Kasabian Football Gaming Live - Behind the experiment

Get Velociraptor! now - http://www.smarturl.it/KasVeloYT A look at the science behind the Kasabian Football Gaming Live experiment.

We created a custom game engine to allow Tom and Darren to control our real-life players. To send voice commands to the players we used TeamSpeak 3, an extremely fast chat system which is usually used by hardcore online gamers. Each of our footballers wore an Xperia Play handset running the Android version of the TeamSpeak client. They also wore a pair of earbuds so they could hear their commands.

Each team had a human "spotter" with a laptop whose job it was to record which player on their team was closest to the ball, and to state whether they were in possession of the ball, or challenging for it. We wrote a custom Flash app to feed this information to the game engine.

When a player was selected they began to hear commands in their earphones. We sent a different set of commands to the player who was in possession of the ball ("shoot", "pass" etc) and the player who was challenging for the ball ("tackle", "block" etc).

We also had the challenge of how to tell the players which direction to run in. We realised that sending "up", "down", "left", "right" etc wouldn't work because we had no way of telling which direction a player was facing at any given moment. Instead we placed coloured hoardings around the edge of the pitch. That way we just had to tell a player to run towards a particular colour.

Tom and Darren, our gamers, controlled their team using an Xperia Play running a custom Android app which sent key presses over wi-fi to their team's controlling laptop. These key presses were then mapped to voice commands via the custom Flash app, and sent to the selected player via TeamSpeak 3.

Each player also wore a headband made from EL wire which lit up when they were selected. This allowed our gamers to see which player they were currently controlling. We used the xBee system of wireless transmitters to control toggle the headbands on and off based on which players were selected at any one time.

Featuring Re-Wired from the new album Velociraptor!

Category:

Science & Technology

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• pro
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[aamusedd22]

@skylan121 re wired kasabian

[skylan121]

song please?



[SigmaXcelsior]

Use iPhones next time please

[000andreo000]

tom looks like a kid!!!

[TheMadcapShambleton]

Such a cool idea! Love it.

[DeSmurfen125]

I love this soo much! ;D

everything: the song, the band, the idea, the game.

just like Football Hero xD

xx Eva from Holland