Saturday, December 01, 2007

Lazer Tag

Some students from the University of Texas designed an arena/play space for lazer tag. What a hoot. We each got guns and a game HUD (heads up display). Each gun only held so many bullets/rounds at a time - you had to get additional ammo from powerups scattered around the space. There were also shield protection and health points scattered around. Once we figured out how to play - they left a lot of important basic details out of their documentation (oh, like you had to join the group they created in order for the guns to work and you had to be in mouselook mode to shoot) but we eventually figured it out. Maybe that was part of the experiment - see how long people would struggle to figure stuff out, how long they'd stand around without being able to play...

ANyway - they created a fun space with multiple floors, things to go into, fly over, look around on. They had a good size crowd too last night. I don't know if they're doing it again. I'm going to check on monday and take my students there. It's a good example of a game built inside the virtual world.

I of course got too carried away playing the game and forgot to take pictures - d'oh. So if we go back in on Monday I will be sure to take some then.

Here's a SLURL - if you have SL running, ou should be able to click on this link and be teleported.

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