3pointD.com

Virtual mouse pursues virtual man (left) based on real mouse’s actions (right)

Wired News features a game in development called Mice Arena in which a player is chased through a virtual environment by an onscreen adversary controlled by a mouse or a hamster. That’s right, your own pet hamster. The hamster gets to play too, pursuing a piece of bait that’s controlled by the player’s actions through a high-tech cage. Infrared sensors pass information about the hamster’s movements to the game, and the game sends signals to the hamster cage that make the floors and walls deform to simulate the passage of territory. This has to be one of the funniest manifestations of 3pointD technology yet. Demo expected by November. But that’s not all: “In addition to Mice Arena, two other games in the Metazoa Ludens series have been proposed. In Chicken Petman, a real chicken will don the role of a ghost and chase movable bait controlled by a person within a maze. In Jellyfishtrone, the team plans to translate the swimming motion of a jellyfish into the serpent’s movements in the traditional game of Snake.”