FrEscher than Relativity

July 18, 2007 7:27 AM

OLE Coordinate System is the software that drives Echochrome, an Interactive Optical Illusion. The playable demo lets you play in an Escherian space. [via]
posted by solipsophistocracy (15 comments total)

This has apparently been bought up by Sony, but I thought the engine makes it more than just PeSPi Blue.
posted by solipsophistocracy at 7:28 AM on July 18, 2007

I couldn't figure out what I was looking at until I watched the demo movie. Now I figured out what I'm looking at, but not why it exists. Fun as a game, though. And the video is (unintentionally?) hilarious. The slo-mo action replay is great.
posted by DU at 7:50 AM on July 18, 2007

Echochrome on Game Trailers. The game footage looks pretty good, actually, though I'd much rather play with a mouse than a game controller.
posted by tracert at 7:55 AM on July 18, 2007

I suspect this would have been better on the DS than on the PSP.
posted by knapah at 8:09 AM on July 18, 2007

Hopefully it turns out better than this old clunker.
posted by Hubajube at 8:14 AM on July 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I too, wish that Nintendo had bought this up instead of Sony. I bet they could do all kinds of cool stuff with this on the Wii.
posted by solipsophistocracy at 8:14 AM on July 18, 2007

This coordinate space implements IUnknown?
posted by GuyZero at 8:41 AM on July 18, 2007

There's actually a current PSP puzzle game whose central mechanic looks a lot like this. The game is Crush, and the premise is that the player can collapse the 3D game world into two dimensions at will. Of course camera placement determines the way the world collapses any given time. Although the OLE mechanic is described differently in the video (and may actually work differently), it seems to amount to much the same thing: the game world the characters walk around in is a naive 2D projection of a 3D map, and the player controls the character's actions by changing the 2D projection by changing perspective.
posted by grobstein at 8:48 AM on July 18, 2007

That said, this looks cooler because there's apparently more flexibility in rotating the world.
posted by grobstein at 8:50 AM on July 18, 2007

It should be possible for anyone to recreate this software and us it in a game if they'd like.
posted by delmoi at 9:09 AM on July 18, 2007

The sound effects in the demo movie absolutely kill me.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 11:15 AM on July 18, 2007

Perfect for iPhone or MS Touch Table. WiiMote is far to imprecise for this, and doesn't have enough buttons to implement perfect 90 degree rotate left right up down etc. As mentioned earlier, a mouse would work too. That said, BRING BACK LEMMINGS!!!!!!!
posted by Debaser626 at 11:22 AM on July 18, 2007

Considering that the game isn't even out yet, it may be premature to lament that Nintendo could have made it better.
posted by cobra_high_tigers at 11:23 AM on July 18, 2007

*too
posted by Debaser626 at 11:23 AM on July 18, 2007

Too bad the code doesn't run on DirectX 10. That would sure help.
posted by mystyk at 7:12 PM on July 18, 2007