If you haven’t played or heard about Minecraft yet you must have been off planet somewhere doing some pretty interesting things. However back on earth Michael Winston Dales has been doing some pretty interesting things of his own using the Minecraft game and a little help from Arduino. The design instructs Michael to stand in a location to Tweet letting him interact in the games events. “The way it works is I use a plug-in for the excellent hey0 mod for Minecraft to give me access to all the core events inside Minecraft, such as when players come and go, and also the Redstone) wires/switches/etc. and then I move all that into a Django based web service, where I can store it all and I’m no longer working in Java 
From there I can start calling webhooks – so I made my Arduino light up LEDs based on webhook calls, and I connected it to twithook to let me tweet. The example above is quite trivial, but I like the idea that now I’ve got this information out of Minecraft, it could be used for lots of fun stuff. I could build a virtual version of my house in Minecraft and us that as the interface to a home automation system like AlertMe or X10. I could control what’s on the CODA screen in our kitchen or what our Nabaztag is doing, as both have simple APIs. Because this uses the minecraft server Laura or I could access it from anywhere in the world to control our house. Having a simple VR model as opposed to a web page could make for a better link between what happens in the virtual world and in the real world,” said Michael. This is a pretty cool idea with a lot of potential for augmented gaming interaction.
From there I can start calling webhooks – so I made my Arduino light up LEDs based on webhook calls, and I connected it to twithook to let me tweet. The example above is quite trivial, but I like the idea that now I’ve got this information out of Minecraft, it could be used for lots of fun stuff. I could build a virtual version of my house in Minecraft and us that as the interface to a home automation system like AlertMe or X10. I could control what’s on the CODA screen in our kitchen or what our Nabaztag is doing, as both have simple APIs. Because this uses the minecraft server Laura or I could access it from anywhere in the world to control our house. Having a simple VR model as opposed to a web page could make for a better link between what happens in the virtual world and in the real world,” said Michael. This is a pretty cool idea with a lot of potential for augmented gaming interaction.Zero