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MIT Hack Turns the Green Building Into a Giant Game of Tetris
An anonymous reader writes "MIT hackers have turned the Green Building, the tallest building in Cambridge, into a giant, playable, full color game of Tetris. According to the IHTFP Hack Gallery, "MIT hackers have long considered 'Tetris on the Green Building' to be the Holy Grail of hacks.""
That is all.
I don't know how many times this has been done, but in 2007 ago electrical engineers here in Oulu, Finland made the same thing, although with regular 7-storyish building. Here's the Finnish news.
Check out the http://www.piwo.pwr.wroc.pl/?lang=en - it is the full-color universal display fired every year at Wroclaw University of Technology campus (Poland). Also on tour in 2012
Maybe Woz will show up to play this one too.
Wasn't this already done like 4 years ago? Okay, this time they managed to link up tetris, not just controlled animation (IIRC), but still...
I'll give you the link I gave on some other site that hosted that: They still have a lot of functionality missing to get to the level of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGU8dlvOPUY
It's just another "crazy thing" that somebody did that really just takes time and planning.
Yeah, just like the first moon landing. Ho hum.
>> Yeah, just like the first moon landing. Ho hum.
More like the sixth moon landing.
Students of Delft University of Technolgy did this in 1995, at the 22-story EWI building. The lamps could also be controlled over internet.
I found a photo here:
http://retro.nrc.nl/W2/Nieuws/1998/02/27/Med/06.html
I just watched the video... I didn't know it was possible to be so bad at Tetris.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IAIPUGO1iko
Great ad hominem about a school you clearly know little about. Hacks like these are just for fun - there is plenty of "real engineering" going on here at MIT. Oh, and MIT is *the* core east-coast school for Apple, I have multiple friends that are headed there this summer.
- Current MIT student
...but they really suck at playing Tetris.
watch out, The Tetris Company LLC is going to sue them for trademark violation...
As chance would have it, I was at MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club open house last night (Saturday 21 April 2012). TMRC, for those who don't know, is a well-spring of hacker subculture. Their model railroad layout is fully automated using homebrew control and interface hardware, and their own Linux-based software. Formerly it ran on adapted telephone switch relays.
Anyhow, their layout includes a scale model of the Green building, and yes, you can play Tetris on it. Granted, it's not as impressive as doing it on the *real* building, but there's something to be said for prior art. ;)
I'll see if I can't get a video of it uploaded.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
No, this is Cambridge. Boston sucks for entirely different reasons.
Vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkIRWoo9qrU
Table-ized A.I.
if it had been Boston the whole city wold have closed in fear - IT'S got flashy lights OMG its a bomb Terrorists!!!
I see installed lighting with permission probably , not hacking ?
The fellow should have practiced the game before going online in front of the whole city though!
I think the fun is in programming it rather than playing it now. It's a great way to familiarise yourself with a new language or to test out a novel display. It's a small enough project that a decent programmer can knock out their own version over a few days - maybe quicker - and you've got something that just about everyone recognises and can appreciate. The specs for the basic game are online and easy enough to understand.
Once you've got past "Hello, world" and figured out the basics of a new language's flow control, data types and structures, it's a good next step.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
"Eureka", Rotterdam, 1991.
Awesome video.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Ahh, the EWI building hack (at the time it was still the EE faculty, I believe?). Where I whiled away many an hour playing X-pilot, on the department's Sun workstations. And remembering when amazingly we got Unix going on a PC thanks to the hard work of a guy called Linus. Good times...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Is there a less shitty set of pictures? Opening the slideshow gives you access to a series of thumbnails and a bunch of frivolous crap all around it.
We toured the MIT campus a few weeks ago during a trip to Boston to visit several schools that my daughters might attend. (My daughter that applied there didn't get admitted though.) Anyway we saw the Green building and the tour guides (some junior and senior students) told us the history of the hacks. (My favorite hack is still the smoot marks on the bridge). They mentioned that the lights in that building are ALWAYS on and if there was a time at night that the building was completely dark it would be a sign of the coming of the end of the world. So I suggested that a good hack would be to black out the building on "Mayan Long count Calendar rollover day". I was told that maybe I should not have said that! (Future hack?)
People still play that boring game?
I thank a freeware/shareware version of it (on an 8086 cpu) for my first introduction to RSI. I learned my lesson and swapped computer games out for *nix instead.
Fritterware: lets you fritter your life away.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Students of the Wrocaw University of Technology turned one of the dormitory buildings into a color display. The event is called P.I.W.O. (Potezny Indeksowany Wyswietlacz Oknowy - literally Giant Indexed Display made of Windows, but the acronym means BEER) and was held for several years during the juwenalia. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGU8dlvOPUY
Though my other, much tamer art project was removed by a distraught faculty member even though I had all the permits. Putting it up a second time (with the help of a facility person and friends) before class was over was a challenge!
All hail the (now defunct) Fish Bowl!
8-PP