Guy Augments Minecraft With Reality, Not the Other Way Around

Augmented reality refers to virtually changing a live view of something real. Essentially, reality is being bent to the will of something virtual. Generally, a lot of hacks nowadays feature new and interesting ways to augment reality with technology, but the augmenting social norms didn’t stop Michael Winston Dales from making reality bend to Minecraft’s will, rather than the other way around.

Using an Arduino board, Dales manages a few neat tricks:

• A set of LED lights light up when Dale, or a few of his friends are logged into his multiplayer server, which he says he can have in room separate from his computer, which would allow him to, basically, receive Minecraft buddy alerts.
• He set up switches in Minecraft that turn the real life LED lights on and off.
• He set up a pressure plate which sends out a seemingly predefined tweet to Twitter, which he proposes can be used as an alert system.

Granted, Dales didn’t set up any ridiculously awesome systems where, for example, if he cooks pork in Minecraft, a machine cooks pork in real life, but he set up a hack which basically makes way for ridiculously awesome systems in which Minecraft can creep into our everyday lives, you know, more than it already has.

(via Hack A Day)