8 ms·

Laser Socks – a sweaty game pointing toward the future of computing

201 points by Glench 9y ago

dang 9y ago
High praise at https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/911269264392306688 https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/911269264392306688.
- samstave 9y ago
  Oh Gosh... Spacewar! it was like adrenaline crack as the frustration of ship-drift into an asteroid/over-accelerating would drive you nuts... Another insight into computing, i think, was TradeWars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars Now make it LaserSocks 4-player - and have non-players call out the player who should be taken out first/betting on who will win :-)
- ipsum2 9y ago
  Which isn't surprising, considering that Laser Socks uses Victor's team's codebase.
samstave 9y ago
This is awesome!
danvoell 9y ago
This is hilarious. Congrats! It's a pretty big leap to discuss the future of computing but I welcome a world of social interaction, laughing and playing games in our socks. I wanna play this.
gr33nman 9y ago
This is awesome. Source? :)
baxtr 9y ago
This is sooo cool!!
obilgic 9y ago
off-topic: there was a text based game featured on here some time ago. It was black and white, and the goal was to farm more and more energy and eventually screen would black out and system would reset. Does anyone remember the name of that game?
- GauntletWizard 9y ago
  It sounds similar to Spaceplan: http://www.crazygames.com/game/spaceplan http://www.crazygames.com/game/spaceplan - Not quite black and white, not quite text based, but similar. I loved it, and was surprised to find that there's an extended edition available on steam: store.steampowered.com/app/616110/SPACEPLAN/
  - obilgic 9y ago
    There we go !!! Thank you. Below is the link that was featured on HN. I believe it was a bit simpler back then. http://jhollands.co.uk/spaceplan/ http://jhollands.co.uk/spaceplan/ Edit: I was able to find the HN post as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12279552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12279552
germinalphrase 9y ago
Interactive and augmented environments are far more exciting to me than the promises of VR. Why escape my life when I can make my lived world better? The Dynamicland stuff is particularly fun due to the promise of accessibility. A mature version of this vision would be tremendously exciting for me as a high school teacher. When I read about VR in education I mostly see "experiences" as a defining value of the platform. This is fine, but less interesting than the potential for augmented environments to enhance my nuts-and-bolts professional practice. I want to be able to create personalized tools for interacting with media and ideas (extant and live creations) and managing interpersonal communications/interactions in my room. I can see immediate value in the ability to build branching lesson plans with trigger-able subroutines to provide more individually appropriate experiences to students. I feel strongly about non-linear learning opportunities, but they're logistically difficult. Likewise, to create modifiable one-to-one/one-to-some/one-to-many communications channels to smooth the experience of working with 30-35 people when I can only be in one place at a time (and to mollify the anxieties/anger/angst of being a teenager expected to publicly perform in a crowd). There are any number of small tools I would like to build. I know what problems I want to fix to improve my efficacy, and I don't need polished consumer products to do that. If "Hypercard for the World" allowed me to start hacking together useful tools for myself, I would shower them with love.
- icc97 9y ago
  The potential for VR of course is that they're the ones who create the simulation.
  - germinalphrase 9y ago
    Sure - and that's valid. I guess I have a futuro-nostalgic attachment to looking people in the eye when we work together.
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      Have you read ‘Snow Crash?’
lifeisstillgood 9y ago
So if I get it, we are this is that first demonstration of a mouse, carved From a block of wood, moving windows around on a screen. One day soon we will all have cameras and projectors and sensors in our home and office environments and be able to improvise new interactions. Seems ... plausible. Where do I get a block of wood the right shape then?
westoncb 9y ago
Here's where the 'pointing toward the future of computing' bit comes in: Similarly, Laser Socks is a fun demo by itself, but what we as researchers hope it points toward is a new type of computing that instead of isolating humans in artificial digital worlds, provides a medium of expression that is continuous and integrated with our physical and social worlds So this is one 'application' built on an 'OS' developed by Bret Victor and Robert Ochshorn which was called Hypercard in the World, though the latest version is called Realtalk. More info here: https://limn.it/utopian-hacks/ https://limn.it/utopian-hacks/
- elefanten 9y ago
  Wow, that link. What an insulting, self-important piece of drivel. It casually asserts that everyone who isn't Alan Kay or Bret Victor is dead-eyed, soulless drone. That all the work done in tech since Xerox PARC has been a series of criminal tragedies. Hope this guy scoots off elsewhere soon, to write some more fantasy time "ethnographies"
afterburner 9y ago
Yeah, laser tag is fun.
lasersox 9y ago
Haha!
RUG3Y 9y ago
Sounds like a lot more fun than the game "laser eyes" that we used to play when pointers became common in the 90s.
victornomad 9y ago
I've seen many installations and games that have physical interactivity. What is special in this game? Is the system that they are using? Any link with more info?
- Pulcinella 9y ago
  The system used to build this game is much more general than the type of stuff you might see at a mall installation, for example. For more follow @Dynamicland1 on twitter.
  - Glench 9y ago
    Laser Socks wasn't a special-purpose installation built for demo purposes. It was a game that normal people could build in their living room in under an hour given the right "operating system". It's one instance of a much bigger idea — that one day everyone could be authoring dynamic/physical content in this new medium just like the written word is used today.
el_don_almighty 9y ago
dammit...I NEED THIS FOR MY HALLOWEEN PARTY But I've been a manager for 15 years and my real geek skills suck Help me!
ideonexus 9y ago
An amazing example of the possibilities is the UCDavis Augmented Reality Sandbox, which uses a projector, an Xbox kinect, and sandbox that lets you wiggle your fingers to create rain, dig rivers and lakes, and see how water flows through an environment. My kids and I were blown away by it at a science festival last year. It's all open source and you could build your own for less than $500 I think: https://arsandbox.ucdavis.edu/ https://arsandbox.ucdavis.edu/
- Pica_soO 9y ago
  I wish we had that as a level editor for the rts-game we work on.
ge96 9y ago
What is the light panel on the ground? To me it's like a conveyor belt/piece of paper slides to block some of the light? edit: that's funny "two lines of code" then mentions the hypercard that detects the laser pointer
- Glench 9y ago
  From the article: > Players try to point a laser pointer at their opponent's socks while dodging their opponent's laser. Whenever they score a hit, the health meter closest to their opponent's play area fills up with blue light. Whoever gets their opponent's meter to fill up first wins. The light on the ground is a piece of posterboard is that has graphics projection-mapped onto it to signify a person's "health" in the game. It would be cool if there were a physically-actuated health bar like you're describing, though! The module that detected laser dots was like a page of code. It really wasn't complicated at all.
  - ge96 9y ago
    I like the idea though, I mean a smart home deal, making everyday boring objects cooler, assuming you also have Augmented reality. I thought it was like a back light panel of a computer display pretty cool it's a projection if I read what you said right. Yeah I wasn't 100% serious of what I said, it's like I don't know if this is a good analogy "yeah it's easy with the push of my foot, I can turn oil into 60 mph" with regard to a car.
jayajay 9y ago
I can see this being interesting in traffic applications. Instead of the red/yellow/green traffic lights we have at intersections today, instead imagine a "laser counter" system that would "tag" various vehicles as they approached and would send a special signal to the car whose turn it was to go. The car, being self driving, would be integrated into all of this and then proceed, assuming the other cars follow the same contract. All it takes is one car to not understand the contract for this to be pretty scary though. Maybe the road could be tolled: the spike-track or barrier won't go down unless your car has proven that it can cooperate in the intersection protocol.

