Future Gaming: The Puffer Sphere January 18, 2007

Read more Gadgets , Games , Home Entertainment , Portable Media

World of Warcraft may be taking over the real world, but there is still a lot happening in the games environment.

The London Science Museum ran its 'Future Playground' exhibition last month, looking at the future of gaming and some of the things on show were both wacky and wonderful. Take the Puffer Sphere above.

This is an inflatable display measuring anything from 2 metres to 10 metres across and can be hung from the ceiling. Developed by student, Ollie Collier, the sphere can have images projected on its curved surface to improve the immersive effect and opens up a lot of possibilities for anew type of 3-D gaming with gamers able to stand around the sphere and interact with it. This is what the blurb says:

PIMS is a portable synthetic environment for fully immersive collaborative visualisation.
The PIMS is still in development. Once finished it will be a fully immersive, portable environment in which small groups can view, explore and interact with 3D data sets, virtual reality models and remote or inaccessible spaces.

The PIMS display system will not only be robust enough to use outdoors, but also quick and easy to setup and operate. It will provide a full 360-degree panoramic in which users can navigate and interact with accurately spatialised visual content.

If you happen to be in Birmingham between now and January 24 you can catch the Puffer Sphere, by Pufferfish, in action at the NEC, as part of the Interiors Event.-Martin Lynch

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