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Life of George melds Lego bricks with iOS for 'digital-to-physical' gameplay, captures our hearts
There isn't much that can't be done with some Mindstorming and plenty of Legos, so color us intrigued by the Lego Group's new game, Life of George. Using a free EyeCue-enabled iOS app, players are tasked with recreating George's photographs using 144 included Lego bricks on a specialized "green screen-like" gaming mat. Once the model is complete, you'll take a photo with your iDevice to be scored based on your building speed and accuracy to the original picture. The $30 kit promises 12 levels featuring 10 photos each, and varying difficulty levels. For added replay value, there's a two player game and a creation mode which lets you create playable models out of your own snapshots. To sweeten this story even more, you'll also be able to keep up with George at his eponymously titled Facebook page, I am George. If the Lego-builder inside of you is itching to snag one, it'll be available from Lego on October 1st. In the meantime, you'll find more details in the PR after the break.
Project Blox is like any other toy that comes with 300 pages of documentation (video)
If your kid (or inner kid) turns their nose up at those delectable Sifteo Cubes, it'll obviously be because they want open source smart building blocks instead. So oblige the budding geek with Project Blox, courtesy of electrical engineering students at the University of Texas at Austin. Every toddler-friendly block has its own LCD and touch panels, plus motion sensors and wireless comms that let it interact with other blocks in weird and wonderful ways -- like the maze game you'll see in the video after the break. Project Blox is still very much a project, unfortunately, but its creators have put all their code and schematics online so baby Einstein can have a go at building his own.
Blizzard teams up with Mega Bloks for Warcraft and StarCraft sets
Big Blizzard licensing news -- Blizzard has teamed up with MEGA Brands, Inc. to release Warcraft- and StarCraft-themed Mega Bloks sets. You might remember the Halo Mega Bloks sets as another of Mega Bloks' video game releases. These are Blizzard's two largest franchises, so it's a pretty substantial acquisition for Mega Bloks. What is most interesting to me about this licensing partnership is Blizzard's consolidation and general changing strategy regarding the World of Warcraft and StarCraft intellectual properties. In South Korea, StarCraft is already on everything you can imagine, and licensing in general is one of Blizzard's biggest assets (as it is for most content creators.) Does this licensing deal signal a renewed push to put Warcraft and StarCraft on lots of new, carefully hand-picked products? Suffice to say, I am excited about Blizzard's licensing future. The sets are scheduled for release in summer 2012. We have no news on what characters or settings will be featured in the sets, but our imaginations can happily wander. Will we get vehicles? Iconic location play sets? Lore exposition in block form? I've got a few ideas...
RIM wants Hulu Plus on the Blackberry PlayBook, 'conversations' continue
RIM wants Hulu Plus on the just-released Blackberry PlayBook. It also wants everyone to know it wants Hulu Plus on the Blackberry PlayBook, after the streaming video service unceremoniously blocked access to its videos just days after the tablet's launch. Now, both PC Mag and The Wall Street Journal are reporting the same terse email statement from RIM: "We are in conversations with Hulu to bring the Hulu Plus subscription service to BlackBerry PlayBook users." No word on the content of those conversations or a timeline for resolution, so for now PlayBook users will need to find another way to satisfy their yearning for Seinfeld reruns.
Meatcraft's Minecraft theme makes it okay for adults to play with blocks
An art project by Jeffrey Kam and Cody McCabe reconstructs Minecraft's ... construction in real life. "Meatcraft" is a collection of 1,500 cardboard blocks made using the textures from Minecraft. Visitors to the exhibit (shown at San Jose State University last month) were encouraged to build structures with the themed blocks on two crafting tables inside a fully Minecraft-ized room. There were even tiny little pixelated pickaxes and other tools. "We noticed several types of visitors in the gallery that very closely mirrored the different types of Minecraft players," the artists said on the project's site. "There are players who like to mine, some who like to build structures, and even some who simply stand around and watch the awesome things people do in game. In the gallery, those who were familiar with Minecraft began digging for ore, specifically the very rare diamond (we only had 4)." If you happen to run some kind of art space, and you'd like to turn it into a play space, you can contact the artists and set up Meatcraft in your own gallery.
