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Some time ago I had the opportunity of getting a tour at Game Science Center in Berlin. The permanent exhibition focuses on the future of gaming and interactions and features a number of really cool things. The whole exhibition is interactive and none of the exhibits really needed any instructions! There were no keyboards, mice or typical game controllers as the exhibition focuses on the new wave of interactive devices.

My #1 favourite thing in the exhibition was the augmented reality sandbox. It was basically a sandbox that had a Kinect 3D above it, calculating the heights and shapes of the sand, and a projector projecting real-time topographic map on the sand surface. It was the first thing we saw at the exhibition and we basically had to be dragged away from it. So much fun and needed no instructions!

You can get a pretty good picture of the interaction from this very popular video on Youtube.

The exhibition featured a number of devices and toys that an average consumer would rarely buy to their homes, including Leap Motion, Oculus Rift and Choosatron. Even though I had tried them all out before, it was great to see what people had come up with in these demos.

It was also my first time getting to try eye tracking in games. As I’m focused mostly on mobile games, I didn’t really consider the other demos from a professional perspective, but I can really see eye-tracking playing a major part in the future of mobile devices. The game we got to test was a simple asteroids game where you were playing as the Earth and you were avoiding asteroids by .. looking at them. It was the strangest feeling when the main game objective was just to look at objects and they would explode under your evil eye. Definitely an eye-catching experience!

Overall we had a great time at the exhibition and it was really great to get to try out all these toys we can’t afford to buy. I can really recommend the exhibition to all Berliners and people visiting Berlin.

All photos by Nicolas Balcazar