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A Tale in the Desert is under new management
After years of inactivity on the A Tale in the Desert front, you might be forgiven from not noticing that the title changed hands last month. That's OK, we didn't see it before now either. Citing preoccupation with another project, eGenesis has handed over management and development of A Tale in the Desert to Pluribus Games. The upside to this transition for gamers is two-fold: The new owners have made the game free for the time being and are preparing to start up the next iteration of the story, Tale VII. "EGenesis has been overwhelmed with their newest project, Dragon's Tale, and has not been able to devote the time needed to ATitD. It is our belief that we will be able to greatly improve the game for you, our customers," Pluribus announced. [Thanks to Alan for the tip!]
Joystiq impressions: HP's Panoply and Pluribus
At HP's recent gaming media event, the company talked about its acquisition of VoodooPC and how HP fits into the console-heavy world of gaming. Specifically, HP seems to be positioning itself as a technology development company that will license its crazy inventions to the console companies. Mscape, an augmented-reality system is the most ambitious step in that direction, but two video projector concepts -- Panoply and Pluribus -- could also be ripe for the console space.Both technologies assemble multiple, off-the-shelf projectors into a Voltron of a screen; Panoply combines several images on a curved, concave surface, while Pluribus combines and overlaps its projectors for big, bright images.
HP shows off some future-gen gaming tech
So we hit up HP's Gaming Summit which, as it turned out, only seemed peripherally related to gaming besides the announcement of an unnamed mid-to-high end gaming brand this year. Still, their R&D labs were happy to drag some old favorites out of the vault -- like the Misto touchscreen-based coffee table -- as well as show of some hitherto unseen technologies, such as:Pluribus - Our favorite: use a camera (for alignment) and as many off-the-shelf projectors as you want to make a scalable, massive, composite-projected screen. Users can choose software assisted alignments that result in resolution, redundancy, enhanced brightness, or combinations therein. In the 12 projector demo we saw, a 15-foot composite display which was almost totally unaffected by someone walking through it. (Check out this slide to get a general idea as to how it works. Forgive us, HP, for our crude mockup.)Panoply - Kind of the same take as Pluribus, but for an immersive game or theater environment. Use software alignment techniques with a camera to line up two off-the-shelf projectors without having to go through the pain of setting up a complicated wraparound display.mscape - Another project Voodoo's Sood discussed was mscape, a new mobile gaming and media entertainment platform in development to take advantage of augmented reality, movement, biometrics, GPS, and so, so many other buzzwords. Seems pie in the sky, but we'd like to see what happens if they launch.Interested? Check out the gallery.%Gallery-2444%
