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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: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Monday July 25 2022, @03:51PM (2 children)
I raise you a Vitra "Wiggle" cardboard chair: https://www.vitra.com/de-ch/living/product/details/wiggle-side-chair [vitra.com] (Not that I'd ever get one, one spill of water and a grand is done for, and I'd rather waste my money on a (mostly plastic!) Embody anyway, if I had too way much spare change...)
But I think a reasonably sturdy home use arcade cabinet can be done in cardboard. Yes, it would be the "utterly solid cardboard+glue combo", laminated hex tiles between two sturdy outer panels of double-layer cardboard. But if you're bored and that stuff piles up, no one stops you from going down that path of recycling all the cardboard. One would just have to account for the engineering properties (e.g. it will be very sturdy for some directions of load, but not in others). 20mm thick cross-hex-lamination could easily statically load down the weight of a real CRT, you'd just have to have specific mount point reinforcements for those critical points (joystick and button mountings, too). So better go for a TFT from the garbage pile with MAME's fuzziness emulator.
Then have your laser print a poster on a matrix of 200g A4 paper (or that Tyvek-like stuff) to use for the cabinet artwork, and finish the edges with some t-strip wrapped in insulation tape.
The whole thing would not be resistant to water and aggressive poking attacks, but that's not much of an issue unless you get fits when you lose. Maybe add that kick plate for such occasions.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday July 25 2022, @04:04PM
That chair had a very interesting look, but I don't think I would plonk down a $1k for one. Question then I guess is how much of that is for the design and how much is for material. If you built an arcade cabinet like that it would probably hold up. But then it would be quite think, so you might need a few extra vent holes. Question is cost, after all you can get some very cheap wood or woodlike products and composites where they mix wood and plastic and god knows that are dirt cheap and would probably hold up fine. The main thing about the arcade cabinet would be a solid inner structure and then the sides can more or less just be cardboard thin. The banner graphics are usually printed on some plastic materials like large durable stickers. A lot of the weight at least previously was to have some structure so it didn't fold since people tend not to be to gentle and to hold the CRT in place. If you can replace that with a new modern thin display you will have dropped probably 90% of the weight. The 2-3 boards to hold the game and sound doesn't weight that much and the power supply usually rests at the bottom or is bolted to the side near the bottom. Some reinforcement in the front near the feet is nice since people tend to kick, even if not in anger.
Then some lamps to backlite the marquee, a few speakers etc. T-stripes to fill in all the gaps between boards.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2022, @08:28PM
Fun Frank Gehry link. For those that don't know the name, he's responsible for a bunch of CAD designed buildings that are full of oblique and curved surfaces. CAD easily lets him create free-form 3D designs and check the structure with FEA, something other architects have been a little slow to pick up. Some are cute but nearly all of his buildings leak and have other problems because contractors/construction crews mostly only know about right angles (with the exception of peaked roofs).
I take your expensive "artsy" Gehry furniture, and raise you one very practical Victor Papanek and his Nomadic Furniture books.