The OutRun AR Project

Some of you might remember playing a game back in the eighties known as Out Run. Imagine playing the same game, but instead of an arcade, you are on a moving vehicle?

This is the Out Run project, by Garnet Hertz. It uses an electric golf cart that allows players to navigate their way around real-life courses using arcade controls.

It uses some customized software that can automatically look in front of a car and then reproduce the route on the game cabin’s screen. It even does it in 8-bit form! You can check it out in a video after the jump.

So basically, we are looking at one of those sit down driving racing games, only someone is actually racing! I believe that it is possible to race on a real track, but it had better be clear of pedestrians.

In case you think that this has been developed just for fun, you would be wrong. Apparently, the developers are finding that this tech can be used for making game-based therapies for disabled users, such as augmented reality based wheelchairs.

Is it possible that we could recreate this type of technology for other video games? For example, could we make a drive-able Pac-man game designed for real mazes?


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