[Official 2008 Game Design] New Technology Discussions

[Chris_Elston]

Game Pieces:
I only have one suggestion that I can think of that ties the new controller to a practical "real world" situation. Often times industrial application of the new NI controller offer some type of vision interpolation, I.E. vision guided assembles. Meaning if a vision system is bolted on a six-axis industrial robot arm, it takes pictures of pieces or parts and finds features on the part that will change the interpolation of the command to "assemble" the part or piece to a mate piece. In other words, the vision system on NI should have the abilities to sent x, y, and theta features of a part that can be feed into a coordinate cartesian system on our robots that will alter it's game play or give the robots the ability of detail "sight". Of course this is similar to the vision light, but now you have a greater resolution offered by the NI vision hardware.

Game Sensors:
I'd like to see some implementation of RFID. Again defaulting back to industrial applications, most all high speed packout conveyor systems or warehouse automation pallet systems now have some sort of RFID tracking system. "radio" pucks if you will that can be programmed or just read only. It would interesting to have RFID pucks on game pieces that can be re-programmed by alliance robots. I don't know what the application of the game element would be but say you had a game piece worth 10 points and a robot picks up the game pieces reprograms the RFID tag on the game pieces to change it's point value or the way the game pieces is used. 10 game pieces on the field, and they have to be programmed for "BLUE" or “RED” and everyone scores a common goal, the goal has an RFID reader, that will read what the RFID tags are programmed. If you programmed it correctly to your alliance color you get the score.