Free Software Art

Today Estación Futuro (the Intermediae at Matadero Madrid project about games and play) opened officially with our first project, an exhibition of Kenta Cho’s more straightforward SHMUPs called Los sueños euclideos de Kenta Cho (The Euclidean Dreams of Kenta Cho), all of them under a FreeBSD license as curated by Yours Truly.

The Dharma Initiative's Play and Game Station

The project is much more than a straightforward art+games exhibition: it is also configured as an entertainment arcade for the kids in the neighbourhood (who were spending most of their afternoons using the web-connected computers to play online games anyway), and it plans to encompass other game-related activities, some of them regarding videogames (like OpenArsGames), some of them regarding real-life games with no interposed computers.

Estación Futuro operates from a geodesic dome in a repurposed abbatoir.

If you don’t know Kenta Cho, now’s your opportunity. Of late he has been working in flash, so you can just head over to the page for his gaming alter ego ABA Games and start playing, or download windows versions of the games we are showcasing at Estacion Futuro. Some of his games can also be found on Xbox and iPhone (that’s one of the advantages of free licenses: other people port your stuff for you).

If you are using a modern free software distro, you could be playing the exhibition’s selection and several other games in a matter of seconds, all thanks to your friendly package manager. And to your friendly packager, which in my case means this is the third post in a row that I have to mention Miriam Ruiz.

Or you could come over and play with us at Estacion Futuro. The Kenta Cho selection will be up until September.

Julian Oliver’s levelHead is an Augmented Reality videogame in which players help a silhouette navigate a nondescript building by direct manipulation of fiducial cubes that represent the avatar’s environments. A webcam extracts special marks on the cubes and Oliver’s software projects the game as though the cubes were hollow and their faces transparent.

levelHead v1.0, 3 cube speed-run (spoiler!) from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

It’s a remarkable work, and doubly so because the code has been released to the public under the GPLv3, with art assets under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 license. There are even quite clear (if somewhat daunting) instructions on for making levelHead work. Other developers would be keeping their code under wraps while talking to Sony about a less saccharine Playstation3 Augmented Reality game (or whichever other “various parties” he is talking to according to his website), but not Oliver. Release early, walk the walk. Kudos.

I have been playing with machine vision and ARtoolkit recently, but I still have to get levelHead to work (I can’t even get it to compile properly). I did see an early non-playable prototype (Unprepared Architecture, with Simone Jones) at Medialab Madrid in 2007, and friends who’ve played with the finished game at its various showings around the world report great excitement and joy. Miriam, if you are reading this, could you please get a package going?