Cross Your Fingers, Cross Your Eyes: The Danger Field

You will hopefully remember the absolutely fantastic Record Tripping - a game from Bell Brothers that has you scrubbing your scroll wheel to fast-forward and rewind time to solve puzzles. Those Brothers have announced a new game, and while all that exists just now is a one-screen prototype, once I finally understood how it worked I realised I had to let you know. The Danger Field is a stereoscopic game, that relies on your going cross-eyed to experience a 3D effect. And here's the thing - it works.

Clearly just now it's not a game in any sense - it's just proof that the tech works. And it's well worth persisting to get it to for you. I have a strong astigmatism in my left eye, and as such watching films in 3D is a strained, frequently blurry effort. But this works for me perfectly. So even if you've given up on 3D as something for you (you know, within reason - it's not going to restore sight to a blind eye - that we know of), it's well worth a try.

The trick to having it work is to go cross-eyed until the two images blur into one in the centre, and then sort of relax your eyes. It takes a few goes, and it seems that the best you'll get is a blurry mess, but then suddenly it falls into place. You should end up with three very clear versions of the image, but ignore the other two and focus on the one in the centre. At that point, that feather that's floating around really rather does appear to be getting nearer and farther away.

If you've played around with these sorts of stereoscopic images before you'll be saying, "Huh, so what?" But I hadn't, and nor will have many others. The next step is imagining what potential there is for this as a game, which we should find out later this year. And if this didn't seem enough to warrant a post for you, just go back and play Record Tripping, because I bet you haven't.