Image credit: Rich Whitehouse
If you happened to find yourself with a new Roomba vacuum on your hands this holiday, you can use it to inject some demon-slaying into your home by turning it into a DOOM level.The DOOMba, created by game engineer and programmer Rich Whitehouse, is designed to turn the sensors on one of the newer Roomba models, the Roomba 980, into real-life map-making tools that can inject some demon-slaying into your home.Roombas already sense data about their environment as they go about cleaning. The DOOMba makes use of the little disc-shaped robot’s sensors and built-in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) to turn your home into hell.Whitehouse wrote in his blog about the project:
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When connected to a PC using imaging software like Whitehouse’s Noesis, that sensing data can be tracked and displayed as a graphic map, and ported into DOOM as a “wad,” or playable landscape. Once you have the map, Noesis gives you options for floor and ceiling textures and other game options.“Some will say that it's pointless, but I have faith in my heart that the Dark Lord will wipe these people from the face of the earth and trap them in a dimension of eternal hellfire,” Whitehouse wrote. “Their suffering will be legendary.”I soon realized that there was a clear opportunity to serve the Dark Lord by conceiving a plethora of unholy algorithms in service to one of the finest works ever created in his name. Simultaneously, I would be able to unleash a truly terrible pun to plague humankind.