Kung-Fu Live for PS3: You Are the Controller

Hi Sindred,
thanks for the encouraging comment!

Its of no consequence to leave the tips of your feet (below ankles) off the view. You can play ok even with 3/4 body or less, but as it is a full-body punch and kick- game, its definitely more fun to play if you fit ok inside the view.

Luckily the PSEye has a nicely wide field of view setting (you can switch between wide and normal by rotating the lense). Using this, a 6 feet person needs about 8 feet distance from the camera. A smaller person/kids of course need less distance to fit in.

I think 8 feet is still quite ok. I have a pretty small livingroom, but it works well for playing. You can also point the camera a bit diagonally from the tv. Usually the cam is on top of the tv or in front of it but ofcourse you can place it e.g. on a bookshelf behind it if there is one to gain more distance. Just the distance from the camera to the player matters.

Yep. Natal’s just been much on the surface lately. Our tech is fairly similar although we don’t use a 3D camera. Compared to older EyeToy games, the player tracking is very different and more expressive. We don’t just track amount of movement in certain areas or frame difference mass distributions but apply full-body skeleton tracking on the player in real-time. Using that we can also remove the player’s livingroom background, detect poses and moves and so on. The player is also integrated into the physics engine of the game world allowing him to kick boxes, rocks, trashcans, etc. on top of his enemies. Thus, the player is really inside the world and moving there, instead of the game and objects basically being in the camera view space.

Yep. We want to do this for the hopefull sequel(s). It would have been cool here as well but to cut the long story short it wasn’t too feasible soon enough for reasons that have nothing to do with technology.

Awesome! Coming out for the holidays this year.

We are exaggerating the players movements a lot so that he would appear faster and more capable and e.g. jump 24 feet in the game world although he jumps only one feet in his house. This might need a bit of tuning still but I personally like the reach it gives me inside the game. As a result, the character bounces around if its e.g. a kid who is just so excited that he keeps on running back and forth in front of the camera. But normally I feel it works quite nicely.

Inventions and new tech often surface from more than one place at the same time. We have been working on the tech for 8 years starting all the way from university research.

Heh! That’s actually me doing the kick and I cannot kick as high as it looks there. We took the pic with a wide angle lense from downwards so that it would look cooler than it is.

Sony started the whole camera gaming with EyeToy. Now there is just much more that can be done with the new technology.

Yep. If you have two TV’s you can certainly do what you figured.

But luckily you don’t really need that. Because of the wide angle lense kicking in about 45 degree angle to right and left (between side and forwards) looks to the camera almost identical to kicking in 90 degree angle (fully to the side). Thus, the game is perhaps best played by turning only about 90 degrees (instead of 180) when changing direction. This also allows you to quickly pound on enemies from both directions.

Having your face forwards may feel a bit silly for the people watching but it really doesn’t seem to bother the one playing. People have said exactly this after trying the game out having first mentioned about this when watching.

Thanks for the support!

Due to bandwidth requirements of streaming the video-you, this is a difficult task for limited resources. So unfortunately this will not happen for the first Kung-Fu LIVE. But if this one does well, it will be up in the air for the sequel again.