Strike911
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Hell, even if this goes nowhere, we should do a fun and quick Sonic-inspired yet original community album, because this thread has really made me want to make a track in the style of Sonic music...
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would be SUPER awesome if this happened...
for realsies.
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What I always find interesting about news reports like these is that the games they always nitpick often leave all controversial choices up to the player. If Mom and Dad raised little Billy right, then maybe he wouldn't be trying to get secret PG-13 romance scenes, much less tricking his parents into buying him a Mature title..
It's not like the game forces you to do anything controversial if you don't want to. In all cases you have to pursue whatever you want, be it being a racist space bigot or pursuing a relationship. They even ask you blatantly if you want to go through with it. "You want a relationship?" "Good Cop, or Bad Cop?" The game specifically asks you want to do. The story in the game becomes a machination of the player's choices. You can be a Mr. Goody Twoshoes if you really wanted to, and VOILA, you get a salute instead of a love scene. HELL! This is not news, and I'm sick of seeing people overreacting about video games targeted at adults.
Yeah, FOX News wants everyone to be married 5 years before they even know what sex is, much less think about it. Ironically, they're the leading network in hiring attractive ditzes to get more viewers. Messed up, no?
There are worse things going on in Mass Effect 2 than relationships. All that stuff in the previous post mentions it... racism, genocide, mass murder, choosing to kill for your own agenda, and unlawful/violent interrogation tactics ....
oh wait, right, FOXNews might like that last one...
yeah and for all the xenophobic themes going on in Mass Effect 2, you'd think FOX would love this game.
... would it help if I made Female Shepherd look like Sarah Palin? She'd get gun (NRA political message, clearly) and she'd get to kill people that look different from her!
/rant
EDIT : JUST ONCE I'D LOVE TO SEE SOMEONE REPORT ON STUPID PARENTS THAT LET THEIR CHILDREN PLAY MATURE TITLES. HELL, REPORT ABOUT STORES LETTING KIDS BUY THE GAME... the medium isn't what's wrong here. At all.
I really enjoyed Mass Effect 2... played through it 3 times.
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Yeah, the English translation is pretty bad. I was reading a guy's blog that spoke Japanese and he said that the English translation is bare minimum, and you can tell even if you don't speak Japanese just by how short the text is. Furthermore, the character's personalities are completely devoid of emotion. The Japanese voice acting is highly emotional and personality filled, but that just doesn't come across in the poorly written translation. It's frustrating to think that a better translation could have made an already great game that much greater...
I loved every minute of Muramasa. I bought it back when it first came out. Went through and got all the swords and secrets. It was one of the few games as of late that I felt compelled to complete 100%, and that's really rare as of late for me.
The art style is great and the music is fantastic. If you don't own it, you should. :]
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Uh-oh! Mighty Kong has woken from his slumber!
Well class it looks like it's time for a pop quiz...
... but don't worry because apparently I'm grading on a curve.
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Actually, I think I read on Kotaku that Miyamoto went on record saying that they (Nintendo) have a master copy of the Zelda stories and how they interlink but who knows if that's really true.
Yeah, I vaguely remember reading that also back in the day.
Still, if they're never going to actually give us real timeline information in the games, I wish they'd just come out and say it officially that each game is a reboot with nods to the old games.
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I don't necessarily know that more background information necessarily means the game will be better though. Shadow of the Colossus and Ico did a great job giving us minimal information with a game that actually worked, with plenty of travel and puzzles like Zelda, except the game emphasized solitude and the overall lonesome ambiance rather than dialogue. What makes Zelda frustrating is the fact that they give us A LOT of info in the game through NPCs that is veiled as story information, but in the big scheme of things, all that information did was point us in a direction for the next dungeon... which is okay. Each game hints at previous history... that's okay. It's after playing a franchise for 15-20 years and realizing that a lot of the dialogue and story elements generally lack meaning, that gets frustrating. Nothing really affects anything, outside of each game... which still is minimal.
