garnet hertz
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OutRun AR project lets you game and drive at the same time, makes us drool
Cool game, or coolest game ever? That's the question we were asking ourselves when we first came across Garnet Hertz's augmented reality-based OutRun project -- a concept car that weds Sega's classic driving game with an electric golf cart, allowing players to navigate their way around real-life courses using only arcade consoles. Hertz, an informatics researcher at the University of California Irvine, has since brought his idea to fruition, after outfitting the system with cameras and customized software that can "look" in front of the car to automatically reproduce the route on the game cabin's screen. The map is displayed in the same 8-bit rendering you'd see on the original OutRun, with perspectives changing proportionally to shifts in steering. The cart maxes out at only 13 mph, though speed isn't really the idea; Hertz and his colleagues hope their technology can be used to develop game-based therapies for disabled users, or to create similarly AR-based wheelchairs. Scoot past the break to see a video of the car in action, and let your dreams converge. [Thanks, Stagueve]
Artist plans to turn OutRun machine into real car
Garnet Hertz's design for an OutRun arcade machine combined with an electric scooter into a real, amazingly impractical vehicle is great, even if it is just a concept for now. But what really turns the idea of a driving game on wheels into something magical (that also plays "Magical Sound Shower") is the software. Instead of simply running OutRun as you drive blindly into traffic, Hertz is working on an iPhone 3GS app that uses the iPhone's camera and GPS to detect your position and the shape of the road, and translate that information into a live OutRun track. See the software at work after the break. The artist's goals are the "Un-Simulation of Driving" (instead of using a game to simulate driving closely with high-end graphics like Gran Turismo, this will fuse video game-like graphics with real driving), and "GPS Navigation Parallax & Mixed Reality" (using only GPS information to drive). And not "Making Something That Is Going To Get Someone Killed", which is why, when this does become a reality, it'll be limited to "controlled environments." [Via Engadget, GameSetWatch]
Ferrari-styled OutRun arcade machine set for crazy scooter transformation? (video)
If you're a child of the '80s and a gamer to boot you surely remember OutRun, the game that rocked a generation with only some parallax effects and pixelated blonde hair -- though the giant arcade cabinet with gold wheels certainly didn't hurt. Now "contemporary artist" Garnet Hertz (creator of the twitching, crunchy frog server) is proposing to give that very cabinet a new lease on life, and a motorized one at that. Hertz wants to take an arcade machine and merge it with an EVT America Electric Trike, making those stylized five-spoke rims actually move. But that's only half of it. He plans to power the display with an iPhone 3GS and use it to render a sort of halcyon 16-bit view of the world ahead, with every road a 64-color dream lined with palm trees. A recent video showing off some of the tech is embedded below, and while we think this is about as likely to turn a wheel as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cabinet is to travel in time, we'll certainly be first in line with four quarters if it ever does.
Twitching frog server gets called "art"
Similar to the previously seen Text-o-possum, someone's bad art project has spread, virus-like, to the internet, where we have to be subjected to its heavy-handed proclamations on the role of technology in modern society. This time it's "Experiments in Galvanism", a tiny server embedded in a dead frog, submerged in mineral oil, which is remotely made to twitch via Galvanism (the contraction of a muscle when stimulated by electric current). Of course, the piece's creator Garnet Hertz has a little more going for him than the Text-o-possum's architect. Firstly, besides the fact that the frog is dead, it actually does have a kind of server inside of it, and secondly, Garnet has managed to convince other people that he's put together something legitimately special -- which is half the trick of art, really. If you've been looking for something to wax philosophical over, hit the read link.[Via Wired]
