Another Hackathon Runner-Up Lets You Control Human Chess Pieces Via iPhone

A 5:45 this morning, a man told another man to walk into traffic blindfolded. Using an iPhone app connected to their service, joysti.cc, Jarod Reyes moved Jon Gottfried through light traffic in what amounted to a real-life game of Frogger. While I often think that we’d be better off if most start-up founders went to play in traffic, I never meant that they had to do it in real life, yet these two actually pulled it off and without killing anyone.

This open source project allows programmers to build game mechanics and send game commands audibly through a smartphone connected to headphones. For example, you could program in a chess game and then force pawns to walk inexorably to their death or, as the gents point out, you could play virtual Tetris, piling bodies willy nilly like some mad scientist intent on creating a human-centipede-esque amalgam of flesh.

The pair will be using the program this summer to stage larger games in fields around Brooklyn and Manhattan and they’re looking for folks to port their own games to the platform. You can tweet them here and check out the code here. You can also see Jon playing the game in the video below.

Here’s their Hackathon presentation

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