Guten Touch news - Editor's Notes

Interactive media is awesome, its entertaining in ways film can only dream of! For a very long time the only interactivity anyone one got from games is being able to input commands using the old joypad or my personal fav the mouse and keyboard combo. Then along came the Wii and the DS which took interactivity to a whole new level with the motion controls and touch screen. Since then we have seen knock offs and re-adaptation's of both the motion control and the touch screen but for me personally they lacked the edge that I wanted to see, until I saw this that is.

The idea is quite simple, the screen is a "interactive canvas" so it's a material that enables a large number of applications. In this case it's a simple interactive version of Space Invaders that react to the foam balls hitting the aliens in order to kill them in-game. It looks like a whole lot of fun and does have the audience interacting more then with a push of a button.

The game and many other adaptations are apart of a travelling art installation called Guten Touch originally created for the Red Bull Music Academy ’08 that aims to enhance the relationship between people and technology by encouraging them to interact with it. You can find out more information about the project here.

This type of stuff always makes me think that games, while coming a very long way since its birth, still has a very long way to go as far as interacting and innovation is concerned.