Microsoft Research has developed a pressure-sensitive keyboard. Beside the conventional keystroke events it sends out the pressure with which each key is hit. In a contest at the international conference on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2009), they asked the community to develop applications for that keyboard that are either creative, useful, or well implemented.
We participated with BallMeR, a soccer variant that is played with two players at one keyboard. The keyboard is spatial mapped to the playing field. If a user hits a key, a hill appears at the corresponding position in the field. If the key is hit harder, the hill grows larger and creates a higher impulse. The goal is to kick the ball into the opponent's goal by deforming the ground.
The playing field is a soft body and all other elements, i.e., the wall and the balls, are rigid bodys. Graphics are done using OpenGL. The app is mostly written in Objective-C in combination with Cocoa for Mac OS 10.6. It took a lot of time to tweak the masses and forces in the game 
We won the 2nd price in the category "Best implementation". Thanks to the Bullet community for providing such a nice engine.
Best regards,
MalteStatistics: Posted by bounce — Sat Oct 10, 2009 1:00 pm
]]>
