How about browsing through the Google Street View panoramas, but not with your mouse or trackpad, not even with your fingers, but with your mobile device, moving it like a window to the world ?…
Enter a location or let the site show you a random one and then, visit it like you were inside it, by moving your mobile up and down, left and right, turning around … Continue reading
There’s a lot of parallax JavaScript libraries out there. One of them is Parallax.js, originally made by Matthew Wagerfield. This one not only does parallax effects with different html layers, but it also reacts to the gyroscope on your device (when no motion detection hardware is available, it reacts to the cursor).
After my previous project Playground 2, I played with WebRTC (in order to see how I could manage to use the peer to peer features of WebRTC) and I found a headtracking library called headtrackr, made in JavaScript by Audun Mathias Øygard, based on WebRTC. I decided to make something out of it and a colleague of mine gave me the idea to mix and match it in some way with some parallax effects (that’s how I found Parallax.js in the first place).
I forked Parallax.js and added the headtracking support (with multiple callbacks such as when the camera is ready or not, when your face is detected or lost …) and everything is retro-compatible. You can see a demo here and I updated the API documentation on the readme.
Try Parallax.js, now with Headtracking
Have fun tilting your face in front of your computer !
Tophe
This project is more an experiment than really a game (it could lead to a game though). The concept is :
This is multiplayer (each player has a ball of a certain color – moving on the monitor and identified on his phone), there is a little chat (if you play with multiple monitors).
If you don’t have any phone, you can even run the device motion emulator ! (thanks to remote-tilt).
It runs with :
The site is hosted on a free heroku instance (I recently enabled the WebSockets which weren’t available on heroku before – caused socket.io to fallback to xhr polling) so it’s not the best server ever, but it does the job for the demo …
The source code is on github, it’s MIT licensed if you want to fork it or whatever.
I’m aware it’s not perfect (if you’re on multiple monitors, you may experiment little display differences), but it could lead to an idea of game or whatever …!
Tophe
PS : Besides of socket.io and little bugs I had to deal with (such as the express sessions linked to the sockets), this project forced me to learn how to publish a project on heroku, which is (when you never have done it before) not something as easy as uploading your files via ftp like you would for a php project for example 🙂 …