I told you never to call me on this wall! University of Illinois at Chicago grad student Arthur Nishimoto (L) and fellow students play Nishimoto's Fleet Commander, a massive multitouch strategy game based on Star Wars.
Image: L. Renambot/Electronics Visualization Laboratory

There have been some big Star Wars videogames, but none as big as Fleet Commander.

Arthur Nishimoto, a graduate student in the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory, has developed his real-time strategy game to be played on a wall-size LCD screen. Players are divided into two opposing teams that take control of X-wings, TIE fighters and even Death Stars, all with a touch of their fingers.

“The purpose of [Fleet Commander] was to explore how a complicated application like a real-time strategy game … could be played in a large, multitouch environment,” said Nishimoto in an e-mail to Wired.com.

Because of the screen’s sheer size, any number of players can jump in and start moving ships around, Nishimoto said, limited only by how many people can cram themselves around the 20-foot-wide display.

Since the launch of Nintendo DS in 2004, touch-based controls have become a tantalizing new frontier of game design, delivering a more immediate connection between the player and the game. Development of iPhone software continued the trend, and Apple’s iPad has made it possible to create much more complicated, sometimes multiplayer, touch-based games.

With touch, bigger isn’t just better, it’s markedly different — you’ll never be able to crowd 20 players around an iPad.

In Fleet Commander, players control their ships through simple touch-based gestures, as Nishimoto demonstrates in a video he released this week (above). They can drag starfighters throughout the map or touch individual ships to open radial menus for additional options, like prioritizing targets. The game ends once one side takes out the other’s main base.

The wall of screens is part of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory’s Cyber-Commons, an experimental, high-tech conference room built in 2008. Another student project Nishimoto participated in was a virtual canvas that lets users mix paint colors utilizing an iPad as a palette, then paint on the LCD wall using fingers or an actual paintbrush.

Fleet Commander is playable right now, but Nishimoto says there’s still plenty of work left to be done. The original plan was to let players land their ships on planets and deploy ground troops. As it stands, it’s more of a technical demo than a finished game design, but Nishimoto said LucasArts, the game-development arm of Star Wars‘ parent company, has reached out to him to discuss potential commercial applications for Fleet Commander. (LucasArts did not return requests for comment.)

Nishimoto’s work is reminiscent of the origins of videogames themselves: The first computer game, Spacewar!, was developed at MIT on a PDP-1 computer that was the size of four refrigerators and carried a price tag just shy of $1 million in 2011 money. Not exactly consumer-level tech, either.

Nishimoto says he’ll continue to tweak his game and push it even further into bleeding-edge technology.

“I plan to continue using Fleet Commander as a platform for exploring multi-user, multitouch interaction techniques,” he said. “Other future work may involve a 3-D LCD wall.”