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To-Fu used to be a square. Now he's a cube. That's technology moving forward, isn't it? Next stop: n-dimensional hypercube!A few weeks back, I saw To-Fu in his latest incarnation, running on Amazon's forthcoming Fire Phone, where his new game To-Fu Fury is part of the launch line-up. The phone itself was a pre-release unit, its form all but hidden by a bulky case and its OS off-limits, so I couldn't check out the finer details, like menus you can move through by tilting, or the deep, probably terrifying integration of the Amazon store into many of the handset's peripheral features. I did get to see the nice big screen that changes perspective based on the position of your eyes, though, and I did get to play a bit of To-Fu's latest adventure and talk to the people making it.
Firstly, that head-tracking stuff. It's powered, I gather, by a handful of little cameras studded around the outside of the screen, and it works, in essence, like tilt, except you don't have to actually tilt your handset physically - you just cast your eyes about instead. It's responsive and capable, and it's weird how quickly it starts to feel natural - so natural, in fact, that it's initially surprisingly hard to get your head around what's changed. But yes, you move your eyes, and the screen shifts in line with your perspective, allowing for an almost tangible sense of physicality to the 3D images displayed. In a game like To-Fu it gives the world a real blockish presence, while also allowing you to easily see what's above you, what's below you, and what's around the next corner. (In the final unit, you'll apparently be able to zoom in by moving your head in close, too - the next-gen version of pinch, if you will. You'll possibly look a bit silly, but it should be a nice novelty.)
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