201 points by Glench 9y ago

dang 9y ago

High praise at https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/911269264392306688 https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/911269264392306688.

samstave 9y ago
Oh Gosh... Spacewar! it was like adrenaline crack as the frustration of ship-drift into an asteroid/over-accelerating would drive you nuts... Another insight into computing, i think, was TradeWars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars Now make it LaserSocks 4-player - and have non-players call out the player who should be taken out first/betting on who will win :-)
ipsum2 9y ago
Which isn't surprising, considering that Laser Socks uses Victor's team's codebase.

samstave 9y ago

This is awesome!

danvoell 9y ago

This is hilarious. Congrats! It's a pretty big leap to discuss the future of computing but I welcome a world of social interaction, laughing and playing games in our socks. I wanna play this.

gr33nman 9y ago

This is awesome. Source? :)

baxtr 9y ago

This is sooo cool!!

obilgic 9y ago

off-topic: there was a text based game featured on here some time ago. It was black and white, and the goal was to farm more and more energy and eventually screen would black out and system would reset. Does anyone remember the name of that game?

GauntletWizard 9y ago
It sounds similar to Spaceplan: http://www.crazygames.com/game/spaceplan http://www.crazygames.com/game/spaceplan - Not quite black and white, not quite text based, but similar. I loved it, and was surprised to find that there's an extended edition available on steam: store.steampowered.com/app/616110/SPACEPLAN/
- obilgic 9y ago
  There we go !!! Thank you. Below is the link that was featured on HN. I believe it was a bit simpler back then. http://jhollands.co.uk/spaceplan/ http://jhollands.co.uk/spaceplan/ Edit: I was able to find the HN post as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12279552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12279552

germinalphrase 9y ago

Interactive and augmented environments are far more exciting to me than the promises of VR. Why escape my life when I can make my lived world better? The Dynamicland stuff is particularly fun due to the promise of accessibility. A mature version of this vision would be tremendously exciting for me as a high school teacher. When I read about VR in education I mostly see "experiences" as a defining value of the platform. This is fine, but less interesting than the potential for augmented environments to enhance my nuts-and-bolts professional practice. I want to be able to create personalized tools for interacting with media and ideas (extant and live creations) and managing interpersonal communications/interactions in my room. I can see immediate value in the ability to build branching lesson plans with trigger-able subroutines to provide more individually appropriate experiences to students. I feel strongly about non-linear learning opportunities, but they're logistically difficult. Likewise, to create modifiable one-to-one/one-to-some/one-to-many communications channels to smooth the experience of working with 30-35 people when I can only be in one place at a time (and to mollify the anxieties/anger/angst of being a teenager expected to publicly perform in a crowd). There are any number of small tools I would like to build. I know what problems I want to fix to improve my efficacy, and I don't need polished consumer products to do that. If "Hypercard for the World" allowed me to start hacking together useful tools for myself, I would shower them with love.

