Best use of a Kinect ever - Ultimate Battlefield 3 Simulator - Build & Test

This is incredible - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg8Bh5iI2WY

Yes, I saw it on TV last night.  Pretty impressive.

Herbie

Although the aiming pad, ambient, and only front projection are redundant. Especially the front projection is redundant because they can make it completely 360 degree similar to how Forza can do 3 screens, just need two more. Since we can have 360 degree view easily, the ambient is redundant. And the gun can have build-in wifi and accelerometer easy.

The moving floor is cool though. I am sure it is not natural feeling as I am sure we can feel the floor is moving based on the momentum. But, still better than nothing.

The virtual paint ball thing is awesome. Better to have direct input from game though. 

Should use Kinect for walking, running, turning, and jumping. The floor is only to move player back to center.

Well, based on what they have, it is still amazing. Just need polish.

Awesome, though the game had better be good to warrant getting blasted with paintballs.

Very cool.  I can't imagine how much pain I'd be in after an hour playing an FPS ... black and blue all over.

They bringing SAS guest to test their toy seemed to me especially cringeworthy. I wrote a long rant about how this simulator could be done properly, but then realized that for what it is the implementation is okay - it's a way to play BF3 and not a proper combat simulator. Still, the amount of faked enthusiasm and marketing pretence is at the same level as I've seen in shows like Space Cadets - the simulator is not that awesome, no need to jump up and down.

It looked pretty awesome to me.  There is a definitive difference between playing in a real life paintball type game and playing on a console.  This kind of blurs the edges a bit. 

It's pretty cool, especially when you consider that they're basically just hacking together bits of existing kit to a standard PC game to get it working.

@reply to post: (AndyC)  Yes, it was more of a 'mashup' than a custom build.  This was why they could only show the front half of the environment (the pre-release version of the game they had would only show the front view, I have no idea if the final version will enable surround views) and had to hack together a method to get the projectors to turn to match the users physical orientation and then hack the ambient lighting so that the lighting behind the player matched the mood of the screen.

I though the paintball guns were a bit over the top, but I guess they added to the tension for the player.

Herbie

That's awesome. They kind of thing should be more available (eg, in high end arcades?)

Is the wireframe they were showing part of the MSR Kinect SDK?

40 minutes ago, Bass wrote

That's awesome. They kind of thing should be more available (eg, in high end arcades?)

Is the wireframe they were showing part of the MSR Kinect SDK?

They demonstrated it on a MacBook Pro running OS X. Somehow I doubt that's official Microsoft code running there.

1 hour ago, W3bbo wrote

*snip*

They demonstrated it on a MacBook Pro running OS X. Somehow I doubt that's official Microsoft code running there.

Battlefield 3 runs on OSX?

4 hours ago, cbae wrote

*snip*

Battlefield 3 runs on OSX?

The Kinect code could be running on a Mac and sends commands to a proxy input-interface on the Windows computer.