December 2008 – Bilal Ghalib

Goodbye 2008

What? So soon? We’re nearing the double digits for the 21st century. I’m nearing my own quarter of a century, I feel like I squandered it. I missed dozens of opportunities to attain mastery at different topics. But is mastery all that great? I’d like to know what you think is important? Because I can’t isolate it, every time I think I have the earth quakes beneith my feet and I wind up in another country of thought. So the closest thing to science in this regard is to take a poll, pshh psychology… Anyhow, what do you think is important?

-reading Outliers by Malcom Gladwell.

Bilal Ghalib

Controlling video games with your hands

Portfolio, Projects

howfly Last semester for my 3D game programming class I was thinking about what I could do to continue my investigation on alternative forms of game play and I was thinking that it would be really neat to interact with a flying game naturally. To this day I stick my hands out the windows and feel the power of the wind rushing by. I remember pretending my hand was an airplane as my dad would drive down the highway.

Using that intuitive motion for control my partner Vamsi and I designed a video game that uses a 3 axis accelerometer and a serial interface to communicate to the Torque engine and made a game you controlled by moving your hand. All the code is found here. The Design Document describing the game play is found here.

Face Controlled Game – Escape From Tibet

game, Portfolio, Programming, Projects

escapefrom

Escape From Tibet (EFROT) was a 2d game designed with XNA that utilized an interesting method for control. The assignment was to create a 2D game, and I thought back to some of my early memories of fun games that I used to play in two dimensions. One that I remembered was Ski Free! Man, what a great game! While trying to reformulate this old classic for our new machines I was considering that human computer interaction has been the same for decades, I thought we would try to manipulate our game differently. I thought of a way we could use the webcams that are on all of our computers to make this game more accessible to all, so you move your player by simply moving your head to one side or another, and by doing some face detection and determining which quadrant of the screen you were in we could then move the skier as he travels down the slope. My partner Aaron Curly made a wrapper for openCV so we could use it in C# and helped me write this fun game. All the code we wrote is available here.