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from the getting-all-your-fun-in-a-cardboard-box dept.
How to turn throwaway cardboard into a DIY arcade game:
Like many people across Colorado, Peter Gyory spent the height of the COVID-19 pandemic sitting at home with nothing to do. Then the researcher, a game designer by training, noticed all the random materials he had lying around his house.
"I was really frustrated that I couldn't make games," said Gyory, a doctoral student at CU Boulder's ATLAS Institute. "I realized I was surrounded by cardboard. I thought: 'How could I make a game out of that?'"
That was the birth of Tinycade. This project, the brainchild of Gyory and his colleagues at ATLAS, brings a do-it-yourself spirit to the world of video games. Tinycade allows anyone, anywhere to make a working arcade machine that can fit on a kitchen table or even a TV tray. All you need are a smartphone, some cardboard, two small mirrors and bric-a-brac like rubber bands and toothpicks. In other words: junk.
"The restriction I gave myself was that if you couldn't go to the grocery store and buy it, I couldn't use it in Tinycade," Gyory said.
He presented his team's invention last month at the Association for Computing Machinery's conference on Creativity & Cognition in Venice, Italy.
[...] Once the platform rolls out, gamers will only need to follow a few simple steps: First, you will download a set of stencils that will help you to cut out and assemble an arcade machine from spare cardboard. You then plop your phone in to serve as the screen.
The machine's controllers are also made out of cardboard and can be configured into a wide range of designs—from standard video game D-pads and joysticks to knobs, sliders, switches and much more. Within a Tinycade platform are a set of mirrors that allow your smartphone's camera to see what's going on under those controls. If you press right on the D-pad, say, the pieces will shift to reveal a digital "marker," which looks like simple QR code. Your phone will spot that marker, then tell the character on screen to move right.
[...] In the game Claw, which Gyory designed himself, players have to fight off a horde of oncoming alien ships. You slide around a cardboard claw, then pinch when you want to reach out and grab one of the enemy craft with a hook.
The team, however, has a more ambitious vision for Tinycade: Gyory and his colleagues hope that users will soon be able to use the platform to make new types of controllers for any game they can think of.
Brief video showing the concept.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Monday July 25 2022, @06:44AM (1 child)
in the bit where they classify a smartphone as "junk".
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Monday July 25 2022, @07:35AM
And that you can buy said junk at a grocery store, along with mirrors. What kind of grocery store do they have in their neighborhood, that sells cell phones and mirrors? In my grocery store I can't even buy rubber bands. They do give them for free at the deli section, but if I want to buy them, I have to go to a stationery store.