Student reveals the origins of his real-life Portal turret Making a working turret that tracks movement and shoots at its targets is challenging enough, but Penn State University student Kevin Swanson had an extra objective for his final Advanced Mechatronics project; it had to look like a turret from Portal, the popular puzzle game/shooter from Valve. “My professor, who is obsessed with Portal, told us as a semi-joke [that he'll] only allow it if the turret looks like the Portal turret,” Swanson told GamesBeat in an exclusive interview. “I just kind of ran with it from there.” The robot uses an IP webcam to track targets and fire bullets. “The idea started with us playing with one of those USB desk turrets, and we wanted to automate it with a camera for our final project,” said Swanson. Don’t worry, this machine isn’t deadly. “It’s not done yet,” Swanson told us. You can see the robot in action and learn more about how it works from Kevin’s video, posted below. [vb_gallery id=429686] Don't let cyber attacks kill your game!
Musicovery BrowserQuest SuperUber Creates Real-Life Interactive Experiences Through Gaming Photo by Bryan Derballa. SuperUber is an interactive design and creative technology firm based in Brazil and New York. They have a penchant for creating social experiences that come to life in the form of smart and playful interactive installations. We brought their work Super Pong, a digital mash-up of foosball and the classic video game Pong, to last year’s New York event and it was such a hit, we commissioned a brand new artwork for San Francisco. We sat down with Russ Rive, one of the firm’s founders to discuss OctoCloud’s minimalist characteristics, as well as its nuances and interactivity. Photo by Bryan Derballa. Photo by Jason Henry.
Ten Interactive Websites For Finding New Music, Reviewed We Are Hunted What the hell is everyone else listening to? We Are Hunted is a damn good looking and highly interactive music listening/discovery service that scrapes tracks from all sorts of blogs and P2P services to create emerging, mainstream, and genre-based charts. There's lots of info about artists, including tour dates, plus a Pandora-esque element to it to, allowing you to generate custom playlists based on your tastes or an artist. It's also a Spotify app, but that's irrelevant to us Canadians for the time being. VERDICT: Public playlists are a good way to make streaming mixtapes for that coy hipster girl you're trying to inconspicuously seduce. Audio Map & Music Map Are you looking for some relatives of your favorite artists? VERDICT: Pushing the sites to their limit, when I used Scatman John as my exemplar, Audio Map showed me a wealth of related artists, keeping techno scat alive. This Is My Jam DAMN! City Sounds “What is the music scene in Coffeyville? YouTube Disco Musicovery
Our Games Archive - Choice of Games Choice of the Rock Star Rock your way to the top of the ’80s charts in this epic interactive tale of music and mayhem! Will you achieve immortality or flame out on national TV? Reckless Space Pirates You have a choice: join a crew of space pirates to steal priceless slime from a nest of mushroom-like aliens–or hoodwink the pirates and team up with the mushroom colony to prevent an interstellar war! The ORPHEUS Ruse Infiltrate the enemy as a psychic spy, leaping from body to body by touch. Choice of the Ninja Assassinate the shogun, then vanish without a trace in this interactive fantasy novel! Treasure Seekers of Lady Luck Jump to hyperspace aboard the fastest starship in the galaxy! The Fleet Take back your home world from alien invaders! Choice of the Star Captain Fight on the front lines of the war between humanity and the hideous Blobs. Heroes Rise Choice of the Vampire Choice of the Dragon Play as a fire-breathing dragon who sleeps on gold and kidnaps princesses for fun. Slammed!
Five things to know about ‘Diablo III’ Diablo III (Blizzard) Releasing for the PC and Mac on May 15, Diablo III is just around the corner. Passionate fans have been waiting years for this -- it's been over a decade since Diablo II first stormed shelves -- and with midnight sale launch events occurring all over the country on Monday, there are going to be millions of red-eyed gamers dragging themselves to work Tuesday morning. Those who don't phone in sick, that is. But why the fervor? 1. Almost 16 years ago, a considerably smaller Blizzard Entertainment (before its merger with Activision to become the world's largest game publisher) launched a new game called Diablo. That didn't stop Blizzard, however, who launched Diablo alongside Battle.net, a player-matching system allowing Diablo gamers to jump in and out of games to meet, trade, and co-operatively battle demonic forces together. 2. If you build it, they don't always come. 3. 4. 5. Er, Deckard who?
How To Draw "How to Draw" is a collection of tutorials that will teach you everything from perspective basics to shading chrome. Never picked up a pencil before? Fear not! From simple line drawings to modern art and easy animations, we've got you covered. All projects come from Instructables.com and contain pictures for each step so you can start your masterpiece today! Instructables is the most popular project-sharing community on the Internet. One Per Cent: Next Xbox could have a biometric controller Jacob Aron, technology reporter (Image: US Patent Office) The controller for the next Xbox might be able to take biometric readings of your hand, according to a recent Microsoft patent. It describes a device that strongly resembles the current Xbox 360 controller, but also comes equipped with pressure sensors capable of identifying individuals or even reading their emotions. Gamers could login to their console simply by picking up the controller, thanks to a pressure-sensitive surface that reads the size of their hand and the strength of their grip then creates an identifying "pressure profile signature". (Image: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images) The pressure-sensitive surface could also have an impact on the actual games. Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, have previously modified existing Xbox controls to create similar effects.