imclab/playground2

An experiment with socket.io and accelerometer (control your desktop with multiple mobile devices)

TOPHEMAN PLAYGROUND V2

##Intro

Try it at : http://topheman-playground.herokuapp.com (heroku instance).

Presentation : http://slid.es/topheman/topheman-playground

Once you snapped the QR-code with your phone, take control of the bouncing ball on your desktop screen, like a Wiimote, tilting your phone as you would do on a labyrinth game.

• Connect with multiple mobile devices
• Watch from multiple desktop/laptop screens

You can even use the devicemotion emulator to control the ball from your desktop.

Not a game, more of an experiment that could lead to a game …

Thanks to remote-tilt for the emulator.

##Install

• npm install
• node app.js 192.168.1.2:3000 (192.168.1.2:3000 being the public IP:PORT of your node server - port by default at 3000 - this is used to create the QR-Code)

##Next

I coded the v1 about a year ago, and now I decided to refactor it so that it could be a sort of a boilerplate for some other games.

Take it, make your own games and tell me about it !

##Notes

My heroku instance doesn't support WebSockets, so socket.io fallbacks to xhr-polling. If you want to test a version with real WebSockets, you can try : http://playground.topheman.kd.io:3000 although it only stays up for 20 min (after the VM goes asleep - so tweet me or whatever so I could lauch it).

When you'll browse the code, you'll see that there is a connection/disconnetion routine on the sockets which makes sure to disconnect any mobile client which has more than one socket opened (to prevent multiple dead balls). This was a tricky part, playing with the express session and the socket.io handshake :-) …