And that in itself is okay, I guess; we're all alive, but the storytelling is just really getting formulaic. All story elements generally occur 4 times in a typical Zelda game. Right at the start of the game, after the first 3 dungeons, before the last boss, and at the end of the game. Every time. I mean, mixing up the storyline isn't hard in comparison to actually hiring programmers to code the game.
... I mean, Twilight Princess, after the first 3 dungeons were complete, and you get into the meat of what's going on, I was on the edge of my seat... "Oh shiii-" you know? Then right after that, it went back into the same old Zelda formula... with the bare minimum of story information being conveyed until you get near the end of the game. Nothing really changes in the Zelda series, honestly.
The gameplay has always been great and a few choice characters are interesting, but the story always lags behind. I think the fans get frustrated after finishing a Zelda title since the gameplay and the story doesn't function in tandem, feeding off each other so the player feels as if they're accomplishing something real in the world, rather than mission hunting. I hate to say it, because I'm such a fan, but the stories in each game (with a few choice exceptions) largely feel tacked on to allot for the spaces between dungeons instead of actually having real meaning.
I don't want to say that the dialogue is meaningless, but practically speaking, it might as well be.
I would love to see Ganon respond to Link's dungeon crawling in the context of the story, rather than just waiting around for Link to show up and kill him at the end... because that's what Zelda's starting to feel like now. Nintendo has been adding new bad guys to take Ganon's place in a few games, but the structure is always the same. Just give me Ganon with some foresight to prepare against Link, rather than waiting around for him.
Don't get me wrong, I love the games, but I'm very anxious to see what Nintendo will do on this new title... hearing that they're going to mix it up does make me feel good. So here's hoping.
There were some great things accomplished in TP, and OoT in its day was amazing. I want to see a new Zelda wow me the way LttP and OoT did. I know its asking a lot, but that's the price Nintendo pays for setting the bar. -
my Wii is a dust collector", well, you're going to wish you kept up with it this year.
My Wii is quite literally a collecting dust since I just don't bother to mess with it ... (outside of playing Muramasa a couple months ago, and Sin and Punishment 1 a few months before that), but I'm still excited for Other M, the new Zelda, and Sin & Punishment 2. (S&P2 I'm really excited for.)
This will be a good year for hardcore Wii owners. I know their ranks are few these days.
These rumors about Zelda... could be cool. Don't get me wrong, I loved Twilight Princess, but looking back on it, I'm really getting tired of the same Zelda formula over and over again. I really love the memorable characters though that have started appearing in the recent games... Tetra, Midna, Linebeck, Zelda from Spirit Tracks, and Byrne from Spirit tracks. They were all interesting characters which a lot of older Zelda games just didn't have much of... so I'm expecting a lot from a new Zelda.
I think we all are expecting a lot, and rightfully so, because the reality is, the big, flagship console Zelda titles have been steadily becoming more stale to me... I guess it's hard to improve upon each successive game. One trend I'm particularly annoyed by is how the latest Zelda installments start out wonderfully and originally, with a fresh story and style... but they've boiled back down to the old go to X number of Temples formula with minimal story until the end... which honestly, is the same story we've had for 20 years.
I love the Zelda series, and with that fondness of the series, I want to see this new Zelda bring something new the to table. If the rumors are true, which they may or may not be, then things will be cool.
Still, even if they repackaged LttP and sold it for 50 bucks in a Wii case with a special art book accessory, HELL, I would buy it in a heartbeat.. so maybe I'm a hypocrite.
STILL, there is one thing I've become more and more appreciative of from the newer Zeldas... and its the writing. Not for its story, its more or less the same most adventures, but the dialogue is always fun and it seems to be improving in my opinion. Especially with Spirit Tracks and Phantom Hourglass... I don't want to say Zelda is a bastion of writing perfection, but the characterizations of some of these newer characters I find myself really enjoying. So I'm excited about that aspect, since I can quite literally see that trend of more interesting NPCs occurring as newer Zelda games get released. Also, the dungeon designs in Twilight Princess were great... the possibilities of a new Zelda are exciting to think about.
