Adding real-world architecture to your game has a ton of benefits. It can set the mood, add authenticity, and give an emotional punch to your game. Plus, and let’s be honest with ourselves here, it’s a heck of a lot easier to base your game on a real place than to come up with something from scratch. So if I’m a game designer and I don’t want to get sued, pretty soon I’m going to ask myself: Can I include a famous location (like Times Square) or a historical building (like the Taj Mahal) in my game? Do I...
read moreCheck out SketchSynth – A student design project at Carnegie Mellon projecting virtual controls into real spaces. With the coming age of augmented reality, where every surface is an interface and Google Glasses are the norm – why should we limit ourselves to interfaces developed by someone else? Only I know what’s truly intuitive for me. Perhaps someday a technology much like this will allow us to build game controllers on the fly on our kitchen table, or set up photoshop just the way we like it on the wall we’re...
read moreThe 9 photos below are all the same ‘couple’ – only the clothes, hairstyles, and accessories have changed. Be it videogames, movies, art or anywhere else – the audience expects characters to have, well, character. The clothes really do make the character, so don’t be afraid to let your imagination run wild. Source: Nacho Rojo‘s “9 Couples”. Nacho Rojo hails from Madrid, spain, and has some great works. Check out the website: www.nachorojo.com.
read moreDavey Jackson of Unity, who we had the pleasure of meeting at GameTech last month, has just posted about the 2012 Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge. Unity projects took home a combined $41,000 in prizes, including yours truly with a second place finish in the Holodeck category. Our entry was TerraViz, a 4D (time and space) visualization and collaboration tool. If you haven’t checked it out, we still have the FVWC entry page up here. Eric did a pretty nice write up of the competition in his blog post. (A word of caution: the download link...
read moreGoogle has announced the sale of Sketchup, the popular 3D modeling program used by millions around the world. Originally developed by @LastSoftware and acquired by Google in 2006, Sketchup has grown to over 30 million users. Sketchup was acquired by Trimble, a California-based maker of positioning software and hardware, including GPS, optics, laser, and more. According to the Google blog, Sketchup will focus on “our core communities: modelers who have been with us from the beginning,” specifically “in the architecture,...
read more