Hulu blocked on the BlackBerry PlayBook, Android fans say, 'told you so'
In news that should surprise no one, Hulu has blocked videos from playing in the BlackBerry PlayBook's native browser, adding the tablet to a long blacklist of devices. But where there's a will, there's a way -- over at CrackBerry, one commenter reported success in emailing himself the embed code and then opening the link from his Gmail inbox. If that tedious workaround doesn't help, you're in for a lengthy, disgruntled wait for a change of tide-- right behind some very impatient Android users.
Interview with the creator of the Apple startup sound
We met them while they were shooting on the Apple Campus, and now the creators of the Dutch site onemorething.nl have posted their interview with Apple sound designer Jim Reekes (who also appears in Welcome To Macintosh). They met up with Reekes while at Macworld in San Francisco a little while back -- he's the guy that programmed most of the sound in the early days, including the famous Mac startup chime and the legendary "sosumi" chime. What's most interesting to me is all of the math behind it -- while making music is traditionally seen as an art, there's a lot of technical know how and information that actually went into the sound's creation. Essentially, you're creating a beep that has to represent a brand, and that mix of technical data with artistic representation is fascinating. Plus, Reekes definitely seems like a guy who's been around both the technical and musical blocks a few times before, and it's cool to hear him pontificate on all of the hard work he did back in the day. It's also interesting to see someone who has such a personal tie to a sound that is so ubiquitous and means so much to so many people -- an "ear-con," he calls it. Very nice interview.
Stacks plugin brings fluid layouts to RapidWeaver
If we've said it once, we've said it 1000 times: TUAW loves RapidWeaver. One of RapidWeaver's strengths is that it has an easy-to-use interface, but you can do some really, really powerful stuff with the program. Plus, the third-party network of plugins and themes is really, really top notch. YourHead Software, which makes some of my favorite RapidWeaver add-ons, has just released a new plugin called Stacks, which ups the ante on what you can do with RapidWeaver, without even having to mess with any code. Think of Stacks as a souped-up version of one of YourHead's other plugins, Blocks. Mat reviewed Blocks a couple of years ago and it remains one of the best RapidWeaver plugins around. Stacks takes the WYSIWYG drag-and-drop layout approach of Blocks, but adds support for fluid layouts (even if your theme has a variable width), nested objects, stacks within stacks, and more. I've been using the Stacks beta for the last couple of weeks and I have to say that it has opened my eyes to some possibilities with RapidWeaver that I hadn't even considered before. Traditionally, creating a different layout for each page is time consuming unless you rely on snippets or go with basic designs. Because I like to use RapidWeaver to rapidly prototype sites, being able to build out various layouts extremely quickly saves me time. As a demonstration, I created this page in about five minutes using Stacks, some graphics and Elixir's Twitter plugin for Stacks. That's another feature I like about Stacks -- there's an API -- so not only can advantageous users look at building their own elements for use in Stacks, RapidWeaver plugin and theme developers can look at using it too. Stacks can also use Loghound's excellent PlusKit so that you can embed Google Docs, other page types or elements and do lightboxing with your photos, all within Stacks. Stacks is $19.95 and it requires RapidWeaver 4.2.1 or newer to work. You can try the demo (direct link to DMG) for free and access all the features; you're just limited to a certain number of items on each page.
