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Sony's SmartAR demoed live, raises the bar for augmented reality (video)
Remember Sony's SmartAR? The markerless AR technology that promises reality augmentation without the need for unsightly tattoos? It's back again, showing itself once more after an all-too-brief 48 hour layoff. A new live-demo shows Sony's markerless object recognition system focusing on posters, tables, books, and coffee cups in lieu of the traditional AR card -- allowing it recognize multiple objects at once. Focusing on objects rather than markers allow augmented entities to interact more naturally with their environment. For instance, bouncing AR balls plummet off the edge of a table, and realistically ricochet off of a book placed in their path. Objects don't even need to remain on screen, as demonstrated by an AR pop-up menu that remained viewable even after the object-marker that spawned it left the viewer's field of vision. Sony seems to have built the groundwork of an augmented reality system that might actually be useful -- pair this up with a set of swank AR glasses (or better yet, holographic AR glasses), and we'll have a vision of the future we can really look forward to.
Sony SmartAR delivers high-speed markerless augmented reality, blows minds (video)
Some may agree that over the years, augmented reality's been slowly losing its appeal given its sometimes laggy and unreliable performance -- most implementations require a weird marker to be in clear sight, and the graphics rendering speed on your handheld device would rely on your slow and steady hands. As such, we were initially skeptical when Sony's SmartAR announcement came along; but as you can see in the video above, said technology took us by surprise with its super slick responsiveness, and the markerless object recognition makes a compelling hassle-free selling point. What's more, the same clip also shows off SmartAR handling large 3D space with ease -- notice how the virtual objects continue to animate even when the original anchor object is out of sight. Sony hasn't given any dates here, but there's no doubt that once SmartAR is available to game developers and advertisers, it'll rake in some nice pocket money for the electronics giant.
DC Universe Online developers having a chat with fans tomorrow
Are you enjoying DC Universe Online? Would you be enjoying it even more if you had a chance to speak with the developers about what's on deck for the near future and what issues will be getting addressed soon? If so, you're in luck (and you have some strangely focused sources of happiness, but that's not really germane to anything). The team announced earlier today on the game's Facebook page that this Wednesday will see the first post-launch virtual chat with development. Jens Andersen, Chris Cao, and Mark Anderson will all be on hand for this chat, starting at 8 p.m. EST (5 p.m. PST) on Facebook. The chief focus of the discussion will be on the game's recent February update, covering what went right, what needs more work, and what the team has learned from the first patch in what's sure to be an ongoing update cycle. So if you're a DC Universe Online fan, with or without the oddly specific criteria, you might want to clear out some time tomorrow evening to catch up with the development team.
25 iPads used to make one big interactive touch display
This is awesome -- a group of musical composers and artists connected up 25 iPads in an installation commissioned by the Environmental Ministry of Japan to create a huge display 25 touchscreens big. Not only do the iPads stream one big image, but they're also interactive -- you can speed the image up or down by swiping, or even change each iPad's individual view. Each iPad also starts out playing one tune, all of them together in harmony, but as visitors come along and change the views and the speed and tone of the music, you eventually get 25 different sounds being played with 25 different views, a metaphor for how each of us affects our own little part of the world as we move through life. The challenge, then, is to get the iPads back together, all in sync, and rebuild the world that we each claimed a little part of. You can watch video of how the installation works after the break, and there's also a hands-on video with a little more technical background on the project. It's very cool -- a project like this would be much more expensive (and probably a lot harder to do) without Apple's own magical and revolutionary device. The iPad keeps surprising us with all of the various ways it can be used to create and display interactive art.
The Daily Grind: What do you really think of your game's community?
It's a fact of life that community is the lifeblood of any MMO. While a bad game can be salvaged with a group of fellow players to whom you've grown attached, a good game can be utterly destroyed by a bad gathering. As a result, most of us generally say that we have at least a passable community within our games of choice. But let's be honest -- there are communities that don't so much resemble a group of gamers as a batch of particularly unruly howler monkeys with worse social skills. We've all played games with a supposedly "great" community that seemed snobbish and elitist, and games that supposedly have an awful community but really aren't that bad. Even World of Warcraft can be seen as a game with a good community if you only focus on your friends, despite the wide-ranging belief that the community is immature at best. So leaving aside the people you usually group with, what do you think of your game's community as an aggregate? Is it a good environment for other players, or do you try to stick to your own little corner of the larger playground? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
TUAW's Daily App: Monster Feed
Monster Feed is a colorful little tower defense title for the iPad, and it's a little more action-based than most TD titles. A lot of your interaction with the oncoming hordes is actually interactive, as you have not only towers to build and grow but also spells and even summonable minions fighting with you and at your side. Monsters have a few new tricks, too -- rather than just blindly following the paths, some will require you to tap on them or otherwise keep them back as you play. There are a few good ideas in the mix, and especially if you're a fan of the growing tower defense genre, this one seems like a must-see. The iPad app is on sale right now for US $1.99, which is 50 percent off of the usual price. If you don't want to jump right in, you can try a lite version for free. And while the app isn't on the iPhone yet, we're told that it will be soon. If you want to try tower defense with a little bit more actual interaction, give Monster Feed a look.
