I think this is the first time I've been genuinely impressed with a Chrome Experiment.
They've recreated Super Monkey Ball entirely inside the browser, with the option of using a device as a controller. Certainly an interesting concept for multiplayer gaming, imagine Chrome running on a Smart TV(Chrome OS TV?) and a couple of friends can hook up their mobiles as controllers, and play some casual party style games like Monkey Ball or Mario Party.
Yes, that's what I've been dreaming of ever since I first saw a smartphone. I'm very surprised it isn't as obvious to other people how cool it would be. The smartphone is the perfect game controller.
For example a strategy game played on a TV together with friends where each phone is not only used for controls but also showing (private) game data and more!
No, it's not a perfect game controller. A convenient one maybe, but not perfect, not even good.
It has the same problem that you would encounter if you tried touch typing on an iphone keyboard. It has no physical feedback so you have no idea if you are pressing the correct button (or any button at all) on the phone screen unless you are actually looking at it. Which means you won't be able to look at the TV screen at the same time.
I think it would suck compared to a traditional game controller, if it were to be used as a traditional game controller. As say, a motion device, it could probably work just as well as any other controller.
But there are of course ways to improve the experience.
For example, you could show the visual feedback on the TV itself, so you can see where you are touching relative to the display. Similar to how the Kinect shows where it thinks your hands are.
I agree. It is perfect for games which rely on the idea of positioning your hands. It's really just a tool for the idea of moving the world with your hands. In this case it's perfect.
Yeah, you're right. I was thinking in terms of a traditional console game controller. A phone has other features that could be used like speakers, microphone, accelerometer, etc. As a motion device it would be great, definitely.
When my iPhone 3G's screen broke, the bottom part of the LCD broke--just enough to cover the keyboard. I was abroad, so for the month until I got home, I learned to touch type on my iPhone.
Personally I hate the PS3 controller as it's too small, I much prefer the xBox 360 controller and especially if it has the keyboard attached to it.
Also, on the iPhone I dislike 99% of the games that use a virtual joystick on the screen, I just can't get on with them.
But for touch interface games, what the parent post says is a joy I look forward to experiencing: A game with discreet information on the hand-held device.
A touch screen certainly isn't for 60fps twitch-gaming in my opinion.
> But for touch interface games, what the parent post says is a joy I look forward to experiencing: A game with discreet information on the hand-held device.
This is kinda different in that the mobile device doesn't need a custom app on it to act as the controller (as in your Brass Monkey example), but can act as the controller directly within the browser. No extra installations, just hit up the website and go.
I'm the CTO at Brass Monkey. We definitely experimented with this approach of using a webpage and websockets to communicate, it is nice that it doesn't require installing an app but it communicates via relaying messages out to the internet and back and so generally has latency in the 100ms+ (<10FPS) range and usually worse. See early video I made at a previous Company using HTML5 for controllers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE8-TntjYB4
With Brass Monkey we decided to instead make a single master controller app that used a trick we discovered to communicate over LAN between your phone and PC, this way it's blazingly fast. Can be more like 10-20ms (100-50FPS) instead and more consistent.
You only have to install it only once and then you can play any Brass Monkey experience seamlessly, including auto-pairing tech that detects other instances of Brass Monkey enabled web pages on your network.
Note: There are still major advantages to the web based approach such as bypassing Apple's approval process. It's hard to have controller side code executed unless you bake into your app as Apple doesn't allow dynamically loading code into native apps. But we decided to go responsiveness for our initial focus and are trying to figure out how to bring in some of the other benefits the web page as controller approach takes.
Would love some feedback on our App if you are games, orSDK if any of you are Javascript, Flash, and/or Unity developers.
> a trick we discovered to communicate over LAN between your phone and PC
Wow! Could you please tell a little more about the trick? How does a LAN connection between your web app in the browser and your iPhone app work? Do you create a locally accessible web server from your iPhone app?
YOu need to take a second to think about what Google is doing here. Again, Google is being clever about getting data from you. Take a moment and ask yourself why they're doing this...
Google want to connect your browser information with your phone information. And they're doing a good job.
The reason this is so impressive is that it brings together three technologies that people aren't used to even seeing one good implementation of yet:
* HTML5 accelerometer support
* Sync between mobile/desktop using websockets
* Web page slicing based (by the look of it) on DOM and image processing
…and of course this is in a nice responsive WebGL-rendered package, which people are getting more used to thanks to the http://www.chromeexperiments.com/ project.
Well, good is bit of a stretch. On first try I got disconnected during loading the level. On the second the level loaded but accelerometer does not work, only the buttons do. Also the screen on the phone (Galaxy Nexus) is upside down.
The reason I am impressed is the game is playable even though the control loop runs through a telephone company, Google's servers in god-knows-where, and back to my PC.
The connect doesn't work for me. I tried using the TabSync method and by typing the code manually. It just keep saying "please enter the 6-digit code".
Does this try to do a direct connection? In my network, that probably wouldn't work because of our firewall. Or it might if the port it listens on is high enough.
No, it does not. It appears to be going back through googles systems as the in between. I was able to play it and I know for certain my pc and tablet have no direct connectivity
It depends on your video card and drivers whether WebGL will be automatically enabled / supported. I had to go to chrome://flags and enable the
Override software rendering list Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, Android
Overrides the built-in software rendering list and enables GPU-acceleration on unsupported system configurations.
They create those demos to attract users to their browser - kind of defeats the purpose if you can run it using any browser. I actually downloaded mobile chrome on to run this - I usually run Firefox.
