Two Bit Circus is 'a Big Band of Nerds' (Video)

Video Two Bit Circus is 'a Big Band of Nerds' (Video) 8

Posted by Roblimo on Thursday September 11, 2014 @05:22PM from the games-that-take-physical-movement-are-healthy-games dept.

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Brent Bushnell, CEO of Two Bit Circus, is today's interview victim. Two Bit Circus is an amalgamation of technology, play, entertainment, and "immersive social amusements." They develop games like the ones shown in their Great Forest Challenge demo reel video. Their big push right now is preparing for STEAM Carnival – Los Angeles, which will be held October 25 and October 26 at CRAFTED, a permanent craft market at the Port of Los Angeles. The STEAM Carnival is also available as a traveling event; if you'd like to host it in your town, Two Bit Circus just might be able to accommodate you. (Alternate Video Link)

Brent: Two Bit Circus is a big band of nerds. We are in downtown Los Angeles. We build experiential entertainment. So we come from the premise: How is that home entertainment hasn’t changed in what, like a decade? What was the last big innovation? Laser tag. And so we want to take all that fun new tech cheap sensors big displays and apply it so we are getting people having fun together, socializing, getting out of the house and being human.

Tim: And in a kind of a big way, we’ve got this table here. I thought it was the main console but it is not.

Brent: No really this is a simple set of casual games, three on three pong a racing game, capture the flag, but the important piece here is that it is for six players. And people come to parties in groups of two and four; six guarantees you are meeting somebody new around the table. And so this is great because it might be really awkward to say, “Hey can I buy you a drink?” but it is really easy to say, “Oh my God! I am going to kill you next time.” And this is one of the examples. We have a full suite of games almost 60 different games. But these are really simple graphics eight colors. But what we are looking at is a platform for gaming. And we have a whole program to get kids excited about programming and engineering, and give them the tools to be able to make a lot of their own stuff. So this is just one of those examples. All these things stitched together into a big carnival that we are going to have in Los Angeles the end of October.

Tim: Now the board here itself, the entire box, this is all constructed?

Brent: Yeah, we made this all.

Tim: The original.

Brent: Yeah, we made this all from scratch. Vinyl cuts, milled off wood, it is running on an Intel Nuc, Ubuntu 12.04. It is all written in open framework. So yeah, we did this all from the ground up.

Tim: Are the games itself open source?

Brent: I don’t know if we’ve open sourced them or not but we have every plan to. So that’s definitely something that’s on our roadmap.

Tim: You got kind of an old school kind of a control here? Talk about that.

Brent: Yeah. This is classic trackball and buttons. A big thing for us is getting people to use their bodies again. So we’ve got a room for the laser beams and a big wall of buttons, I’ll show you later. A trackball is really a great control device.

Tim: Everybody wants that.

Brent: We are super durable. Oh my God, these things are bullet proof. Everybody is getting so obsessed with touch screens for everything when you really can’t do a lot on a touchscreen. So these trackballs are really a nice way to play games.

Tim: Apart from wood, are you using anything modern?

Brent: Yeah. We had some fun making this. You wouldn’t think that there is for evolving a classic arcade game like this. This is like our kit version. This is sort of nuts, same with that wall of buttons. We’ve made like eight of those. So yeah, it is pretty. And every time you make a change that there is a game play dynamic that affected and it is really kind of fun to AB test this stuff.

Tim: Now this seems to be built primarily for fun, like you said, it's awesome, you’ve gone from STEM to STEAM. Talk about that a little bit.

Brent: STEM to STEAM yeah. So we are all passionate nerds. We love what we are doing. My background is computer science. My cofounder Eric Gradman is a roboticist, and the thing that we can’t believe is that more kids don’t want to go into STEM. We’ve got this coming freight train of not enough high school workers for all the different jobs that we’ve got coming. Meanwhile, there has never been a better time to be an engineer. The tools are awesome. You can do in a weekend what used to take people a year. So there’s obviously a disconnect. And we thought a big piece of that was branding. STEM has this stodgy branding issue of pencil ties and lab coats for people who aren’t already excited about that stuff. They are intimidated. And so we chose the lens of a carnival and fun and games as a way to appeal to kids and get them hooked into that without having to think about being nerdy and whatnot. We are big fans of STEAM because of the addition of arts. Anybody can do arts. But if you are at the table doing art and STEM is over here happening, it gives you a little bit more exposure and you can see what’s going on.