Henry Hatsworth not Layton arrival: coming March 2009
Though we jest about the similarities between the two prim, proper and perfectly portable puzzle-solving gentlemen on the DS, the truth is that Henry Hatsworth has a distinct and delightfully violent streak. His game, Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, not only features all manner of block-matching challenges, but simultaneously offers plenty of things to jump over, fight and shoot. Good show! Clearly, he's a man of both brain and brawn (we can relate!), and we'll be welcoming him onto the DS in March 2009. Oh, and don't you dare forget the "outrageous world-ending bosses." %Gallery-29502% [Via press release]
LEGO gets into classrooms with WeDo robotics systems
There was a time when the world was more innocent and Lincoln Logs in elementary classrooms were a given, but now that teachers are looking to squash every ounce of fun between 8AM and 3PM (okay, so maybe we just had a rough experience or two), LEGO's taking the back door in. The WeDo robotics kit is marketed toward elementary schools and the younger kids within them, with each package containing 158 blocks, gears, levers, etc., a USB hub for connecting to your Mac / PC, OLPC XO or Intel Classmate, a motor, one motion sensor, one tilt sensor and a CD with a smattering of sure-to-be-riveting activities. Mum's the word on pricing for now, but considering your tax dollars will be paying for 'em, it's not like you'll really benefit from knowing.[Via BoingBoing]
LED Alarm Clock Blocks are too pretty to smash
If you're a habitual destroyer of snooze buttons, there's at least a smidgen of a possibility that picking one of these up could stop that habit. Seiji's stylish LED Alarm Clock Blocks (¥8,190; $76) rely on a trio of LED-filled boxes to convey the time (right down to the second), and best of all, the trifecta can be arranged however you'd like (horizontally, vertically, etc.) in order to please your fuzzy eyes in the AM. Unfortunately, you'll still have to use that spare travel clock while this thing gets imported from Japan, but you know what they say about the early bird...[Via technabob]
Embed .Mac Web Gallery thumbnails in RapidWeaver pages
The new .Mac Web Galleries are great, but they unfortunately can only be built by iPhoto '08 and integrated into iWeb pages. Thanks to this RapidWeaver forum post from Günter, however, RW users have a trick for embedding those slick scrolling .Mac Web Gallery thumbnails into their pages. The trick more or less involves creating at least one or more .Mac Web Galleries, opening iWeb and using its new widgets feature to embed one of your galleries in an iWeb page, publishing to a folder and copying the specific piece of .Mac Web Gallery code out of that iWeb page and into a RapidWeaver Blocks page. It isn't exactly pretty, but I think I know of a way to simplify this process, at least for some of you. The way I figure it, if you're already publishing an iWeb page to your .Mac account with your galleries embedded in them, you can just open your iDisk and drill down to Web/Sites, find the page you published with that gallery code and simply grab it from there. No publishing to a folder and creating more junk to manage and delete, since you're already publishing those pages and code somewhere. As far as looking at the code on those pages, you can of course simply open them in a browser and use the View Source command, or you can find a text editor like TUAW favorite TextMate or even the free Taco HTML. For more questions on this you can try in the comments here since I know a good number of TUAW readers are also RapidWeaver lovers, but the original RapidWeaver support thread where I found this tip might be a better place if you want to get more thorough answers faster.
E307: Steven Spielberg Presents: Knock Some Stuff Over
We hate to be mean, but we have to wonder how closely the world's best-known film director was involved with the concept for Blocks. It doesn't exactly take the most creative person in the world to come up with "throw a ball at some blocks." We suspect that this one wasn't just phoned in, but phoned in by proxy by an assistant who was also on vacation. Either that or Spielberg has been cultivating this idea since he was 2 years old. Yes, the hyped PQRS project is Blocks, a puzzle game about knocking over structures of blocks by hucking stuff at them. Some of the blocks explode, some cause chemical reactions, and most just tumble. It looks like it would be pretty fun for a Flash game. The most interesting part of Blocks is the in-game level editor, which allows you to go all Incredible Machine on some block structures.
Jenga CONFIRMED
We recently reported that Atari would show a Jenga game at E3. We wondered if it was going to be just Jenga or some kind of expanded game based on the concept of Jenga. It's just Jenga.What does the Wii bring to the table (so to speak) that the original game doesn't have? Well, the ability to play Jenga on top of a castle, or in front of a lighthouse, or in someone's living room-- and the ability to do so as an icon of a snowman.Where Wii Jenga fails and real Jenga exceeds, however, is in the graphics. The original Jenga's wood texture looks absolutely lifelike, while the texture is quite blurry and unrealistic on the Wii.
