As attested by this Battleship:GoogleEarth , it seems that Julian is moving towards his "near future laboratory experiments". His idea was to start thinking about "how Google Earth could become a platform for realtime mobile gaming". An instantiation of this was then to transfr the simple game mech...
On gestural interactions with games
An interview on Gamasutra of Katherine Isbister and Nicole Lazzaro about Intimate Relations in video games. Some excerpts I liked (but the whole interview is interesting) G: What are your hopes for the gestural input, particularly with the Nintendo DS and the Wii remote? KI: (...) I think the trick...
Two examples of objects/MMO cross-over
reports on this interesting cross-over: LEGO Mindstorms (the line of robotics components that let you build interactive objects) will have a new line called "NXT that is going to be previewed in Second Life. Also, the insightful Amy-Jo Kim pointed to this article: Habbo China to Match Real and Vir...
Jaiku: real-time presence/location awareness on a mobile phone
Today's release in the world of presence/location-based mobile applications: Jaiku. It's basically a phone book that displays the real-time presence and location of your contacts. We invented the term ‘rich presence’ to describe the many relevant things a phone knows about you. Rich presence on J...
RFID tag + ahstray
Seen in Geneva: an arphid ashtray Why do I blog this? it seems that RFID tags (arphids) are everywhere lately.... the pervasiveness of technology in everyday objects? it's rather someone who bought a CD or something, removed the tag and left it here. ...
Playdocam: games with your webcam
Via internet actu, the Playdocam seems to be an interesting device: PlaydoCAM™ transforms your ordinary web camera into a motion-tracking gaming device and places you at the centre of a unique online gaming experience. Many PlaydoCAM™ games are under development for both single and multiplayer acti...
Social communication "eyeball" robot
Via News.3yen, this incredible Muusocia developed by ATR and Systec Akazawa. Described by news.3yen as a "social communication robot": The website claims that its “purpose is to make the existence consciousness of the person reconfirm who touches the Muu” …whatever the hell that means. The eyeball ...
Content-less places in virtual and physical realms
Via aeiou, Internet Soul Portraits is a project by Mark Callahan: Internet Soul Portraits (I.S.P.), net art project I.S.P. is a tongue-in-cheek treatment of web design as pure representation. In this project, familiar images are altered by the application of essentialist, reductive approaches from...
FT on wearable computing
The FT has a piece about wearable computing: The shirt that checks your heart, the hat that checks your brain (By Alan Cane). Even though it's very geeky, there is an interesting metaphor: Professor Sandy Pentland of MIT’s prestigious Media Lab, one of the world’s leading experts on the topic, says...
A locomotion interface using a group of movable tiles
CirculaFloor, a project led by Prof. Iwata (presented at SIGGRAPH 2004): CirculaFloor is a locomotion interface using a group of movable tiles. The movable tiles employ holonomic mechanism that achieves omni-directional motion. Circulation of the tiles enables the user to walk in virtual environme...