Saturday, November 13, 2010

Tron on Android Gadget Pack

Reliving my childhood/young adulthood for just one minute, the only movie that even held a candle to Sneakers and Hackers was Tron. Fantasies of flying through the motherboard in search of missing ROM addresses and hexdumping around with light racing motorcycles is pretty much what gets me by some late nights while hacking. It sure romanticized the reality of actual programming experience, which typically consisted of gcc-make-vi-pico-repeat-success-segfault.

So when I found out that the new Tron movie was coming out, and that it had motorcycles, and modern interpretations of the flying-saucers-of-death meets-American-Gladiator game, I got excited. In fact, I think all the guys and I at Liquidware are going to take a full half day off just to see the movie together (ps if you're in the Boston/Cambridge area, and want to come along, just shoot me an email at inthebitz at gmail).
Anyway, I'm anxious. I think the movie is going to rock. And even if it doesn't, I'm going to see it anyway because of how influential it was to me, and many guys I know.

And in honor of that great movie, Will and Chris and I found an interpretation of Tron, called "Light Racer 3D", and got it running on the Liquidware Android Gadget Pack, running Android on the Beagleboard... enjoy!
Here's a video of it running on the Android-Beagleboard-BeagleTouch combination. It's surprisingly fast and snappy for a portable device like this - at first, I couldn't really believe that the 3D graphics were so fluid...

All of the modules and components are available at the liquidware shop, and some more pictures are up on the Flickr page. Enjoy!

No comments: