back to article MIT boffins play BUILDING-SIZED Tetris

This is one of those stories that just makes me grin and giggle (not a simpering, girlish giggle, but a strong, manly giggle). In their latest display of technical hackery, MIT students built a Tetris game that uses an entire building as the game board. Kevin Fogarty has the story with video here, or you can watch it embedded …

COMMENTS

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  1. David Gosnell

    Prior art

    Loads of prior art on this one, has to be said.

    1. Andrew Moore

      Re: Prior art

      I've even seen the Tetris one done before.

  2. Chazmon

    very cool but with all their awesome technology surely they could have used a tripod!

    Im not sure if its cooler than the using lights to play snake which I think was just good communication and a lot of people stood near their light switches.

    1. Steve Evans

      Indeed!

      Will someone please show me the man who invented the phone video record mode and decided people didn't need any basic instructions such as "Try to hold it steady" and "Waving the camera about like a drunken fool will make your viewers want to vomit".

      Even the incredibly obvious "Try to keep the camera pointed at the subject" would have been a start.

  3. Adrian Challinor
    Pint

    BRILLIANT

    OK, some prior art, but this is what students should be doing. Intelligent pranks.

    Unfortunately, during may days at Durham, we just didn't hand held video cameras, so no proof exists of the pranks. .... Fortunately!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Pfft

    How can someone at MIT suck so badly at Tetris?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So they go to all this trouble of setting up this game, and then film it on a shite camera phone? Genius.

    1. skeptical i
      Pint

      Not surprised they didn't use a real camcorder and tripod ...

      ... but am surprised this is the best footage available. Was Captain Staggerpants the only spectator with a cellphone videorecorder?

      <== get your drunk-o-vision on

  6. Dave Wray
    Stop

    Blinkenlights anyone????

    This is so 10 years ago schweeheart it's not even funny....

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. annodomini2

      Re: Blinkenlights anyone????

      17

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris

    3. Christian Berger

      Re: Blinkenlights anyone????

      http://blinkenlights.net/blinkenlights

      And they also had better videos of that event. BTW they deliberately chose not to do colour for artistic effect. The colour project is http://acab.muc.ccc.de/medien

  7. Dave 126 Silver badge
    Happy

    Nintendo theme...

    okay, not quite the same, but here is a Nintendo-inspired effort that obviously took some time and effort:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7RR5V0rmN4o#!

    (the most realistic Goldeneye 'mod' - Ever!)

    Enjoy!

  8. hunttis

    Tetris is easy, go for a SHMUP!

    We did this too, in Tampere, Finland. And we developed a much more action based game ;-)

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgVldsKo_3s

  9. Mark Dennison
    Happy

    de;light - Everyman Playhouse Liverpool

    Our young technicians from the Everyman and Playhouse theatres in Liverpool did a similar project at the end of March. Although they used projectors and an iPad to control things I think it is visually better and has sound! No tetris but there is a game of pong!

    http://www.everymanplayhouse.com/News/DeLight_illuminates_Vauxhall_with_stunning_audio_visual_show/806.aspx

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpAmCvmCuB8&sns=em

  10. Charlie Clark Silver badge

    re. Performance

    Of course, if you wanted to wring the absolute highest level of performance out of it, you’d probably go 10 GbE over copper

    This is a very strange assertion as it seems to be prioritising network data speeds over the physical medium, which given the scale of the game might be considered relevant. It's a fact that radio waves travel through air than electrons along a copper wire: the difference is probably measurable at the higher windows. Assuming lights are either on or off you've got a minimal amount of data to send but if you are worried about data speeds and perhaps latency then you need fibre for this kind of stunt. Don't want windows flickering out of sync.

    A more impressive but significantly more extravagant display:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sS6FbTDDuo

    1. Richard 12 Silver badge
      Happy

      Re: re. Performance

      The data requirements for this are minute -153 x 3 bytes per frame, 459 bytes. 24fps is plenty, so the necessary data rate is less then 90kbps.

      This prank is almost trivially easy to design and can be built quite cheaply.

      It'll cost you a £40 LED parcan or LED strip with driver per window, and for a building this size with openable windows, a drum of Cat5 cable and a £10 USB DMX adapter. (This is less than one DMX universe.)

      Then you just need a suitable version of the game application, and the basic Tetris is pretty trivial.

      The reason it's not done more often is politics - it's hard to get permission to do this kind of thing to office buildings that are big enough for it to be any fun, and unlike projection, you can't tear down fast enough to escape if you try it without permission.

    2. P. Lee
      Joke

      Re: re. Performance

      presumably, 10g over copper at those distances would have been a feat worthy of an MIT student. The resources alone for Cat6A would have stretched them...

      Personally, I'd have gone with fiber. That way you could use a mirror port from the in-house film torrent network to drive the lights directly...

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I stopped watching after 10 seconds due to feeling seasick.

  12. Steve Foster

    Theme...

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMAIqZatptY

  13. OrsonX
    Thumb Up

    Tetris

    Best game ever!

  14. Avalanche

    This news is so 1995...

    It was done in 1995 on the Delft University of Technology, faculty of electrical engineering: http://web.archive.org/web/20080119060815/http://www.etv.tudelft.nl/vereeniging/archief/lustrum/90/english.html

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hmm... I recently stuck a projector in the upper corner of our manufacturing floor, took a photo from the same angle, used the photo to build an inverse transform for the angle / FOV of the projector and deal with occlusions, and...

    ...project the DOOM level one floor tile on the floor.

    It was pretty awesome, honestly. The only problem is that I kept wanting to shoot everybody I saw.

    Did the same thing in my office for grins, except that time I just drew lines on the edges of the furniture and so forth. It's good fun, but even with a wireless keyboard, trying to draw while compensating for the odd angles is enough to make you nearly turn yourself inside out.

    Oh, the other neat thing to do is to project white on a swathe of something, take a photo, invert it, and then project that back the same way with some varying opacity... you can make real colors disappear. Spooky.

    1. Martin Huizing
      Holmes

      Pics...

      ...or it didn't happen!

  16. Mips
    Childcatcher

    Why would anyone..

    ...want to show the word they cannot play Tetris.

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