Battlemouth

Everyone loves Pac-man; some take this love to extremes, and the rest of us get to enjoy the results.  Below, you see some examples of Pac-man in real life in a variety of forms.  These people are all heroes to me now.

As you can see, someone has turned their Roomba into Pac-man. Pac-man is great, and I love Roombas (mine is named Stacy), so this is a winning combination. The implementation isn’t top notch; the true yellow’ness needs to be developed, but this is a great start. To take this one step farther, this could be combined with a method which controls the Roomba via the Nintendo Wii Balance Board. You could actually play Pac-man with your Roomba, instead of just watching it! So much potential fun.

Another method of controlling Pac-man is shown above. That Pac-man robot can be controlled via remote control, and as you can see in this link there is a big track and ghosts and everything. Very well done. These two are pretty good real life Pac-man implementations, but how about a few using real people? Done.

Here you see a stunt being pulled in various buildings on a college campus. The deathly screams made by Pac-man are really a nice touch. I appreciate some people’s applause and I would be giving these folks a standing ovation as they passed through. An entertaining video, but what if you want to really play Pac-man in real life? You can use virtual reality! That’s right, you just put on your VR mask, load up the program and you can see the delicious dots to chomp down on layered over the real world. This looks fun, but very expensive (at least for now). Do we have any other options?

Do you live in Manhattan, or close enough to get there? Then you can play the wittily named, “Pacmanhattan”! A graduate program at NYU (I went there!) developed a system to play Pac-man around Washington Square Park. This requires players (Pac-man and the four ghosts) each have a partner who follows them around and updates someone who is managing the system of their location at every turn, who updates the computer. Street signs on corners are used as power pellets, and you eat people by tagging them. The downside of this is that you don’t get to actually see the dots, but it’s much more interactive, and is much cheaper to implement than the virtual reality method.

That’s it for Pac-man live, I hope you’ve been inspired to develop your own ingenious system, or at least recreate (and improve upon?) one of the systems above.

Godspeed.