I mean, at its core, the Zelda gameplay has been great and steadily improving, its just the small things that Nintendo leaves out that smaller, crappier companies don't that annoys most Zelda fans. Dungeon designs have been great, gameplay has been good as well, but the small details like the mere premise for entering a dungeon is little changed from the late 1980s. A breath of fresh air would be nice, and no, Link's cross bow training doesn't count. teehee. In my opinion, the Yeti House Dungeon from Twilight Princess is a great example of a dungeon that both feels fresh but similar to the old Zelda formula.
Needs more Yeti. That's what I say... metaphorically speaking.
2010... I'm happy its here, but I'll be happy to see a new Zelda at the end of it too.
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http://www.strike911.net/Sonic%203%20-%20%20Eurobeat%20Boss%20Party.mp3
EDIT: Don't let the URL name fool you, this is from Sonic and Knuckles.
Was playing around with some Sonic music and I got this very short little remix going on... I think I've been listening to too much Eurobeat.
What do you think? Certainly is a work in progress... more of a framework than anything else, but I'm kind of digging the groove.
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Okay, I've seen 2 Sonata Arctica shows in Dallas. They. Are. Incredible.
If you are free May 1st, then you better go see them! Seriously.
I wish I could go... :_(
And its Freakin' powerglove. Seriously. Seriously. Seriously.
...
SERIOUSLY.
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Go Dallas!
Still for the last few years they've been -really- inconsistent, with only a few pockets of good playing. So while I'm quietly rooting for Dallas, I'm concerned their inconsistency will pop back up like usual.
That said, last few games have been great.
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I love my DS, but there are a few things I would love to have in a DS2.
What I REALLY want is the option to download games digitally in addition to whatever physical media the device uses. I don't want to have to carry multiple game carts with me anymore, unless I REALLY want to. I'd prefer to have some kind of memory option to save multiple games on the device all at once because it's just so much more convenient.
And it would be really nice if my Wii Virtual console could be transferred over to the new device. The new graphics chip definitely wouldn't have a lack of power to play these kinds of games. Instant buy at that point. If I could play N64 games, like Sin and Punishment and play it on the go, that's all I would want, but I'd be happy for even just being able to play SNES games. I could buy old games that I can't be bothered to play at home (because of all the distractions from modern consoles), and play them on the go. The PSP can run old Playstation 1 games, which is fantastic... The DS2 should have this feature. I know people with homebrew applications can run emulators on the system, but a legitimate option is really appealing to me... and i would instantly pay a lot of money for that alone.
That's what I really want, and honestly, I don't think its THAT much to ask for, especially when you consider what Sony has been doing with the Playstation Store and the PSPs interoperability.
Then again, this is Nintendo, and they have their own way of doing things that never really makes sense to the rest of us...
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It's been a super long time since I've tried remixing something... so avast, here is Linebecks theme... except more dramatic.
HTTP://WWW.STRIKE911.NET/linebeck.mp3
I have a rough piano/orchestral rearrangement of Linebeck's theme from Phantom Hourglass. I had been meaning to remix it somehow and forgot about it until I started playing through Spirit Tracks when I heard the tune again.
Linebeck is by far one of my favorite characters in Zelda and his theme is so jovial, silly, and memorable. I wanted to make a tune that was a little more dramatic. It's still got a lot of work to do, and I realize it cuts out at the end, but its because its not done! Ha!
I'm liking the sound I'm getting from the piano. I'm happy so far with that part... took what seems forever to get just right though. The whole thing needs quite a bit of polish. I'm particularly concerned with the percussion and strings towards the end, with how they kind of just show up out of nowhere, so I need to work on building them up a little before their entrance. I also want to have at least a few instruments in there, and specifically, another instrument playing in the part right at the end... some kind of harmony, I dunno.
I really want to explore different styles with this theme and create a final arrangement that is something you could imagine playing as a legendary sea captain sails by. Yes, I realize its completely out of character for Linebeck, but that's the fun.
