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.