Student Tech Demo Warps Reality with Mind-Blowing Perspective Puzzles

Cognimancer

Imperial Intelligence
Jun 13, 2012
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Student Tech Demo Warps Reality with Mind-Blowing Perspective Puzzles


A new project from a team of college students might just be the next Portal.

Forced perspective is nothing new - if you've ever seen a tourist posing like they're holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa, you pretty much know how it works. But the trick is usually restricted to stationary images, because once you move, the illusion is ruined. Well, not anymore; five students from Carnegie Mellon University are testing the limits of perspective in a first-person puzzle game, with some seriously mind-bending results. Their tech demo, "The Museum of Simulation Technology," drops you into a very interesting reality where space and size are all in the eye of the beholder.

I'll put a disclaimer right here that these mechanics are really hard to describe in words, so you should watch the video above just to learn what the game is all about. Basically, the game lets you move objects around in 3-dimensional space, but their size is constant relative to the player's perspective. So, if you pick up a tiny object right next to you, then project it towards a distant wall, it'll still be the same size on the screen as when you picked it up - but because of the increased distance, the object actually got a lot bigger.

The net effect is that this project has all kinds of potential. The puzzles start out pretty simple, but if this tech demo is any indication, the mechanics allow for enough craziness to fill a decent-length puzzle game. It bends the brain in a way that echoes Portal (heck, one of the levels in this demo even includes portals), so this project is definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Source: reddit [http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1uo0q8/what_if_you_could_use_perspective_to_reshape_your/]

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Bazaalmon

New member
Apr 19, 2009
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That's so awesome. I'm going to keep an eye on this, because I'd buy this game in an instant! I wonder what other scale-able properties there'd be like weight, gravity, or something else.
 

FalloutJack

Bah weep grah nah neep ninny bom
Nov 20, 2008
15,489
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Yeah, that's a definite winning combination of abused physics right there. The classy music's a nice touch too. Gimme.
 

AndrewC

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Jun 24, 2010
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rhizhim said:
the should continue this before others pick up that idea and try to pass it as their own.

on the other hand there are already some experimental games that do this
<youtube=SS4r9Fq3beU>
Ninja'd.

Yep, this stuff is nothing new but it's nice to see more people taking a stab at it.
 

ciancon

Waiting patiently.....
Nov 27, 2009
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That is one of the most incredible game mechanics I've ever seen.
Serious props to whoever came up with that and made it work!
 

praetor_alpha

LOL, Canada!
Mar 4, 2010
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Wow. This is amazing. You're not supposed to do that with the moon! I found some parts hilarious.
 

Quazimofo

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Aug 30, 2010
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I'd buy the hell out of this in an instant. Brilliant core idea, and the applications just made me giddy! Seriously, Grab the moon to find the hidden exit on it then make it big enough to exit? Fantastic!
 

Steve the Pocket

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Mar 30, 2009
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Clovus said:
So, when does Valve come knocking to hire these kids for Portal 3?
I was gonna say. Considering Tag wound up becoming a major component of Portal 2, that "might just be the next Portal" comment up top might turn out to be more literal than the writer realized. Though I doubt the shrinking/growing mechanic would be implmented quite this way. Even the pseudoscience behind the Portal universe couldn't justify that. More likely it would involve a shrink ray of some kind; you just know Aperture would have been toying around with that idea at some point over their 50-year history. Come to think of it, when was the last time we got a game that had a shrink ray in it? Duke Nukem 3D? Seems like an obvious idea that'd be ripe for a modern game, now that we have the technology to make super-high-res textures that would scale properly.