Carcade Transforms Car Window Landscape into Arcade Game

Screw green engines and automated driving. This is what I really want: Carcade, a system that captures the window landscape in real time to create gaming stages on the fly. Created by Andreas Nicolas Fischer, Martin Kim Luge and Korbinian Polk–three students at Berlin University of the Arts–Carcade opens the possibility to never-ending gaming, with the potential to shut up kids doing long-distance car travel all over the world. Permanently. And only for that, my friends, these guys should get the Peace Nobel Prize.

Their demo is quite good. They used a webcam connected to a laptop. The program then analyses the video, detecting the outline of the landscape and using it as the terrain for a shoot-em-up kind of game, in which you manoeuvre a spaceship to obtain stars. Best of all, they even implemented a two-player game mode.

It’s a lot simpler than the aeroplane racing simulator we covered yesterday, but my guess is that this could be made even more sophisticated by using laser meters to actually detect depth of the landscape and make more complex, multidimensional game stages. [Carcade via OhGizmo!]