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Verizon Creates Minecraft Mod To Let Players Video Chat On an In-Game Smartphone

Posted by samzenpus on from the joining-the-club dept.

Deathspawner writes: There's never a lack of stuff to be impressed by in Minecraft, but rarely does that impressive stuff involve a corporation. Recently, Verizon teamed up with some prolific Minecraft streamers to design a mod that takes interactivity to a new level. After building an in-game smartphone and cellular tower, the gamer is not only able to browse the Web on the device, but also video call, all in a humorously low resolution. Verizon has created a GitHub page to explain how the magic is done.

1 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. Defending my lawn! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I realize that this probably makes me a horrible person, whose shriveled soul is incapable of joy, and who was obviously never a child; but exactly how much external infrastructure are you allowed to use before "In Minecraft!" is no longer true in any meaningful sense?

    The various redstone logic arrangements, while obviously perverse and inefficient, do implement various computational widgets "in minecraft". As best I can tell from reading the project documentation, this exercise uses an external helper program to do all the heavy lifting(digesting web pages and incoming video into an array of textures to be applied to blocks, implementing the MMS for the 'selfie' feature), with the only involvement from Minecraft being a large rectangular array of blocks that the external helper program re-textures to produce something similar to a framebuffer(it's not quite the same, since each block displays a multi-pixel texture, rather than acting as a single pixel).

    You certainly couldn't do this with just any game(at least not as easily; if you have access to the game's memory, you can probably scribble on its textures; but doing that without bringing the whole mess down in a screaming heap is easier said than done); but that arguably makes it less interesting: Minecraft's support for external modification of server state is relatively robust, so there really isn't much that you can't do, if you are willing to do most of the work in an external program and then use Minecraft as a needlessly perverse frontend. Am I just a joyless asshole? A generation too old for this 'minecraft' stuff? Insufficiently impressed by a Verizion marketing exercise?