I clicked through all their fine print links and the demo ran OK on Firefox nightly using the desktop only option. Admittedly that cuts out a good portion of the demo.
If your purpose is to attract users rather than advance the web, sure.
But they _claim_ that the purpose of these demos is to advance the web.
That's not to mention that claims like "only works in Chrome" when in fact it works elsewhere happen to be lies. I guess no one worries about that sort of thing nowadays...
Couldn't agree more. Instead of promoting cross-browser web standards in a cooperative manner, they're pretending they couldn't support other browsers in a sad attempt to win more users. Not going to happen.
I would love to see some apps better integrated - basic stuff like calendar and todo (BTW check out http://drive.google.com/keep - it's a rival to Evernote)
That was solved and properly done tens of years ago on the palm. Why can't I have something at least as good right into the browser, synced with my google account??
(Edit: not the wrong place since you already do your mail with a browser... and keep your contacts... and your todos... just remove the middleman, the website, and put everything in the browser. My guess is end users might love that)
Okay so before I even got to the actual experiment I was impressed that the music on the page only plays while you are currently viewing the page, so if you are on another tab the music stops! I want to know how to just do that!
I haven't looked at the source code but according to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/Using_the_Page_..., you can simply register a onblur / onfocus event handler on the window object (this doesn't use the recent Page Visibility API, it's been possible for a long time)
123 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadThey've recreated Super Monkey Ball entirely inside the browser, with the option of using a device as a controller. Certainly an interesting concept for multiplayer gaming, imagine Chrome running on a Smart TV(Chrome OS TV?) and a couple of friends can hook up their mobiles as controllers, and play some casual party style games like Monkey Ball or Mario Party.
For example a strategy game played on a TV together with friends where each phone is not only used for controls but also showing (private) game data and more!
It has the same problem that you would encounter if you tried touch typing on an iphone keyboard. It has no physical feedback so you have no idea if you are pressing the correct button (or any button at all) on the phone screen unless you are actually looking at it. Which means you won't be able to look at the TV screen at the same time.
But there are of course ways to improve the experience.
For example, you could show the visual feedback on the TV itself, so you can see where you are touching relative to the display. Similar to how the Kinect shows where it thinks your hands are.
Personally I hate the PS3 controller as it's too small, I much prefer the xBox 360 controller and especially if it has the keyboard attached to it.
Also, on the iPhone I dislike 99% of the games that use a virtual joystick on the screen, I just can't get on with them.
But for touch interface games, what the parent post says is a joy I look forward to experiencing: A game with discreet information on the hand-held device.
A touch screen certainly isn't for 60fps twitch-gaming in my opinion.
Isn't that the whole idea behind the WiiU?
This is kinda different in that the mobile device doesn't need a custom app on it to act as the controller (as in your Brass Monkey example), but can act as the controller directly within the browser. No extra installations, just hit up the website and go.
I'm the CTO at Brass Monkey. We definitely experimented with this approach of using a webpage and websockets to communicate, it is nice that it doesn't require installing an app but it communicates via relaying messages out to the internet and back and so generally has latency in the 100ms+ (<10FPS) range and usually worse. See early video I made at a previous Company using HTML5 for controllers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE8-TntjYB4
With Brass Monkey we decided to instead make a single master controller app that used a trick we discovered to communicate over LAN between your phone and PC, this way it's blazingly fast. Can be more like 10-20ms (100-50FPS) instead and more consistent.
You only have to install it only once and then you can play any Brass Monkey experience seamlessly, including auto-pairing tech that detects other instances of Brass Monkey enabled web pages on your network.
Note: There are still major advantages to the web based approach such as bypassing Apple's approval process. It's hard to have controller side code executed unless you bake into your app as Apple doesn't allow dynamically loading code into native apps. But we decided to go responsiveness for our initial focus and are trying to figure out how to bring in some of the other benefits the web page as controller approach takes.
Would love some feedback on our App if you are games, orSDK if any of you are Javascript, Flash, and/or Unity developers.
francois@playbrassmonkey.com
Wow! Could you please tell a little more about the trick? How does a LAN connection between your web app in the browser and your iPhone app work? Do you create a locally accessible web server from your iPhone app?
Google want to connect your browser information with your phone information. And they're doing a good job.
https://code.google.com/p/powpow/
(see video)
There's also this
https://github.com/greggman/octopus
Sometimes you have to actually play with something to appreciate its potential.
* Battery
Lot's of it on my iPhone. But it's worth it :-)
This has since been acquired by Brass Monkey: http://playbrassmonkey.com/
For me only a loading screen is shown.
Update: Found a video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AvTl9aU5D8
Does this try to do a direct connection? In my network, that probably wouldn't work because of our firewall. Or it might if the port it listens on is high enough.
edit - likely a webgl problem that I've brought upon myself by disabling the gpu-blacklist
Override software rendering list Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, Android Overrides the built-in software rendering list and enables GPU-acceleration on unsupported system configurations.
Option to get WebGL enabled by default
But they _claim_ that the purpose of these demos is to advance the web.
That's not to mention that claims like "only works in Chrome" when in fact it works elsewhere happen to be lies. I guess no one worries about that sort of thing nowadays...
That was solved and properly done tens of years ago on the palm. Why can't I have something at least as good right into the browser, synced with my google account??
(Edit: not the wrong place since you already do your mail with a browser... and keep your contacts... and your todos... just remove the middleman, the website, and put everything in the browser. My guess is end users might love that)