Anyway, what do you think? Ideas? Suggestions? I don't do the orchestral thing often so ... I probably could use a little kick in the right direction.
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Yeah, someone ask that guy what the hell is going on with those lines of text. Now I want to know !!! He lives in Redmond... same name as the writer credited... he's the best lead we've got right now.
Well, I seem to have concocted some kind of preliminary theory on this mystery...
They might be talking about fledgling figures at the advent of the Ultra 64's development before it was known as the Ultra-64, or even the earlier "Project Reality."
Project Reality occurred as soon as Nintendo had shopped around for a graphics chip. Pre-planning MUST have occurred before this where people decided what exactly they wanted in a new machine. And with the SNES out in Japan in late 1990, plenty of guess work could have been going on as to what Nintendo wanted to try and release for the future.
I read that actual development of the machine started in August of 1993 like you stated above... but that excludes any pre-planning which would have had to occurred months in advance (if not a year or so). It's possible that early predictions felt that they could hit that millions of polygons number. The Ultra-64 was billed as a machine that would offer photo realistic worlds, I remember the buzz in old gaming magazines while I was in elementary school at the time. I think recently I saw a promo video on YouTube where a marketing guy even say it while demonstrating an underwater demo of a fish swimming.
When "Project Reality" finally began after nailing down a 3D chip, Nintendo "boldly" believed that the machine would be more powerful than the time's most advanced supercomputers according to this site, (http://www.answers.com/topic/nintendo-64). If that's true, then wishful thinking even earlier was possible on such a ridiculous scale. Plus it's no secret that console makers start looking at ideas to create the next generation of consoles immediately after a new system has released. The SNES came out in late 1990 in Japan, and late 1991 for North America. That's a lot of time between then and 1993 that Nintendo could have been throwing around ideas for the future.
I'm leaning towards the idea that the Cukeman is referring to pre-production predictions of what Nintendo's next-gen product would be. "Project Reality" officially came underway in August of 93, which leads me to believe that the company had some early projections up probably for bigwigs preparing for the next console release. Hell, crazy inflated numbers have always happened... Sony is most famous for it in the last two generations, iirc. All console makers are guilty of it, but I seem to remember Sony getting the most flak for it.
Still millions of polygons is a silly expectation at that time, but with developers believing that they could get graphics that were better than what supercomputers were capable of ... then that number might be possible hopeful thinking for the company at the time.
It's the only thing that really lines up with Link's Awakening's development cycle... still. One giant gap in this theory is how a writer could get privy to this information unless someone working on the new product wanted to put an Easter Egg in LA, or Nintendo was briefing the company on their new product, but... dunno.
That's my theory anyway. There are a lot of assumptions and a few gaps, but its the best guess I can make outside of saying its just futurist gibberish from a silly NPC that someone coded in secretly.
I would love to find out the real answer.
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I'm starting to think its just a bunch of gibberish from writers that had a secret NPC.
I searched the internet and the German translation of Link's Awakening included some of these vastly different lines, all of which were removed from the DX version that came out years later.
The German translator of Link's Awakening made a joke by hiding some funny sentences in the game. When Link presses A next to a Cukeman, it says one of four different sentences:* NIE OHNE KONDOM! (Never without condom!)
* Irgendwelche Sorgen, Nöte oder Probleme? (Do you have any sorrows, hardships or problems?)
* STOP THE WAR! GIVE PEACE A CHANCE!!
* Gib mir Deinen Saft, ich geb' Dir meinen... (Give me your juice, i'll give you mine...)
Seems like the rest of the translations loosely carry over, more or less.
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Beat me to it Thalzon.
They could be talking about the Super FX Chip, but then again, if I recall correctly my tenure in elementary school, StarFox came out in early 1993 before Link's Awakening.
But saying the Super FX chip is capable of displaying millions of polygons? No way. It could only allow for a couple hundred, max.
N64 churned out like what? 100,000? I can't remember. I think the Gamecube bumped it up into the millions, but .... that was in 2001, sure the GCN would have been in development for 2 or 3 years ahead of its release. Which would have been 1998. *shrugs* Still that's 5 years ahead and TWO generations from when Link's Awakening came out.
