieces of foam board the guys hang on a wall, and even your body if you stand in the way during scanning. From there the guys each grab a joystick and play the hacker-favorite game of snake.

After the break you can watch a description of how the system works.[vimeo http://vimeo.com/37657491 w=470]

17 thoughts on “Snake-the-Planet Makes A Game Board Out Of Your Surroundings

    1. The controllers didn’t seem all that polished to me (they looked kind of painful to use actually), but the game sure did! The snakes break into little particles and fly apart when they hit something, that’s awesome. I’m going to have to steal that for my next snake game. :D

    1. I’m 40+ years old. I played snake games before these guys were born.

      Snake games were pretty low on the totem pole of games, simple to program and boring as can be.

      Amazing how people can gin up nostalgia for crap that they never experienced when it was new. ;) It’s all TRON’s fault, the original movie, not the 2010 one.

    1. Whaaaa whaaa whaaaa… somebody call a freaking whambulance for fartface.

      If you really cared to look at their site which has three tabs total, you’d see the HOW tab says:

      All software is developed with C++ and Objective-C using OpenFrameworks and will be distributed as open source SOON.

      By using a camera feed with the OpenCV (computer vision) library we are able to quickly analyse surfaces to get the quad distortion of the projector and 2D interpretations of architectural elements within this quad, which we can then turn into our game levels.

      The system currently requires a laptop, camera and projector – all being driven from a battery and inverter housed entirely within THE NANABIN.

      And if you want more than that right now… feel free to contact them: snake [at] mpulabs [dot] com

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