Fantastic Contraption

Fantastic Contraption is a Flash-based physics game created by Colin Northway, released September 16, 2008. Northway sold the rights to the game to inXile Entertainment who released the game for iOS on January 26, 2009. A sequel, Fantastic Contraptions 2, was released July 27, 2010. It was released for iOS on Nov 5, 2010. In February 2015 inXile entertainment discontinued their Sparkworkz web-games division, ending all server support for the games. Colin Northway has expressed interest in reviving the games, and potentially releasing an upgraded version.

Gameplay

Players assemble contraptions with the goal of moving the level's goal object past obstacles and into the goal area. Contraptions are built using various types of rods and wheels, may only be built in the workshop area, and must somehow get the goal object into the goal area by any means possible. Doing so wins the level. Players can play for free with a set of premade levels. In the past it was possible to gain the ability to create their own levels and play other user-made levels for $10, but server support for the games ended in February 2015.

Fantastic

The fantastic is a subgenre of literary works characterized by the ambiguous presentation of seemingly supernatural forces. Structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov originated the concept, characterizing the fantastic as the hesitation of characters and readers when presented with questions about reality.

Definition

The fantastic can be seen in works where the reader has a sense of confusion about whether a work presents what Todorov calls "the uncanny," wherein superficially supernatural phenomena turn out to have a rational explanation (such as in the Gothic works of Ann Radcliffe) or "the marvelous," where the supernatural is accepted as real. He also points out that the ending always drives the hesitation towards one of two decisions:

The fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural or supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work -- in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as "poetic" interpretations.

Contraption

Contraption may refer to:

PlayStation VR

PlayStation VR, previously known by the codename Project Morpheus, is an upcoming virtual reality head-mounted display produced by Sony Computer Entertainment. It is designed to be fully functional with the PlayStation 4 video game system. It is currently a prototype and has no confirmed release date, although Sony has scheduled its launch for the first half of 2016.

The prototype revealed at GDC'15 included an OLED 1920x1080 pixel display (providing 960x1080 px resolution per eye) with an RGB subpixel matrix, and is capable of displaying content at 120fps. It features a FOV of 100°, 6DOF head-tracking, stereoscopic 3D, and unwarped output to a TV, either for others to view what the headset wearer sees, or a separate display to compete against the headset user using a standard PS4 controller.

History

Sony's interest in head-mounted technology dates back to the 1990s. Its first commercial unit, the Glasstron, was released in 1997. One application of this technology was in the game MechWarrior 2, which permitted users of the Glasstron or Virtual I/O's iGlasses to adopt a visual perspective from inside the cockpit of the craft, using their own eyes as visual and seeing the battlefield through their craft's own cockpit.