The real Mario Party
There's a party going on tomorrow and the Tanooki got a sneak preview of the decor. It's a full-on Super Mario themed bash, complete with all the stuff you'd expect to find in a Mario game. This fantastic Chain Chomp piñata is just waiting to be smashed, hopefully by a jumping kid in a Mario costume. Seriously, if there's an invite going free, we'd love it.Head past the break for the giant Pirahna Plants and chocolate coins!
Beat Blocks melds wood and MIDI in rhythmic harmony
No doubt we've seen quite a few attempts to mesh MIDI with, um, just about everything, but Jess Hoefs' Beat Blocks creation certainly brings back fond memories of our childhood days. Based around basic wooden blocks, colored with blue tape and adorned by bottom-mounted sensors, the system functions when a block is placed into a sensor-laden cube on the board, sending a signal to generate a specific loop. The "tangible interface for a rhythm sequencer" utilizes MIDI and contacts in order to generate sound signals, and by re-arranging the blocks on the fly, users can mix up the beats and create quite the musical masterpiece whilst reliving their days of innocence. Jeff is looking to ramp up two different flavors, with one being of a smaller, more performance-oriented design, and a larger matrix board to accommodate "multiple users." So if you're still curious just how fiddling with toy blocks can actually create musical delight, be sure to hit the read link and surf over to the video demonstration.[Via OhGizmo]
German robotics group crafts LEGO factory to build... LEGO cars
It's one thing to craft something remarkable all by your lonesome, but constructing an entire factory to handle all the dirty work for you is really doing something. A robotics group assembled (ahem) at a German "grammar school" (VHG) in lower Bavaria has fabricated a feat that even Toys R Us would marvel over, as the group's expansive LEGO Mindstorm factory was built entirely out of LEGO blocks, and moreover, programmed to assemble LEGO-based vehicles. Taking a note from every other major assembly plant in the world, this automated construction site feeds blocks from one end to the other, carefully pushing, pulling, and connecting pieces as necessary to completely assemble a LEGO car. While we've no idea how you'd even begin concocting this same masterpiece at your own domicile, nor how tough it is to be admitted into this apparently incredulous university, you'll reportedly need at least 2,000 man hours and €3,000 ($3,937) just to get started, but feel free to click on through for a lengthy video demonstration.[Via MetaFilter]
Yourhead + Rapidweaver = WYSIWYG Goodness
After reading Michael's post about the new release of Sandvox, I realized we have never mentioned the excellent Blocks plugin for Rapidweaver from Yourhead Software. Now I have not played extensively with either iWeb or Sandvox, having been inducted into the Rapidweaver fan club even before they came out, but naturally I was very interested in their characteristic feature--WYSIWYG web page editing. The downside of those programs (at least as I perceived it) was that their very ease of use seemed to place more restrictions on what you could do with them as compared to Rapidweaver. Well, Blocks gives you the best of both worlds: Rapidweaver plus WYSIWYG editing similar to iWeb or Sandvox. We have previously mentioned Yourhead's Collage photo gallery plugin, and in addition to Blocks they also have several more excellent plugins, including the just released Carousel (an even better photo gallery) and Accordion (for easily making dynamic javascript page elements).To get a good sense of how powerful Rapidweaver becomes with these plugins be sure to check out the screencasts both from the developer and from Screencastsonline.If you're looking for a relatively easy to use website creation tool and want WYSIWYG page creation, be sure to add Rapidweaver + the Yourhead plugins to your comparison list. Rapidweaver is $39.95 (though it's also part of the soon to wrap up Macheist bundle) and the Yourhead plugins range from $9.95 to $19.95.
It's not Lumines, we swear
Puzzle Scape is an entirely original puzzle game coming out next month on the PSP. Published by O~3 Entertainment (not Q? Entertainment), the game has players arranging blocks into 2x2 squares. The game features 40 skins scenes which are interactive backgrounds that evolve.While this may sound entirely familiar, there are some features that make it somewhat unique: game sharing, eight player multiplayer, and the ability to save scenes as wallpapers.[Via PSP World]