Multitoe floor shows us the logical next step (video)
If the toe mouse just wasn't grand enough for you, how about an entire floor to practice your foot-based inputs on? Researchers at Potsdam's (that's in Germany, yo) Hasso Plattner Institut have put together a multitouch floor that recognizes individual users by their shoe pattern and responds to such universally familiar actions as stomping your feet and tapping your toes. The so-called multitoe project works on the basis of frustrated total internal reflection, which allows it to ignore inactive users while being precise enough to recognize foot postures. Follow us after the break to see this back-projected proof of concept in action. [Photo by Kay Herschelmann]
TUAW First Look: Digg's iPhone app
Digg released its official iPhone app this morning, and after playing with it for a little while, I can tell you that it does what it says on the box: it will let you browse, interact, and comment on the popular news aggregator without many problems (there was one major issue -- I'll mention it in a second). However, in general, the app isn't all that different from the interface they released a while back. Sure, there are a few app-y touches, but mostly the app just feels like a Digg-specific browser. I suppose that's what they were going for. The app works pretty easily -- you can dive in and view the top, recent, or upcoming stories in any of Digg's categories, and clicking on each headline sends you to an in-app browser with the page displayed (as best it can be -- of course Flash movies don't work, and lots of the really popular links on Digg are murdered via bandwidth already). At the bottom of each page, you'll find buttons to like or dislike the story (sorry, Digg or Bury), a button to save the story if you're logged in to your Digg account, and the option to share the link. When you select the share option, you can send it off to the iPhone's clipboard, Twitter, Facebook, or Email.
iPad devsugar: Three lessons from the iPhone
In pixel-terms, the iPad offers a much larger workspace to develop on than the iPhone but in terms of the human experience, it's not that very far away from iPhone programming. The two share an underlying operating system and a large overlap in human interaction realities. Here are just three of those overlapping iPhone development realities. Consider taking these ideas into account as you're building your new and updated applications for the iPad. Human fingers are big. Although the iPhone has a much smaller screen than the iPad, the size and shape of the typical human finger does not change between the two devices. Do not design interaction elements for the iPad smaller than, say 40-by-40 pixels in size. When in doubt, design larger rather than smaller. The iPad with its larger screen is more likely to be held further away during use than the iPhone, which is often raised fairly close in during use. Build your on-screen objects accordingly. With its 1024x768-pixel screen, the iPad has the room for clean, large interaction elements. Use that space to better compliment the human finger. Attention spans are short. Like the iPhone, expect your users to approach the iPad in a sporadic netbook-style fashion. Design your applications around short interaction periods and prepare for your application to be cut off as a user stands up to grab his next Orange-Cranberry Frapaccino. Always save your application state between sessions, as much as you possibly can. A well designed app should relaunch quickly and, upon relaunching, approximate the same task your user was performing the last time the program was run. This can demand diligence on the part of the programmer, but is worth the time investment due to the payoff in user satisfaction. One more tip after the break! Thanks Scott Lawrence, |Agent
Facebook vs. World of Warcraft
They both have millions of users across the world. They both have made and broken friendships and relationships, and they both have raised millions if not billions of dollars for their respective companies. And chances are that they're both so popular even your grandma knows about them. Gamasutra has written an interesting post comparing both World of Warcraft and Facebook of all things, and they say that the two are more alike than you might think: both enable you to create an identity, and use that identity to interact with others, and both give you a wide variety of options to do so (in WoW, you can slay dragons together, and on Facebook, you can tag pictures or post on walls). Gamasutra wants to get to the center of where exactly the interactivity lies, and in doing so, figure out what makes Warcraft a game, and Facebook a network. One major difference is in the interface -- obviously, WoW is wrapped in a fantasy world, so that in between all of the socializing, you're also fighting the Scourge or the Burning Crusade. Facebook has games, but it doesn't have that overarching narrative. WoW also rewards group teamwork and coordination, while Facebook leaves collaboration to its own rewards. And of course the cost is another big difference: WoW is still a subscription game, while Facebook pays in other ways. But the amount of similarities between the two are pretty fascinating. And comparing the two, as Gamasutra does, really makes you think about just what interactivity means, and how two apparently very different types of interactive media aren't that far apart after all.
