We’ve seen our fair share of pico projectors that work decently enough for what they were created to do, but somehow they never really took off and entered mainstream consciousness since it never had a “killer app” or a “killer purpose” apart from being a novelty. Hopefully this handheld projector system that was developed by Karl Willis and colleagues at the Disney Research labs in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania will fare differently. Their multiplayer gaming system is known as SideBySide, where it relies on handheld projectors to get your game on – and on nearly any nearby surface to boot.
SideBySide relies on modified pico projectors that are capable of emitting infrared and visible light, where the former will be able to use markers to track the interactions between players, projecting them on top of the game’s graphics. Currently, this is limited to just green since the other two colours of the red, green and blue projector are replaced by infrared. It is like the early 1980s all over again!
Some of the games comprise of competitive boxing and cooperative brick destruction – a multi-player Arkanoid, so to speak. I guess it will take some more time before games on SideBySide will be engrossing enough for the mass market to pick it up.
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