Reality becomes 8-bit

It is entirely possible that, four or five months from now, Garnet Hertz will pull up next to you at a stop sign on Balboa Island.

You can glance over and check out his ride, then watch as he zooms away at top speed: 15 mph. It may not seem particularly swift, but Hertz won’t be able to see the actual road ahead of him. Instead, he will be looking at a computer rendering of the world. Hertz will be driving a video game down the street.

UC Irvine post-doctoral researcher Hertz, research director Walt Scacchi and a team of computer scientists at the university’s Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds are making a driving simulator that actually drives. Essentially, they’re combining a golf cart and gutted Deluxe OutRun game console.

OutRun, a 1986 Sega arcade game, allowed gamers to race in a faux-1984 Ferrari Testarossa that moved in conjunction with action on the screen.

“People want to have an ‘immersive’ driving experience,” Hertz said.

He’s taking it one step further.

“In terms of getting a video game cabinet to roll down the street, I haven’t seen it before,” Scacchi said, who has overseen the project.

As OutRun moves, a camera-laptop setup picks up on converging lines to determine the direction of the road. The driver then sees the real world rendered as an 8-bit asphalt highway lined with palm trees — the same style as the original game. Hertz proposed the project after a December 2008 visit to an arcade in Santa Cruz.

It simultaneously scales reality down to a game, while the gaming mechanism is scaled up to actual driving.

“It’s half fake, but half real,” said Hertz, who played OutRun as a child.

A more recent inspiration were stories of drivers relying solely on GPS navigation and winding up in rivers — the OutRun team has also developed an 8-bit rendering of maps based on Google Earth and GPS technology. This could be used, Hertz said, as a potential GPS “skin” to make getting directions from Garmin or TomTom seem more like a video game.

Developers hope to release a “lite” version of the game for the iPhone, allowing people to view the world as a video game as they walk, bike or drive around town. The technology could also be expanded to find objects, such as buildings, in addition to the road.

Hertz notes that the fun would be “to see how the system tries to interpret and render the real world.” This rendering could be the relatively simple 8-bit type from OutRun or have more complex, 3-D graphics such as those found in games like Doom.

Hertz plans to drive the contraption at an October show at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, but there is much yet to do. He must center the steering column and pedals, narrow the golf cart body to resemble the one-person gaming console, construct the fiberglass body, and attach the seat and hollowed cabinet.

While OutRun might someday make for an interesting amusement park ride, consumers won’t be driving these video games down the road any time soon. Hertz embraces the inherent danger associated with relying completely on technology.

“No matter how good computer vision is, it is never going to be completely perfect. Computer vision is never as good, as complete, as the real world,” he said.

An underlying goal is to highlight the discrepancy between games and reality, he said. “It’s not really meant to be safe at this point,” Hertz said. “It’s meant to be interesting.”

Scacchi and Hertz cite concept car designer Ed “Big Daddy” Roth as an influence. Roth worked apart from the car industry, challenging the way cars could be interpreted. Similarly, Scacchi said, the goal of OutRun and the Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds is not to “just align ourselves to the game industry, but expand and see how virtual worlds and new media work in the 21st century.”

“Games have the potential to go everywhere,” he said.