How we learn the jargon
We get a lot of requests here on the site from researchers trying to study you World of Warcraft players. Everybody with a research grant, apparently, wants to study you -- your psychology, your interaction, and the relationship you have with your avatar. We get so many requests, actually, that we usually have to pass -- we're not smart enough to choose which ones are legit and which ones aren't, and if we posted them all, we'd do nothing but post requests for survey answers all day. But I like the way alckly has done her research over on WoW Ladies LJ: she posted a question about WoW jargon, and you can see everyone's answers right away. We definitely have lots of jargon to go around, from LFG to twinks to PuGs and a lot more. But what's most interesting about all of these answers, to me, is the way it spreads. There's a little bit of Googling and research going on, but really it's a very social thing -- you see "wtb" in the trade channel, and then you ask someone you know what it means (rather than looking it up somewhere else). Thus, definitions of the terms are very organic: "pst" could mean "pssst, here's a whisper" or "please send tell," and yet because they both mean the same thing, both meanings propagate. Likewise, usage tends to be a very social thing -- the person who types "LFG strat need heals" won't type "would u like 2 go to strat?"
All the World's a Stage: Player housing, interactivity, and other possible features
All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles. Playing Warhammer recently has made me think of more features that WoW could add in order to create a better roleplaying experience. Far and away the most important one, to my mind, was the Tome of Knowledge. WoW players really need an in-game resource they can refer to as a standard for information about the Warcraft universe, and having this at hand, roleplayers could do a lot better than they can today. Knowledge is the most important thing, of course, but there are other features Blizzard could add to the game that would help roleplayers too. I'd like to address a few of these things, and see how much they could really do for us. Player housing is a possible feature that gets talked about a lot, but I have my doubts as to whether or not it would really help roleplayers all that much. Another issue is one that is more important to me personally, and is another feature inspired by my trial with Warhammer Online: looking at interactivity between characters.
IDT to swap solar cells into LCDs, but not for energy reasons
Solar-powered LCDs? Oh, yeah -- we've got those. Sadly, that's not at all what Integrated Digital Technologies is aiming to improve upon next week at Computex, though we still find its approach to trimming LCD weight and manufacturing costs an interesting one. If we're digesting this correctly, we're hearing that the outfit plans to create interactive displays (or iScreens) that have embedded solar cells in the TFT array rather than extra film or glass with photo sensors. The result? A cost savings of up to 30 percent in manufacturing, not to mention a rather significant decrease in weight. Without any images to go by, it's still a wee bit tough to really wrap our heads around this new take, but hopefully we'll see more next week in Taiwan.[Via TG Daily]
UNLV researcher studies WoW social interaction
The University of Nevada, Las Vegas' student newspaper, the Rebel Yell, has an article up about a student there named Michael McCreery, who's studying how people interact in online games. Unfortunately, most of the article is about the game itself (most of which we already know, obviously), and there's not much about how he actually did the study: apparently he had people play WoW using only the ingame chat, and surveyed them afterwards about it.How exactly that tells you how to "quantify the social interactions of participants in the game so that future online games can build better environments," we have no idea, but we'll leave that to the experts. Basically, McCreery and his team are examining how people use and interact with others in the game to see how we project ourselves and our characters.Eventually, he wants to do something "education or therapeutic" with the information, though that too is left pretty open. Virtual environments like World of Warcraft do definitely engender ties between players -- is it possible that those ties can be used in an academic or therapeutical setting? Definitely an interesting line of research.
