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Project an Interactive Game on Your Floor or Wall (Video)
Lumo is an interactive projector. You can use it to bore people with PowerPoint slides or you can use it as a game machine. It has a built-in (low res) camera that can detect a kick (as shown at the beginning of the video) and make a (virtual) ball move as a result of that action. 'But,' you ask, 'do they have an Indiegogo campaign?' Not yet. It launches on March 23.
The Lumo projector was originally designed for commercial use at children's museums and as a trade show attention-getter -- at $10,000 a pop. The consumer version is expected to cost less than $500, according to Lumo CEO (and Slashdot interviewee) Meghan Athavale. And while she doesn't talk much about it in the interview, if you already have a computer, a projector, and a Kinect or webcam, you can buy the a stripped-down version of the company's 'interactive-floor-wall projection' software for $39, plus games or customizable game templates.
The Lumo projector was originally designed for commercial use at children's museums and as a trade show attention-getter -- at $10,000 a pop. The consumer version is expected to cost less than $500, according to Lumo CEO (and Slashdot interviewee) Meghan Athavale. And while she doesn't talk much about it in the interview, if you already have a computer, a projector, and a Kinect or webcam, you can buy the a stripped-down version of the company's 'interactive-floor-wall projection' software for $39, plus games or customizable game templates.
Your assumption is wrong. Timothy made the video. I just edited and posted it. And he chooses video subjects based on what he finds interesting and doesn't get paid to make them.
FYI, if you ever see a piece of sponsored content on Slashdot, it will say 'sponsored content' or 'advertisement' or will otherwise be easily distinguishable from editorial content.
Why should everything on Slashdot be negative? Being positive (or at least neutral) about something doesn't necessarily mean someone got paid.
I wouldn't pay $500 for this thing any more than you would. If anything, I might look at their $39 (proprietary) software and try it with a computer and webcam. And probably not even that.
That's a lot of questions! I'll try to answer them here but feel free to email me at meg@lumoplay.com if you want more info. For some reason the site's not letting me log in.
"The statement that the projector "plays" motion reactive games seems misleading, but for a typical consumer audience I can understand the simplification."
Yeah, I'm not sure how to describe this. There's an android processor inside and we built a special game player that reads motion data to create motion reactive games kids can play by kicking projected stuff, junping on hotspot areas etc... we have a few games that track toys also - that stuff still needs work but it's cool so far.
"Meg, out of curiousity, other than not needing a stand-alone computer and video input, how does your product differ from Mandala, which was introduced by Very Vivid back in 1988, for the Amiga? It could use any video source (usually a projector aimed at a wall, but most any video output device would suffice) along with a video input from a camera to allow interacting with on screen content, and was quite popular with museums and other entities for setting up interactive displays in the early '90s, prior to Commodore's demise."
Mostly this is about clever game design. The experiences we make are meant to intuitively encourage motion and are all designed for the floor. Kids play by moving on top of a projected area and they look at each other instead of a screen. The game environment becomes part of the real world. The installations in commercial environments and museums were our inspiration when we started.
"Do you have anyone working on your team that has ever dealt with a Mandala, or even old enough to remember one?"
I'm old enough (barely). My background is in cell animation, and I graduated from college in '97. My first computer animation tool was a toaster. I didn't actually build my own system until 2008. The first one used a logitech USB camera.
"At a hardware engineering level, has more been done than reducing part count, in effect? The Mandala was purely 2D, for example, having only the ability to determine motion on an X/Y basis parallel to the video display. Have you added another axis since you are supporting the 360 Kinect, perhaps, or could you consider that for your next generation?"
Po-motion uses another axis for some games to do depth sensing. But Lumo is super simple - mostly because it had to be affordable. So the camera system is crazy simple and efficient. It doesn't support the Kinect. It's all designed around a simple IR light sensor (not a laser, just a wash without point cloud data and a low pixel optic camera with an RGB filter).
"Additionally, would the use of 1080p or higher resolution video cameras make supporting resolutions higher than 1024x768 feasible in the future, or give more precise movement tracking? What is the granularity of movement tracking currently?"
I don't know if I can do this justice in a comment. The short answer is that the higher the resolution of the camera feed, the higher the processing required to avoid latency. So yes, we could detect more finite details and movement, but the tradeoff would be a bigger processor and a higher cost for the unit. That's one reason we design all the games for large motor movements. The other is because there are already systems like touchscreens that let you control things with tiny, detailed motion. We want kids to move more.
"On a software level, how easy is it describe interactive objects and the interactions that can be performed along with the results? What would it take for Minecraft, for example, to be ported so that no controller was needed, just a lot of movement (my nephew REALLY needs some exercise!)?"
This is my FAVORITE question. I love Minecraft too (I even have PE so I can play it when I travel). I've spent a ton of time trying to figure out a way to integrate creations from the Minecraft universe into Lumo. It's tough - things like click and drag won't work yet. We are working on presence detec