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Comments: 225 +-   Playing a First-Person Shooter Using Real Guns on Friday August 07, @05:22AM

Posted by Soulskill on Friday August 07, @05:22AM
from the and-shovels dept.
fps
entertainment
games
Blake writes "A group called Waterloo Labs rigged up a few accelerometers to a large wall and projected a first-person shooter onto it. Using some math, they can triangulate the position of impacts on the wall, so naturally they found someone with a gun and bought a large case of ammunition. Even cooler, this group usually posts a 'how we did it' video a few weeks after a project's debut, including source code."
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  • by MichaelSmith (789609) on Friday August 07, @05:24AM (#28984121) Homepage Journal
    shoot back?
  • Guns? (Score:5, Funny)

    by acehole (174372) on Friday August 07, @05:25AM (#28984129) Homepage

    Real guns or not, iddqd and idkfa is all i need baby.

  • Source code (Score:3, Funny)

    by xerent_sweden (1010825) on Friday August 07, @05:35AM (#28984183)
    I sure hope it's bullet proof!
  • Sadly... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Pvt_Ryan (1102363) on Friday August 07, @05:38AM (#28984199)
    This will only encourage those idiots that say games are simulators for killing people.

    On a brighter note it was still a pretty cool idea.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Eh... no one pays attention to those people anyway. They have a right to an opinion just as much as I have the right to own my gaming systems as well as a real firearm. If they REALLY don't like it they can always start one of those online petitions (because from what I hear they are SO influential... *sarcasm*).
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          Yes, because we all know that Jack Thompson was a noted liberal! Oh and that channel 'Fox News' that would continually have him on as a 'video game violence' expert is also well-known as being the most liberal channel on all of US cable!
    • Re:Sadly... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Yvanhoe (564877) on Friday August 07, @06:45AM (#28984531) Journal
      And they demonstrated it works fine while hitting the damn wall WITH A SHOVEL ! That was the greatest part. Forget the Wii, I want the next zombie game to be played with a wall of concrete and a shovel.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      Actually, this will make the games more like simulators for killing people. Hell, I played a (crappy) sniper game for an hour and then walked out of the arcade onto a catwalk above a food court... and couldn't help picking out targets. Mentally, of course.

      In this case anyone playing will learn that you can't reload just by firing off-screen, and that real guns are loud, kick, eject shells... and they'll get used to it. I'm not saying that it will turn an ordinary person into a killer, but there is an argume

  • by oodaloop (1229816) on Friday August 07, @05:46AM (#28984231) Homepage
    Shooting at a close wall representing a target far away, and shooting at a target far away are not the same thing, ballistically speaking. Depending on the angle, a shot taken might have traveled past the intended target and missed if it were for real. Also, a closer shot means you don't have to adjust for windage or elevation, or at least as much. In Marine Corps boot camp, we fired at man-sized targets at 500 yards outdoors, which is not easy. I knew someone in the air force who said they did the same thing - little targets much closer indoors. Not surprisingly, he thought it was easy.

    All that being said, this sounds pretty cool. It might liven up range time if nothing else.
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      True story: in boot camp, on pre-qual day I was platoon high shot, with a 242/250. On qual day, I fell to a 237 (choked under pressure) and someone else stole high shot.

      Later, in the fleet, we were going to be tested, right? So, the knuckleheads in the butts thought they'd be funny, and they gave me crap windage data, flagging me as a total miss on half my shots. I KNEW I was hitting, so I blew it off, even though it meant I couldn't log any windage data for qual day.

      So that night, this wise ass in my pla

      • by KDR_11k (778916) on Friday August 07, @08:51AM (#28985455)

        Did you know the army gets tested by shooting at sheet metal signs 300 yards away? If the sign goes "Ding" they get marked down as a hit.

        That's nothing, the Bundeswehr practices by shouting "bang" and politely asking the target to fall over.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        :D

        A few years ago I was at Markham Park in S. Florida introducing a friend to shooting. Though I have the technique and terminology down pat, I'm not really a good shot (lack of practice mainly). I can hit an 8" target pretty consistently at 125 yds though (yes, is pretty pathetic but I'm damned proud of it).

        So I was standing there explaining how to load, how to unload, what to do when the "all clear" blows, etc.. My friend was picking it up. In the next lane was a guy dressed in full camo. He had some

        • by Irish_Samurai (224931) on Friday August 07, @09:27AM (#28985789)

          The guy in camo is what competition shooters call a mall ninja. He can't shoot, was never in the military, but wants to be a bad ass. That's why he had a big elaborate gun, he bought his way in. You see them at competitions wearing shirts that say "Blackwater" and hats that say "C.I.A".

          Bunch of damn tools.

            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              not really. suppressors are perfectly legal in some states, I know several people who have them. it's pretty easy, you pay for the $200 stamp from BATFE and turn in your paperwork and wait a few months, no big deal.
    • by Yvanhoe (564877) on Friday August 07, @06:26AM (#28984437) Journal
      Ssshhhh, any FPS player knows that bullets travel in infinite straight line at the speed of light.
      • by GNUThomson (806789) on Friday August 07, @07:02AM (#28984613) Homepage

        Ssshhhh, any FPS player knows that bullets travel in infinite straight line at the speed of light.

        Unless you use lasers in space shooters. Contrary to a popular disinformation spread frivolously by those lousy physicists, lasers are actually very slow. With a proper engine upgrades, you can outmanuver them easily.

    • Makes sense, but what about zombie-sized targets?

      • bullshit.
        all soldiers (and yes, airforce pilots are also soldiers) undergo the same basic training so if the pilot cannot fly he still can shoot at the enemy or defend himself after ejecting.

        this is not a fucking team fortress, real humans are universal.

