TO TRY a new gaming style, grab some plastic and put a chip on your shoulder.

Zi Ye and Hammad Khalid of the Human Media Lab at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, have devised a way of using a shoulder-mounted projector system to display - and play - a game on a bendy A4-sized sliver of plastic. Sensors in the screen allow gameplay to be controlled by bending, shaking or tapping it.

A prototype of the system, called Cobra, was shown last week at the Computer-Human Interaction meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. It runs games on a computer housed in a shoulder pouch, while the pouch's straps hold a small projector that shines images onto the flexible screen, held by the gamer.

The back of the screen is criss-crossed with flex-sensing wires, and other sensors note when the screen is tapped or shaken - actions which could be used to, say, swing a virtual sword or reload your trusty bazooka. These signals are sent wirelessly to the computer by a small circuit behind the screen.

Three infrared LEDS mounted on the display are tracked by a camera housed with the projector, enabling the rotation of the screen to be used in, say, driving games. "The projection follows the display automatically. A very wide range of game actions can be supported," says Ye.

The upshot, the pair say, is that Cobra provides the gaming power of a laptop while giving the gamer the freedom of a hand-held.

There is a growing interest in using projectors to enhance displays, says Shahram Izadi of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. They allow programmers "to radically augment the desktop with natural, intuitive user interfaces".

(http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627576.200-bright-future-projected-for-handheld-games.html)