It will drive you out of your mind: UCI develops rolling video game

UCI post-doctoral researcher Garnet Hertz gets ready to rev up OutRun, his rolling video game. (Lauren Biron / For OCLNN)

IRVINE — It is entirely possible that, four or five months from now, Garnet Hertz will pull up next to you at a stop sign on Balboa Island.

You can glance over and check out his ride, then watch as he zooms away at top speed: 15 miles per hour. It may not seem particularly swift, but Hertz won’t be able to see the actual road ahead of him. Instead, he will be looking at computer rendering of the world. Hertz will be driving a video game down the street.

UC Irvine post-doctoral researcher Hertz, research director Walt Scacchi and a team of computer scientists at the university’s Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds are making a driving simulator that actually drives. Essentially, they’re combining a golf cart and gutted Deluxe OutRun game console.

OutRun, a 1986 Sega arcade game, allowed gamers to race in a faux-1984 Ferrari Testarossa that moved in conjunction with action on the screen

“People want to have an immersive driving experience,” Hertz said.

He’s taking it one step further.

“In terms of getting a video game cabinet to roll down the street, I haven’t seen it before,” Scacchi said, who has overseen the project.

As OutRun moves, a camera / laptop setup picks up on converging lines to determine the direction of the road. The driver then sees the real world rendered as an 8-bit asphalt highway lined with palm trees — the same style as the original OutRun game. Hertz proposed the project after a December 2008 visit to an arcade in Santa Cruz.

It simultaneously scales reality down to a game, while the gaming mechanism is scaled up to actual driving.

“It’s half fake, but half real,” Hertz said, who played OutRun as a child.

A more recent inspiration were stories of drivers relying solely on GPS navigation and winding up in rivers — the OutRun team has also developed an 8-bit rendering of maps based on Google Earth and GPS technology. This could be used, Hertz says, as a potential GPS “skin” to make getting directions from your Garmin or TomTom seem more like a video game.

Developers hope to release a “lite” version of the game for the Apple iPhone, allowing people to view the world as a video game as they walk, bike, or drive around town. The technology could also be expanded to find objects, such as buildings, in addition to the road.

Hertz notes that the fun would be “to see how the system tries to interpret and render the real world.” This rendering could be the relatively simple 8-bit type from OutRun or have more complex, 3-D graphics such as those found in games like Doom.

Hertz plans to drive the OutRun contraption at an October show held at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, but there is much yet to do. He must center the steering column and pedals, narrow the golf cart body to resemble the one-person gaming console, construct the fiberglass body, and attach the seat and hollowed cabinet.

While OutRun might someday make for an interesting amusement park ride, consumers won’t be driving these video games down the road any time soon. Hertz embraces the inherent danger associated with relying completely on technology.

The original 1986 game.

“No matter how good computer vision is, it is never going to be completely perfect. Computer vision is never as good, as complete, as the real world,” he said.

An underlying goal of the project is to highlight the discrepancy between games and reality, he said.

“It’s not really meant to be safe at this point,” Hertz acknowledges. “It’s meant to be interesting.”

Scacchi and Hertz cite concept car designer Ed “Big Daddy” Roth as an influence. Roth worked apart from the car industry, challenging the way cars could be interpreted. Similarly, said Scacchi, the goal of OutRun and the Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds is not to “just align ourselves to the game industry, but expand and see how virtual worlds and new media work in the 21st century.”

“Games have the potential to go everywhere,” he said.

Other projects at the Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds include DinoQuest, the online game which accompanies a Discovery Science Center Exhibit, and a parody of World of Warcraft called WTF?!

See more photos here on  Hertz’s  OutRun Flickr account.

Tags: autos, cars, computer games, Irvine, uci, video games

This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Business, Entertainment, Local News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.