And I honestly don't think people at Nintendo, especially, would have the foresight to predict how many polygons systems would be capable of churning out 10 or 15 years later.
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Isn't that image of the girl dancing from the game DJ MAX?
Yeah, these are very cool. I'll try my hand at converting some of these animated gifs to individual frames for the display. Haha!! A Giant Flashing "NO" is DEFINITELY next on the list. Lmao.
As far as animations go, anything that has more than 10 or 15 frames just takes too long. I tried putting in the Prince of Persia animation but I could only include the last part where he blocks and attack, kills the guy and runs away. I think that alone was 78 frames, all of which have to be manually inserted and converted to the right filetype... I used a macro but still, it took a while. The Cat puppet was easy since it was only 4 frames and I could put it in a for loop for like 8 times, so it looks cool.
Ideally, any animations should be light on the number of frames and not require too much fast frame switching. The sign seems to handle slow moving animations better... keep in mind this thing was built in late 80s, so its not as advanced an animated GIF (teehee). The Prince of Persia animation looks sweet though when its running, though it took forever to calibrate it right. For those 78 frames it required about 300KB, which is a third of the space on the floppy. lol.
STILL, if you find a cool animation that you don't think would be very difficult to implement please post them as they look really impressive on the display when they're going.I was seriously considering some of those crazy black and white pixel animations that those asian people made... but I can't for the life of me remember where they were on this here intertronz.
Again, ideally any animations should be light on the number of frames (around 20-ish) and though the animation speed can be fast, ideally, slower animations work and look the best. Faster animations tend to have a slight flicker since I guess the LEDs are having to fire up constantly.
The pics of the guys running and the fist of the northstar gifs will work perfectly and look cool, and I'll try to convert them later tonight, but the one with woman singing, while it would look very cool is just too detailed. It's so smooth that the frames for the animation would probably fill up most of the space on the floppy. I'm a little worried about putting large animations into the machine that require a lot of system resources since the RAM is so limited. So far so good though.
I've added almost all of the stuff you guys have suggested in addition to lot of game title logos and animations that I'm a fan of *Cough* Phantasy Star Online, Snatcher, Metal Gear, and Zelda *cough*.
Animations look cool on the thing, but pictures are good too... so if you have any suggestions for static images *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*!
The floppy disk is only half full, so yeah. Good times.
Awesome stuff so far everyone!
EDIT:
Well, after looking at those GIFs, the fist of the north star pic and guys running are both around 10-15 frames which isn't bad at all. The girl singing is only about 55 frames, which really isn't too bad either, especially after doing that Prince of Persia gif. hehe. I might consider tossing all three of those in.
Where do you guys find cool animated gifs btw?
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Oh My Gosh! I love you guys! <3
This is awesome. Some of these lines are great and the actual animated files are especially super awesome in a hundred ways. I'll have to take some vids of what it looks like all together.
This is awesome guys, seriously.
I love the catpuppet and the prince of persia thing. Omg!!! Too awesome for words! -
Haha, true and fair enough. It's terrible that I forgot to add "Please, no penises." in the original message. haha.
It would be kind of funny to see people's reactions to something like that though. Anyway, yeah, no penises (or any other various number of explicit body parts)
I'd prefer not to have anything on the sign that is TOO offensive. A little bit of salty humor I can deal with, but nothing too sweepingly overboard.
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So I acquired this rather large LED display. It took me a few months to fix it, but I got it up and running like new. It's basically a computer built in the late 1980s with a whopping 2MB of RAM and it essentially runs DOS from a Floppy Disk to work. While it's 100% old, it's also 100% full of awesome. I love this thing, its retro but still interesting enough to be in a techie's house.
The reason I'm coming to you clever OCR forum goers is because I would like suggestions of sayings, quotations or images that would be clever/interesting/funny/witty to see on a hanging LED sign. It's a slide show basically. It's not being displayed commercially so it'll just hanging in my personal space, so worrying about being offensive really isn't the biggest deal.