Tim: You can’t avoid it at that point either.

Brent: You can’t avoid it at that point either. Yeah exactly. So it seems the art portion brings in that creativity and design that’s always been a part of engineering, but was lost in the STEM conversation. So STEAM really brings it to front and center highlights the fact that that is really an important part. Because we don’t just want engineers, we want creative engineers. We want creative problem servers. Engineering will be a component of it. Science will be a component of it. Math will be a component of it. All of that stuff is not done in isolation. It is a concert.

Tim: You mentioned the wall of buttons. And that sounds like what kids would enjoy. Go ahead and let’s take a look at that.

Brent: Let’s do it. So this is our button wall twister. Now this is a two player game. So one person’s red. One person’s blue, and it is a mashup between Whackamole and Twister. So what you are doing is you are hitting button combinations. So what we are going to do is, if I am red, I got to hit both of these at the same time, in order to advance. Okay good. Still 2. Can’t really see it that well in the sun but now as it goes to 3, you’ve got to hit all 3 at once.

Tim: You know what? It is hard to see in the camera, but you can point out that these are linked. That’s what indicates which ones are pressed.

Brent: Yes, great. So there is my last one. So as you hit each one of these, you are having to use more and more body parts than if you are doing with someone else, you get all twisted up and it’s quite fun. And this is another example of something where we have a smaller vision that is a kit. So kids can make their own and the only difference is we have this big piece but they are still the same buttons, the same back ends, and they get to build their own stuff.

Tim: Can you talk about the internals of this? What has it got?

Brent: So we’ve got a Galileo. And basically over I squared C and serial. It is able to talk to all the elements of all these buttons. And then we have got this custom made road case because we take these things to parties and events and so we want to be able to wheel them in nice and easily. So there is a whole piece that mounts on the front of this so that we can ship it nice and easily, and up and running. We wanted to highlight the Galileo for IDS and then you can see all the different attachment points here. So we finally added audio too. So we are excited about that. As a 45 second game, you are sitting and playing this twice, and it is actually a great workout.

Tim: Would this be one of the things that would be on display in October then?

Brent: This would be on display in October. Our Carnival actually will be the end of October, 25th and 26th we got 50,000 sq. ft., so we are going to have just a whole suite of games. Rooms for the laser beams, fire installations, a whole bunch of different games. We have tried to reimagine a bunch of the classic carnival stuff and then also applying a lot of those modern tools, UV cameras, IR sensors, and whatnot to really have some fun.

Tim: Have you really thought where you have a calliope.

Brent: Well we have a.... man where you have – we have been working on an automated piano like a robotic piano, it is not really a calliope sadly.

Tim: We could have Tin Pan Alley for that.

Brent: We are going to have something, yeah, exactly, nice little throwbacks, yeah

Tim: The freak show, the hammer bell

Brent: Yeah, we definitely have a strongman it is actually hooked to a Jacob’s ladder so the higher you go the higher that fireball goes it is harder, but we’ve got a whole bunch of interesting workshops allowing people to build a lot of their own stuff. And outside we are going to have a bunch of big games. A lot of those classic outdoor backyard games. A huge corn hole, with huge pickup sticks, and some of my old school favorites, like skittles ringtops. So it should be a lot of fun.

Tim: Do you have a website?

Brent: We do. It is Steamcarnival.com, yeah.

Tim: And ourpeople should know

Brent: Let’s see. We are going to be taking this across the country, because any folks in cities across the country, that want to get involved, we’d love to hear from you, we love to showcase our own stuff, as well as bringing in other people’s fun stuff. So reach out. It is easy to get a hold of us through our website.

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