Outrun Augmented Reality

SpiffWilkie

New member
Joined
Mar 28, 2004
Messages
3,507
Reaction score
123
Location
Memphis, Tennessee
Sorry if this is a repost (tried to look for other threads).

Outrun AR



[Garnet Hertz], a professor and "artist in residence" at UC Irvine, built a drivable Outrun arcade cabinet for an experiment in augmented reality.

The old fiberglass and wood cabinet was hacked up and the motors, wheels, and drive train from an electric golf cart were stuffed inside. The original steering wheel and pedals were used for the controls. Although the top speed of the in-game car is about 180 mph, that was brought down to a reasonable 13 miles per hour.


The build doesn't run on the original 68k processor. Instead, custom software is used to take real-world image data from two webcams on top of the cabinet. These images are then converted into Outrun sprites and displayed on the monitor. The software proportionally changes the speed of the in-game car, but it seems the difference between the game speed and real-life speed would be a little disconcerting. Although it's not a real world track with the corkscrew loops of Race Drivin', it's still an interesting experiment in augmented reality.
 
It seems kind of cool (the concept). The guy who did this project contacted me about buying my outrun that I have but he wanted the deluxe sit down, buti only have the regular sitdown version.
 
I think the concept is pretty cool. Feeding in the real-time data and converting it to Outrun pixels is awesome. Imagine being a passenger in a real car and being able to play a real-time version of the highway you're on.
 
Wake me up when they make a little more progress on it. If you have to peer around the cabinet to see where you're going, it's not time to show it off yet. When real cars that go by appear on the outrun screen, THEN I'll be interested. Ultimately could be pretty cool, though it sucks that a nice sitdown cab had to be sacrificed.
 
Back
Top Bottom