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Ideas of applications

Yoan Mollard edited this page Jun 14, 2015 · 1 revision

Ideas of applications

New inspiration to create your own Arbalet app? Have a look to the list below:

Note: If you probably imagine easily how an arcad game can render on Arbalet, some ideas below however are less trivial to represent on a low resolution and coloured surface. This is part of the game, just let your imagination take over. Remember one thing, if you intend to draw complex things like you would do on a computer screen, you're probably thinking that badly, you should instead use the whole table and a big range of colors.

Open Data

Realtime Stock Exchange representation

Because of human cupidity, information about money is probably the only data fluctuating each second available online in real time (hum, say the less real-time of them are freely available, but that's still very fast). Use all the surface, all the colors, this will give art, but art based on meaningful data.

Weather station

Smart alarm clock

Red is good to fall asleep, blue is good to wake up, based on that, build an original alarm clock...

Public transportation

If it's not too much archaic, your local public transportation company may provide an API to get real time info about the network. With all Arbalet pixels you may represent several stations, several bus lines, time left before the next one...

Everyday use

Musical player

Arbalet already provides a simple example of spectrum analyser. To improve it connect your phone, and see the spectrum or any msucial animation played in real time.

Event/Message notifier

Browse the notification bar of your phone and imagine what events can be reported to the table

Text displayer

Display your love message or your todo list on Arbalet. The ASCII characters rendering should be builtin to the SDK but a dedicated app can use this future feature to display a list of texts, with different colors, at certain times, ...

Demonstration, effects and non-playable games

Fire simulation

3D bouncing ball

The third dimension is the color.

K2000

Matrix falling code

Fireworks simulator

Midi player

A midi file has several tracks with notes starting and stopping for each one, that should be easy to represent some tracks of a midi song

Flag drawer

Pixelise, draw and animate the world's flags

Geek/scientific stuff

Binary clock (or with any base n>2)

Normal people think about programming a normal digital clock first.

Not easy with so little pixels. Think about using more than one state

DNA representation

Simulate a program running on a Turing machine. Have a look to the numerous software/hardware simulations to get more ideas first, they are awesome.

Illustration of sorting algorithm

Why not sorting colors, number of pixels or both? Bubble sort, quick sort, heap sort ... make it more easy to understand and compare them!

Remarkable numbers computation

How to render the calculation of pi, the golden number or the Fibonacci sequence on Arbalet?

Oscilloscope

Errrr, just a random idea, maybe not that much pertinent.

Games

There are so much things to put in this list... Switch on your old consoles to get more ideas, but implementing recent games on 150 pixels and 256^3 colors is also challenging.

To play to your games, think about using different kind of inputs, joysticks, leap motion, kinect, ...

Snake

Breakout clone

Pong

Space Impact/Space invader

Mines

Hangman

That will be necessary to implement the text feature of the SDK first. Or you consider the player must remember the sequence of letters, that's also a choice, invent your rules!

Tic-tac-toe

Invent variants, this game is soooo boring

Tron

On 150 pixels, either your Tron world will be really small, or you invent new rules. What about allow crossing walls built more than 10 seconds ago? Use colors to represent the age of a wall, and try if it's challenging!

Pole position/Car race

When cars move on a linear infinite road...

Connect 4

The original game is 7x6 but use all rows and all columns. Maybe variants would make the game less annoying also.

Master Mind

Chess

Pieces are represented via a unique color

Some memory game

Simon/Blinken

Puzzle Bobble

Tower of Hanoi

Abalone

Othello

Nim's game

Some soccer game

Flat Rubik's cube

At least 12x9

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