icc97 9y ago
The potential for VR of course is that they're the ones who create the simulation.
- germinalphrase 9y ago
  Sure - and that's valid. I guess I have a futuro-nostalgic attachment to looking people in the eye when we work together.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    Have you read ‘Snow Crash?’

lifeisstillgood 9y ago

So if I get it, we are this is that first demonstration of a mouse, carved From a block of wood, moving windows around on a screen. One day soon we will all have cameras and projectors and sensors in our home and office environments and be able to improvise new interactions. Seems ... plausible. Where do I get a block of wood the right shape then?

westoncb 9y ago

Here's where the 'pointing toward the future of computing' bit comes in: Similarly, Laser Socks is a fun demo by itself, but what we as researchers hope it points toward is a new type of computing that instead of isolating humans in artificial digital worlds, provides a medium of expression that is continuous and integrated with our physical and social worlds So this is one 'application' built on an 'OS' developed by Bret Victor and Robert Ochshorn which was called Hypercard in the World, though the latest version is called Realtalk. More info here: https://limn.it/utopian-hacks/ https://limn.it/utopian-hacks/

elefanten 9y ago
Wow, that link. What an insulting, self-important piece of drivel. It casually asserts that everyone who isn't Alan Kay or Bret Victor is dead-eyed, soulless drone. That all the work done in tech since Xerox PARC has been a series of criminal tragedies. Hope this guy scoots off elsewhere soon, to write some more fantasy time "ethnographies"

afterburner 9y ago

Yeah, laser tag is fun.

lasersox 9y ago

Haha!

RUG3Y 9y ago

Sounds like a lot more fun than the game "laser eyes" that we used to play when pointers became common in the 90s.

victornomad 9y ago

I've seen many installations and games that have physical interactivity. What is special in this game? Is the system that they are using? Any link with more info?

Pulcinella 9y ago
The system used to build this game is much more general than the type of stuff you might see at a mall installation, for example. For more follow @Dynamicland1 on twitter.
- Glench 9y ago
  Laser Socks wasn't a special-purpose installation built for demo purposes. It was a game that normal people could build in their living room in under an hour given the right "operating system". It's one instance of a much bigger idea — that one day everyone could be authoring dynamic/physical content in this new medium just like the written word is used today.

el_don_almighty 9y ago

dammit...I NEED THIS FOR MY HALLOWEEN PARTY But I've been a manager for 15 years and my real geek skills suck Help me!

ideonexus 9y ago

An amazing example of the possibilities is the UCDavis Augmented Reality Sandbox, which uses a projector, an Xbox kinect, and sandbox that lets you wiggle your fingers to create rain, dig rivers and lakes, and see how water flows through an environment. My kids and I were blown away by it at a science festival last year. It's all open source and you could build your own for less than $500 I think: https://arsandbox.ucdavis.edu/ https://arsandbox.ucdavis.edu/

Pica_soO 9y ago
I wish we had that as a level editor for the rts-game we work on.

ge96 9y ago

What is the light panel on the ground? To me it's like a conveyor belt/piece of paper slides to block some of the light? edit: that's funny "two lines of code" then mentions the hypercard that detects the laser pointer

Glench 9y ago
From the article: > Players try to point a laser pointer at their opponent's socks while dodging their opponent's laser. Whenever they score a hit, the health meter closest to their opponent's play area fills up with blue light. Whoever gets their opponent's meter to fill up first wins. The light on the ground is a piece of posterboard is that has graphics projection-mapped onto it to signify a person's "health" in the game. It would be cool if there were a physically-actuated health bar like you're describing, though! The module that detected laser dots was like a page of code. It really wasn't complicated at all.
- ge96 9y ago
  I like the idea though, I mean a smart home deal, making everyday boring objects cooler, assuming you also have Augmented reality. I thought it was like a back light panel of a computer display pretty cool it's a projection if I read what you said right. Yeah I wasn't 100% serious of what I said, it's like I don't know if this is a good analogy "yeah it's easy with the push of my foot, I can turn oil into 60 mph" with regard to a car.

jayajay 9y ago

I can see this being interesting in traffic applications. Instead of the red/yellow/green traffic lights we have at intersections today, instead imagine a "laser counter" system that would "tag" various vehicles as they approached and would send a special signal to the car whose turn it was to go. The car, being self driving, would be integrated into all of this and then proceed, assuming the other cars follow the same contract. All it takes is one car to not understand the contract for this to be pretty scary though. Maybe the road could be tolled: the spike-track or barrier won't go down unless your car has proven that it can cooperate in the intersection protocol.