Recently, a new sort of machine has appeared in Japanese arcades: a real-time strategy game (Sangokushi Taisen) where the input takes the form of trading cards, bought right there at the arcade, with RFID tags in them.
The cards are arranged on the machine, and their movement corresponds to the movement of squads of soldiers and warlords on the screen.
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This game has the obvious appeal of involving physical objects; rather than pressing keys or moving the mouse, you are moving around cards that represent your army. This game is so close to playing with actual toy soldiers that can move on their own - can we do better?
How about if we combine the input area with the area in which the game takes place? What if the cards you are moving around and the soldiers those cards represent occupy roughly the same space? The projection table worked-on during last semester's Digital Media class could do that. The cards would be positioned on the table. The camera would sense which cards represent what sort of military unit (provided they are marked with something the camera can recognize, like, say, a bar code), and where they are positioned, while the projector could project not only the landscape on which the battle is fought, but also the soldiers themselves - the battlefield would cover the entire table, while the soldiers would be projected on top of their respective cards.
This is one step closer, to be sure, but we end up with boring two-dimensional representations of the tanks, marines, and so on. Perhaps there is some way to make them look vaguely three-dimensional?
The Mirage Mirror toy provides an interesting tool. The idea is that the object put on the bottom mirror happens to sit in that mirror's focal point, and, through a series of reflections, an image of that object is made to appear in the top mirror's focal point, which happens to be in the hole in the top mirror. There's an illusion of that object floating in the air above the top mirror. But, of course, we don't need an object on the lower mirror - all we need is a projection of the object on the mirror surface. This is something the table's projector can supply.
Proposed Project
Using the dual parabolic mirror setup found in the Mirage Mirror toy, create devices capable of turning 2D image projected onto them into 3D "holograms" - or, perhaps, "mirages". The devices can be coded with distinguishing marks that the camera of the projection table can discern. A program can then be run (a real-time strategy game, strategic military exercise, etc) that can deduce from the markings on the mirror devices what sort of object each device is supposed to represent; an image of that object can then be projected onto the mirror device.
Hurdles
- Will the mirror thing actually work? The image is not really a hologram in the way we'd like it to be - a free-floating image in space, visible from most, if not all, angles. Its appearance and behavior depends wholly on the curvature of the two mirrored surfaces, the size of opening in the top one, and the angle under which it is being viewed. Furthermore, the image would have to be projected straight down to be effective; the projector, I assume, wouldn't exactly be perpendicular to every point on the table. This means that in certain areas of the table (namely, those not directly underneath the projector), the mirrors would have to be slightly tilted towards the projector. UPDATE: It won't work. Professor Perlin says that a 2D image projected onto the lower mirror won't create a 3D image floating in the air, which pretty much means "back to the drawing board".
- A really large pair of mirrors is needed to create the image of a tiny plastic pig, or a penny; can we somehow change the proportions and dimensions of the mirror without affecting the size of the image?
- The mirrors are not a trivial thing to produce. They have to be perfectly parabolic (or, with the appropriate alterations, if any are needed), for example. I don't know anything about manufacturing mirrors; that could be a pretty big problem.
Concept Image
