Back in October 2006, I started to track stories and developments in an emerging field I termed Crowdsensing; the use of mobile devices and networks to create adhoc sensor networks for applications such as weather forecasting, air quality and road traffic services.
Indeed, developments such as theParticipatory Urbanism project and Intel’s Ergo underline how mobile sensor networks are manifesting themselves in useful, real world services.
Philippe Kahn’s Fullpower Technologies promises to equip handsets with multiple sensors that may enable a groundswell of crowdsensing innovation. Though, Kahn’s namechecks sensors such as accelerometers and cameras, it’s unclear whether Fullpower is working with handset manufacturers, networks, looking at developing software stacks, UI innovations or creating reference hardware designs.
However, Fullpower’s site does allude to an ‘inference engine’ capable of ingesting motion, imaging, proximity, light, pressure and GPS data alongside very specific medical data such as heart rate and blood glucose; implying some intriguing mobile medical applications.
Nevertheless, this is an area and a company that may have some profound implications for the nature of messaging and hence an emerging technology worth tracking.
Earlier today, I got talking to Tom Scott about organising simultaneous BarCamp events in Leeds, York and Manchester next year…I could then jetpack across the Pennines after presenting a session in Leeds and re-run it in Manchester :)
Epiphany! Never mind Barcamps, why has no one run an alternate reality version of 8-bit classic Jetpac! Sure, it’d be dangerous, life-threatening and expensive…but isn’t dying what video games are all about? come to think of it…think of the possibilities in mashing up Pac Manhattan AND Jetpac!
Cute, clever & fun :) Taking a cue from the Wii Remote, Future Feeder’s Tilt SCREAM Pong uses a MacBook Pro’s sudden motion sensor to control the paddle in a regular game of Pong – tilting your MacBook, moves the paddle! In a cute little twist that utilises the integrated mic, screaming at your Mac momentarily expands your paddle :)
Trippy. If I didn’t have to reboot my MacBook from OSX to Windows everytime I wanted to play Binary Zoo’s Echoes, I’d be completely addicted…
Echoes is a slick, psychedelic interpretation of Asteroids, with added Binary Zoo powerup craziness. Echoes is to Stardust, what Super Stardust is to Asteroids…though fortunately, it doesn’t make my eyes sting like their previous title mono.
BZ’s games are simple, fun and fiendishly addictive remakes of gaming classics…I got my fingers crossed that they’ll someday do a remix of Defender…
‘ve been invited to speak at next month’s inaugural Northern Exposure conference, organised by Game Republic and Game Horizon. The programme includes sessions from Team 17’s Martyn Brown and Charles Cecil of Revolution Software
I’ll be speaking about how a number of emerging technologies and trends may intersect the gaming industry – from the design patterns of Web 2.0 to the confluence of mobile and internet technologies behind Alternate Reality Games.
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Carbon was planning to announce development of an ARG for a client at this year’s Edinburgh festival, unfortunately, the project was becoming too costly – perhaps we’ll return to it in 2008 :)
I have an irritating habit – whenever I hear a three-letter acronym, my brain starts working on smutty, childish, innappropriate variations. Someone usually has to tell me to stop. In the last few minutes, Aaron and I ping-pong’d out the following from ‘LCD’…
Lonely Cantankerous Drunk
Lizard Cock Dunker
Lovely Cock Deepthroater
Lying Crap Distribution
Lobotomised Curly Dome
Likely Colored Door
Love Can Doom
Lauren Can’t Dance
Lesbian (Cute) Dormitory
We deliriously thought that this’d make a fun web app – no wait…a game! A circle of players are assigned three letters, each have 10 seconds in turn to come up with something funny (other players ‘digg’ it), the player with the most thumbs up, wins the round and the chain is shared online. Dead simple, kinda like an online You Don’t Know Jack :)
Woah. Is this what would happen if Charlie Kaufmann was writing videogames? Valve’s Portal looks like a physics-mashing blend of Being John Malkovich and the ACME Portable Hole; the trailer is even reminiscent of themovie’s LesterCorp orientation films.
I’ve been very critical of the state of innovation in the games industry, but it seems as though novel and original ideas are starting to break through; notably on the PC platform and the emergence of episodic games. Recent months have seen the release of Jenova Chen’s Flow thesis and Rag Doll Kung Fu. Let’s hope PS3 and Wii can keep up the trend for originality.
And remember, There’s A Hole In The Sky Through Which Things Can Fly.
Ali’s work for Sony’s UK launch of the PSP finally debuted at the Dray Walk Gallery as part of the PSP The Beautiful Script exhibition.
I was in London for a few meetings yesterday and decided to catch the show while it was still running…I’ve uploaded my photos of the event, and the area around Brick Lane, to my Flickr account.
Earlier today Ali and I were riffing on Sony’s motivation to align the work of emerging British Islamic artists with the PSP launch…and we still couldn’t figure it out! Either, the British Muslim demographic is hugely desirable to Sony or they see urban art such as Ali’s being close the brand values for PSP?
In either case, seeing the artists work slideshow on a kiosk’d PSP I understood the themes of freedom, beauty and desire as embodied by the aesthetic of the PSP…and, as a Muslim, its simply flattering to know that someone somewhere in Sony drew a connecting line between those aesthetics and Islam :)
The website for next month’s Innovative Game Design Symposium, in Maastricht, has a unique Flash-based UI, presenting the entire site in one zoom-able screen.
The reader starts with a visual map of the site – sections such as schedules, organisers, biographies, are represented as thumbnail blocks of text. The reader then zooms-in and pans-around the text at a readable size.
The interface is an interesting and very intuitive alternative to traditional page and frame based navigation, enabling the reader to quickly move through a hierarchical information structure.
