Yep, but as Lockwood said, they're made by guys who are obviously not bowlers, so when you hook the ball the program has no idea what you're doing. Plus the one you found is $15K. That's a bit outside of my budget at the moment. They look friggin' sweet though. If money were no object, I'd buy one of these as the starting point for this project. Of course, if money were no object I'd also live in a mansion and would probably have my own actual bowling lanes, lol!
I think the Kinect would be key for this project, as it is easily obtainable, relatively inexpensive and you can download a windows based SDK for it. I'm sure with some tweaks I could have it reading the arc and speed of a bowling ball in a day or two. Without getting into the specifics of it, it would simply be a matter of taking a series of images of the entire lane surface as the ball is thrown and comparing them in the program. The program could identify the ball in each image and based on where it is on the lane in each image, it could calculate the speed of the ball and based on the arc it has as it travels across the lane bed, extrapolate where that arc would end in the virtual world. Add some 3D models of the lane, the pins, a ball and plug the appropriate values (weight, speed, arc, etc) into a physics library and Bob's your uncle. I'm simplifying this big time of course, but that's the basic idea.
PC hardware is also relatively cheap to obtain. You wouldn't need a real powerhouse of a machine to render the graphics and read the data from the kinect. As for a lane bed, if I got lucky I might be able to find some old lanes for sale online or I could just buy a sheet of laminate flooring for the lane surface, that should be good enough to simulate the front part of a bowling lane. The most expensive part honestly would be a flat panel monitor big enough to span the lane like the Chinese one has.
As for programming, that's where I'd come in
That's what I went to school for. I currently work more as a data analyst than a programmer but I have written several PC games and have even written an app for Android. If I had the hardware I could get the software to talk to it, no problem. It would just take me a few days to get it all talking and to get the physics down.
All I lack is the money to make it happen. Sigh. Maybe in a year or two I can scrape together the funds for something like this - I currently have too many other priorities for my money at the moment. Until then, it's just a dream.
Originally Posted by AZBowla
Yep, but as Lockwood said, they're made by guys who are obviously not bowlers, so when you hook the ball the program has no idea what you're doing. Plus the one you found is $15K. That's a bit outside of my budget at the moment. They look friggin' sweet though. If money were no object, I'd buy one of these as the starting point for this project. Of course, if money were no object I'd also live in a mansion and would probably have my own actual bowling lanes, lol!
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