Sometime I want to see.

[shogun00]

Lately, I've been seeing videos of people playing real UFO Catchers (Japanese claw machines) online via mobile/PC. It's a very interesting concept. Use your credit card to buy credits and play the claw machine in real time. Any prizes you win, the vendor will ship them (worldwide) to your door.

Here's an example!

This got me thinking. Wouldn't it be neat if we could have something similar with pinball machines?

Sure digital emulation is nice and all, but it doesn't replace the real thing.

Just strap a few mechanisms to the start, flipper buttons, and launcher. Attach a couple cameras and microphones to the machine. Have some type of credit system. And, just play the real thing with your mobile device or web browser. Sure there would be a few kinks to work out, such as the ability to nudge and latency. However, I think the idea has a lot of potential.

 

[ZREXMike2]

shogun I think there are some pinball machines like that, like Secrets Of The Deep. I mean real tables of course, not digital like FX3.

 

[vikingerik]

Latency renders this impossible for pinball. 30 ms (two video frames in TPA) is enough to miss shots. You're not getting anywhere near that with an internet roundtrip plus video encoding plus the mechanical components plus the viewer app.

 

[Tarek Oberdieck]

Latency renders this impossible for pinball. 30 ms (two video frames in TPA) is enough to miss shots. You're not getting anywhere near that with an internet roundtrip plus video encoding plus the mechanical components plus the viewer app.

[FONT=Verdana,Arial,Tahoma,Calibri,Geneva,sans-serif]Remember Big Race USA Head 2 Head 20 years ago? I think it's possible cause the ball coordinates only must be transfered. The rest can be done on the local machine. The Pro Pinball system had a lot of latency in many games, but in the meantime we all own much faster online access. Of course the ping time isn`t decreased a lot since these days but I guess the 30ms are more stable yet...[/FONT]

 

[vikingerik]

That's totally different. That's not reacting to and flipping at the ball through roundtrip internet latency. I think BRUSA H2H doesn't even send ball coordinates at all. You never see the other player's ball. Your machine only needs to know what shots the other player made. That's all BRUSA needs to send, and it's okay if that message arrives even half a second late, as long as there's logic to handle conflicts if both players make the same shot during the latency interval (just a timestamp on the message is probably enough.) I played BRUSA over dial-up way back when and it worked fine, but that's not at all the same thing as flipping at a remote ball in real-time.

 

[Pete]

you can control dialed-in with your phone... although youve got to be in the same room as it... and you cant nudge... it's not very good.