        • A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

          -Robert Heinlein

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            And yet Heinlein's specialty was writing.
            • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

              by Anonymous Coward

              And yet Heinlein's specialty was writing.

              From various biographical material, it seems that Heinlein demonstrated all those abilities except "plan an invasion" (he was in the Navy between wars) and "die gallantly" (he died of old age).

              Edward.E. Smith probably could have pulled all those things off as well (in his case, probably including "plan an invasion")...

            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              Before Heinlein was a writer, he was an officer in the Navy, having been through the Naval Academy. Which suggests he probably could take and give orders, co-operate, act alone, conn a ship, fight efficiently, and plan an invasion.

              I'd guess that he could also change a diaper, pitch manure, butcher a hog, build a wall, set a bone, balance accounts, and comfort the dying, all of those being skills someone of his background would have picked up one way or another.

              The only building I know of he "designed" was

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          Are you kidding me? Chairforce... erm Air Force pilots do not under go the same kind of small arms training that a Marine does. Every branch of service has their own basic training courses. When I went through basic we spent most of one whole day learning about the M16A2 and got to shoot about 100 rounds at the range. The targets were all at simulated range. Meaning that it's a big sheet of paper with targets of varying size and shape.

          I knew a girl who enlisted in the army to drive trucks and even she had a

          • "in the Core"?

            As in, in the "Marine Core"?

            Wow. I guess those Air Force pukes just aren't hardcorps enough for that kind of training.

      • Not necessarily. Who does security of the perimeter around the air base? Who would defend the air base in war time conditions when the marines and army are out there holding the line?

        Knowing how to defend your colleagues, the installation and yourself is not a waste of money. It's not like they are in a low risk job and will never be deployed overseas.

        Of course if their training is almost meaningless and treated as a joke by those doing said training. Then I agree with you.

      • That was years ago, so I guess. But today there are many airmen serving on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, the AF has increased combat training in boot camp because of that.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        Not everyone in the Air Force is a pilot or weapons officer. I know Air Force security personnel who had to "knock doors" in Iraq.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        I guess you've never heard of pilots landing in enemy territory?
  • Just saw that last night in one of their patented "off the wall tangent" clips. They were playing paintball in the house and realized they didn't have paintball guns, so they decided to use real guns.

  • System (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TerraGreyling (1605413) on Friday August 07, @05:56AM (#28984285)
    When I was in the ARMY we trained on a video game system that had normal ar15's connected to gas lines that would simulate a round being fired. The whole wall in the trailer would be the target zone, close and far distances. This would also have wind, barometric pressure, and temperature so you know how to adjust your fire. And this was back in 2003, so how exactly is this new? This system would also use live ammo, but the ballistics gel isn't a fine surface to project onto.
    • Live ammo is actually irrelevant part of the project.
      It would have been far cooler if they played the fact that ANYTHING thrown at the wall registers as the accelerometers they've placed in the wall measure impact of practically anything.

      As can be seen at the end of the video - it is far more fun to hit zombies with shovels than to shoot them.

  • I've tried. They just stop showing the pretty pictures.

  • Jack Thompson! Sigh. Hopefully he or someone else like him does not see this.
  • by davidbrit2 (775091) on Friday August 07, @06:12AM (#28984367) Homepage

    Granted, their version used something like Airsoft pellets rather than live rounds, but the idea was the same. Kind of a fun game, if you ignore the pellets that keep bouncing off the target and hitting you in the face...

    Some info on the game. [arcade-history.com]

  • by C_Jax (1331301) on Friday August 07, @06:13AM (#28984375)
    Finally, a chance to level playing field against all the smack-talking 13 yr olds playing COD on Xbox live, Say hello to my M203
  • I preferred the bit at the end where they start dispatching the bad guys with shovels.

    Now I want to play Left 4 Dead with a shovel!

  • by El Cabri (13930) on Friday August 07, @08:47AM (#28985391) Journal

    Reminds me of basic training in the army in the 70s. A projection screen is rolled around two rotating vertical cylinders, one on the left and one on the right, therefore forming a "double layer screen". A movie is projected on the front of the screen and light also shines from the back. The trainee shoots at the screen, where the movie representing the advancing enemy is running. At the "bang", the movie projector freezes the frame and we can see light shining from the back through the two aligned holes in the front and back screens. The instructor can determine whether it's a hit and then the cylinders are rotated so that the front and back holes are not aligned anymore and the impact disappears, and the exercise continues.

  • by IndustrialComplex (975015) on Friday August 07, @11:31AM (#28987263)

    Just browsing the summary, but this sounds very similar to some of the archery systems they have set up at hunting stores.

    A woodland scene is projected on a screen, and you actually fired your own arrows (points replaced with a blunted tip) onto the screen. It would mark where you hit, and then 'score' your performance based on where it felt the best position to shoot the animal was.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      Where I live there's an indoor shooting range with a projection system. I remember one afternoon in the late nineties when a couple of us went and had a huge amount of good, clean, violent fun with the street battle scene from the movie Heat [imdb.com] - must have been a year or two after it was released.

      After that I've often wondered how one could go about creating a 3-D projection system for total immersion. One of the walls I ran into was the problem of running onto a wall :-) And then soon after, paintball took o

    • Re:Been done... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by lewko (195646) on Friday August 07, @08:51AM (#28985449) Homepage

      Yes, but it hasn't been done for about five bucks worth of parts.

      Those simulation systems are aimed at government or military budgets, and are well outside the reach of hobbyists, or small security and law-enforcement agencies.

      Admittedly Quake and Doom aren't useful training tools for real world combatives, but it's a start...

    • But what about Rocket Jumps? I think right now you can only do one. After that things don't work so well....
When I left you, I was but the pupil. Now, I am the master. - Darth Vader