Braid creator rips on WoW, talks artificial rewards and social gaming
In an interview with Gamasutra, game designer Jon Blow (who created the critically acclaimed Xbox Live Arcade game Braid) had a few things to say about World of Warcraft. His criticisms could be just as easily leveled against any Diku-based, WoW-like MMO.He began by saying that WoW employs "artificial rewards" as opposed to "natural rewards." In other words, players play WoW for achievements like leveling up that have little real meaning, and they'll sit through a lot of boredom to reach those goals. That's not an unfair analysis; leveling up is a very empty and artificial kind of catharsis. Perhaps the most controversial statements he made were related to the social aspect of the game. One of Azeroth's millions of citizens? Check out our ongoing coverage of the World of Warcraft, and be sure to touch base with our sister site WoW Insider for all your Lich King needs!
Video: Ganzbot reads Twitter feeds aloud, looks fashionably low-rate
We've seen methods for hooking house plants up with their own Twitter account, but there's hardly anything more satisfying that building a robot to read back all those feeds from the thousands of people you're undoubtedly following. Ganzbot is a decidedly low-budget robot that relies on an Arduino Decima to control the head actions and a USB cable to receive up-to-date status information. Have a look at the innards as well as a few words being spoken just after the jump.[Via MAKE]
Australian TV covers World of Warcraft
Fortunately, this "mY Generation" show from Australian TV is a little more fair with WoW than the last bit we saw. Though the stereotyping of an entire generation and the video effects grate after a while, it's a generally better look at what it's like to be a World of Warcraft player. It would be nice to see, for example, these kids going out to a movie occasionally or interacting with other people (since most of WoW's population actually does that), and it would have been good to hear from more than just that scientific woman talking about the average playtime -- why all the focus on how many hours /played these people have and not what it feels like to play during those hours? But as far as mainstream reporting goes, it starts out as a pretty good description of what it's like to be a WoW player.Part 2 and part 3 start to fall down, though, and by the time an intervention rolls around, the show gets a little more biased. I have to say, it would be fun to see a documentary done in this way for someone who watches TV 20 hours a week -- "We wanted to hang out with her, but she said the season finale of Top Model was on. She's a completely different person now!" Somehow, staring at a screen and doing nothing is still socially acceptable, but according to television itself, staring at a screen and interacting with other human beings isn't.Thanks, Luke S.
Age of Conan on single player mode
Age of Conan has gotten an intense amount of exposure lately on virtually every site that covers games. You might have noticed. The influence of AoC is ever-present, burned into the retinas of most of the Massively team as they slash their way through Hyboria. The title seems to have breathed new life into massively multiplayer spheres, with people everywhere either talking about it, reading about it, or playing it. While the AoC launch went smoothly, this is not to say that the game itself is perfect. Psychochild takes Age of Conan to task in his latest Weekend Design Challenge, for what he perceives to be a potential flaw in the game's design: much of the low-level experience, despite being a massively multiplayer title, is essentially a single-player game. He contends that the point of online games is to interact with people in one way or another, but the difference between instances in AoC is literally night and day. Night quests give personal instances that are wholly isolated from other players. This creates a split where daytime quests are multiplayer; night quests are single player. While a benefit is that players can opt for the night quests to take on their own spawns unchallenged by competitors, doesn't this defeat the purpose of AoC even being an MMO title?
Have Clone, Will Travel: Ambulation in the EVE tutorial
EVE Online is like no other MMORPG. In this sci-fi virtual world you are your ship, and the ship is you. Indeed, despite the fact that a great amount of time is spent creating a specific look for their avatars, many new players are surprised to see all their efforts being wasted, once they realize that their avatar ends up being nothing but a small head shot. This is one of the major differences between EVE Online and the rest of the MMORPGs. You are not your avatar. But that is about to change.Most MMORPG players enjoy associating themselves with their characters, but for the last 5 years, EVE capsuleers have never seen theirs, nor have they had a chance to control its movements. This deficiency has been recognized by CCP, the developers behind EVE. After looking into the matter, they came to the conclusion that it was hard for their players to emotionally identify themselves with a spaceship, especially the female minority (about 20%).Ambulation is CCP's answer.
Eye Gaze project to enable the disabled
Someone is always working on a way to let differently-abled people interact with virtual worlds and games. This video shows someone playing World of Warcraft using a system called the Eye Gaze, which tracks eye movement and somehow (I'll say magically) converts the signals into mouse clicks and WASD movement.This could be big for people with conditions that affect motor control, such as muscular dystrophy or polio. There's also a Second Life demonstration video. Though the team's website is currently down, there's a lot of food for thought in these videos. I can see a system like this dramatically improving quality of life for people with crippling disabilities, and also for, as one commenter put it, 'insanely lazy people'.Videos after the break![Thanks, Aki!]
