If you’ve ever opened an instruction manual for a game, you’ll know that they’re full of warnings and disclaimers.

“You may experience seizures.”

“Do not play on rear projection TV.”

“Tighten the wrist strap and watch your surroundings.”

“This system may cause permanent vision damage to children under 7.”

And so on…

Hell, Nintendo games often have a separate pamphlet that’s several pages long, going into great detail about how the game might injure you, cause you to injure others, or somehow destroy everything in your house.

But this week, I found the very best disclaimer that I’ve ever seen on a game.  It was located on the back of the instruction manual for the 3DO game “Gridders”.

 

 WARNING: This product is composed of 100% matter.  If it comes into contact with an equivalent amount of anti-matter, it will be instantly and completely destroyed.  Manufacturer does not warrant the product against this and accepts no blame should this event occur.

Those three sentences alone are justification and redemption for the existence of the 3DO.

Oh yeah.  That’s right.  Built in.

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the world: For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: For depriving us in all cases whatsoever.

Sweet.  It’s rewriting history already.  Perfect.

Here’s the video:

[mediaplayer src=’https://mathpirate.net/hold/LCARS1.wmv’ ]

https://mathpirate.net/hold/LCARS1.wmv

This is a scene from the Next Generation episode Journey’s End.  The first run is simply the result with Wesley Crusher blacked out.  The second part displays the faces that are recognized.  There are occasional blips (Data gets blacked out in several frames, Wesley’s ear gets “recognized” a few times), but overall, not too shabby for something thrown together in a few days with no virtually no tuning of the system being done.  The reason he’s not blacked out at the end is likely due to the decision to expand the minimum face size to 50×50.  If the face size were smaller, it likely would have detected and blocked that part, as well.

And with that, I’m declaring Crazy Project Weekend complete.  All in all, it was a success, although there were some things that didn’t work out.  I started on Friday morning with nothing but an idea and ended up successfully building a robot that could win a game of Pong, despite never having touched most of the major technologies (OpenCV, Mindstorms, Bluetooth) prior to this weekend.

I’m definitely going to have to do this sort of thing more often.

Just a reminder, the source code, if you’re interested, is available in SVN:  https://mathpirate.net/svn/

And now…  Sleep.

Full Video

I’m working on a YouTube friendly condensed version at the moment.

[Edit: Here’s the YouTube version.]

21-9!  Take that and dance, 30+ year old technology!  I’ve got two words for you:  Inyo and Face!

Video coming soon.

Booyah!  Chew on that, Stella!