If there are any movies, tv shows, or games that had interesting signage I want to know about it!
I've got a few already. That recreation of the "Pills Here" sign from the Airport from Left4Dead is an example of one of them I've got finished. I also have "the cake is not a lie" in there too, in addition to an image of the Virtual Boy WarioLand. The WarioLand image looks both silly and awesome all at the same time since its almost the same colors as the Virtual Boy's display.
I think I also have an image of Chuck Norris and another of Mr. T. The actual resolution of each image is only 128 pixels by 48 pixels, so its really limited, and it only allows for 3 colors (black, 50% red, & 100% red), so yeah. Any images suggested have to be modified by me in Photoshop before I can convert them to the weird file format the sign uses to display images. That said, pixel art works perfectly. Converting images to smaller resolutions look great on the display despite the low resolution and the fact that it's only in two shades of red or black.
It helps that images be high contrast though, where the subject matter is clearly visible from the background. Like the picture of Chuck Norris I tossed on to it clearly shows Chuck Norris and a giant American flag behind him, so it works for things like that.
Your suggestions and comments will make me super happy. I'll throw anything on there that is interesting, funny, or just plain cool; sayings, images, whatever.
Thanks.
EDIT: OH YEAH, I forgot to mention. Outside of your typical slide transitions, it can do very rudimentary animation too by playing slides in order with a no delay (or at least a shorter delay than if you wanted to display something). It's fast enough to be pretty smooth too. It's a lot of work though, but something really cool would definitely be worth it.
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yes, which explains columbine and the college shooting that the asian guy did, and of course his being asian links to his love for video games!
My GOD! YOU'RE ON TO SOMETHING HERE!
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Ah, I remember this... and the controversy. IIRC, there was some rumor of it being some kind of MIDI rip or whatnot. That was pretty long ago. Nevertheless, it's still nice to listen to.
Well, having listened to most of it (just about finished) the tracks that are redone are really stellar. A few of them took me by surprise by their quality, in that, they took an old piece of music and made it sound completely different just by making the quality better. That said, there are quite a few themes that feel like they have had little done to them outside of changing their instruments. I don't know that I agree with some of the choices they've made, and some songs do sound very midi-ish. There are a handful that sound like midi's with new soundfonts laid on top. And again, on occasion those instruments don't sound great on a few choice tracks.
All in all, a cool download. While its true that quite a few do sound like a glorified midi rips, the few that are really redone are very fun to listen to. Some of the instrument choices could have been better. There were at least two times where my ears hurt from a frequency coming out of some of the higher octave instruments.
A trip down memory lane.
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Pretty cool. I was looking for some nostalgia.
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Sad times. I really enjoyed King of the Hill, even if Luanne wasn't my favorite character, she was a staple in the series.
THIS, not the iphone/pad/whatever, is the future
in General Discussion
Posted
I saw this a while ago also, and while the tech is certainly cool, its just a stepping stone to see it in a practical device, same with the Ipad. I'm not a fan of the ipad, but if it can ride its hype train long enough then it could very well revolutionize the handheld computer market by making it an accessible non-niche device. Still... its just a stepping stone.
SixthSense is cool, but personally, I'm not wearing an ugly ass necklace like that to hold the projector... just won't. Put it on a watch or a some kind of interesting ear piece, OR something not so blatantly gaudy and maybe I'd be willing to bite. I know his version was just a prototype but still... impressive, but not really to a stage where the mainstream would be willing to use it. Same with the ipad and its quality control.
That said, I like the fact that its open-source. If it gets a good community behind it (looks like it does already) then real-world applications (and innovations) can start popping up with the tech. Other companies will start integrating this technology into phones and things... it'll naturally progress with our phones because that's what we're used to... right now having a neat little projector with vision detection is cool, but its nothing more than extraneous at this point.
Love the phone numbers on the hand though... and the pinching files to your computer and vice versa... and the extra book information. There's a lot of really cool possibilities.