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Hey, Hacker News! I launched an escape room venue in Orlando about four weeks before everything went into COVID-19 lockdown. My team and I started noticing remo
by alexissantos 6y ago
Hey, Hacker News! I launched an escape room venue in Orlando about four weeks before everything went into COVID-19 lockdown. My team and I started noticing remote/virtual escape room offerings that were just Zoom calls where players direct a game master to look at/interact with things in a physical space.
We liked the idea of playing with a real environment from home, but wanted to give players direct control over the environment. Paranormal Panic is our first stab at a remotely playable escape room.
Players have 30 minutes to catch a ghost, and must work together as two squads. Each team connects with a separate device (laptop, desktop, or tablet), and although they have live video feeds from the same room, they see different angles inside it. They also have control over different equipment, and have different information on their control panels.
It's built using Vue, Websockets, Jitsi, Raspberry Pi HQ cameras, and Python.
We got lucky that escape rooms are a reasonably safe entertainment option (gatherings of eight or less, no strangers, sanitized, etc.) during these times, so we're fortunate to have reopened and are seeing good attendance. That said, we hope these remote experiences (esp. as team building events) will be a good supplement to our in-person business. We're developing a few other remote experiences that are more ambitious, and we expect to have them ready soon.
- willcipriano 6y agoReally cool idea. I've often thought about creating games with physical objects controlled remotely (my idea was something like RC cars). I'll give this a shot.
- alexissantos 6y agoLet me know if you dabble with the RC cars! We were thinking of using an RC car for part of this experience, but figured we'd leave that R&D project for another day. Our main concern was designing/modifying the car (and its play space) in such a way where it doesn't get stuck. One of our goals was to make this an experience that can be managed and reset remotely by our team, so we wanted to avoid manual intervention as much as possible.
- willcipriano 6y agoI was thinking about using making a scale model of a cityscape and letting people race cars with cameras mounted to them. Getting stuck would be a feature (just like a real car race, if you get stuck somewhere you'll lose), and require human intervention to fix. I think latency is the real problem, games work around this in many ways that aren't possible in the real world.
- alexissantos 6y agoFrom my tinkering, I've found that MJPEG streams are the lowest latency live video I can get. Old school, but no buffering like HLS or MPEG-DASH, etc. I haven't tried modifying the buffering in HLS and the like to zilch (or at least as low as I can go), but that's one thing worth exploring. I keep it low res (640 x 360) and low fps, but use the new high quality Raspberry Pi cameras to get an image that looks decent regardless. One way to get around the latency issue with RC cars is to pre-plot the path and build a puzzle around that. (Not that there has to be a puzzle in there.) Also, if you like scale models, have we got somethin' cookin' for you!
- throwaway744678 6y agoYou may want to check on 'Mario Kart Live: Home circuit' that Nintendo announced a few days ago. Basically an AR/VR mix of Mario Kart with real model cars running in your living room.
- birdyrooster 6y agoI’ve always wanted to make a twitch plays channel with an rc car and SDR
- JamesSwift 6y agoThats awesome. I'm sure the orlando dev community would love to hear about the implementation side of things. I know for a fact the IOT group would love it. Are you in the odevs slack? If not send me your email and I will get you invited.
- alexissantos 6y agoJust shot you an email!
- footballnate29 6y agoCongrats on launching! My old football team used to do escape room as a team building exercise. Might call them up to see if they want to relive the fun!
- alexissantos 6y agoThanks! Hope we can bring the team back together!