Reactrix went out of business.

You’ve probably never heard of them, but if you ever visited a fancy mall you might have seen their handiwork. They made these neat little interactive projector displays. Basically it was a ceiling-mounted projector that projected an image onto the floor, with an electric eye that would sense when someone/something moved over it, and alter the image accordingly. So you could have a virtual pool of water, or box full of balls that would swish around when somebody walked over it.

These boneheads were using it for advertising.

What a waste of a brilliant idea. Is it any wonder they went out of business? This bunch of suits looked at this technology and thought “An opportunity to make money selling people shit they don’t want!”

I look at it and think, “Next generation video arcade!”

First, you take the whole getup, and expand it to fill an entire room. The bigger the better (within reason), whatever your budget can afford.

Second. add some accessories, like laser tag-like guns, and/or transponders so the system can track who’s who.

Third, write some worthwhile software for it.

Imagine using the setup as a huge, immersive game of Pong. Now imgine adding any number of extra widgets to the ‘board’ that can deflect the ball and/or be ‘hazards’ to the players, like some bastard child of Pong and Pinball. Or, imagine just taking the laser tag guns and shooting the hell out of each other, with an actual ‘beam’ on the display. And if you get ‘hit’, WHOOSH, the projector ramps up a bright flash of light on your position, then fades you to black, so you actually get the visual effect of ‘dying.’

Set up a bunch of displays like this and charge people to play, like a theme park. For bonus points, open-source the whole thing so anyone (with the budget) can replicate it. And if you set aside some time (like overnight hours) for game programmers to hack up their own games for it, so much the better.

If I ever become stupid rich, this is the project I’m going to work on.