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Uber drivers in India will start collecting area data to improve safety
Uber's connecting with a crowdsourced safety app and, eventually, local government to help improve conditions in New Delhi, India. The company announced a partnership with SafetiPin, a firm that collects location-based info and offers a "safety score" for a given area. The idea is that Uber's "partner-drivers," as the company calls them, will start collecting nighttime safety information throughout the New Delhi area -- a city where an Uber driver was accused of rape last year. Since those allegations surfaced, the company has announced various efforts to improve passenger safety in the Indian capital. In fact, Uber's partnership with SafetiPin closely follows the company's addition of an in-app "panic button" for the area earlier this month.
Police think Waze's traffic app puts officers in danger
You may use Google's Waze app primarily to avoid traffic jams and watch out for speed cameras, but some American police see it as a threat -- and they want Google to do something about it. Officers speaking to the Associated Press believe that Waze's police finding feature, which is mainly meant to warn about speed traps, makes it too easy for would-be cop killers to find targets. These critics hope to muster support from law enforcement groups and push Google into disabling the feature so that it's not relatively trivial to "stalk" uniformed people from a phone.
Music MMO Anthymn rebrands and preps Kickstarter campaign
After falling well short of fundraising goals in 2013, music-focused Anthymn is gearing up for another shot at a Kickstarter campaign in the near future. The title has rebranded itself as Maestros of the Anthymn, and according to its Facebook page, it is getting ready to make the case for crowdfunding. "To all of our amazing friends and fans -- we are proud to formally announce the name of our upcoming Kickstarter project," String Theory posted. "Welcome to Maestros of the Anthymn, a groundbreaking episodic adventure of song, sword, and sorcery for PC and Mac. Stay tuned later today for our big update on the game, our vision and what's next for the Kickstarter launch plans!" It is unclear whether or not Anthymn will be retaining its MMO focus or going another route entirely with this rebranding. The original concept was for an entire fantasy world where music and magic infused entire nations and where every class had a musical focus and theme.
Collaborative mapping project will chart the Amazon's rivers
Crowdsourced mapping efforts are helpful in many places, but they're most useful in corners of the globe where even the professional maps are incomplete -- you can address gaps in coverage that might be difficult for distant observers to fill. And OpenStreetMap knows it. The community-driven site has just launched Mapazonia, a project that asks you to help chart the Amazon's rivers and roads. It's not expecting comprehensive data when the area spans 2.1 million square miles, but it believes that your first-hand knowledge could put missing towns on the map and fix inaccuracies in the shoreline.
Make My MMO: October 12 - 18, 2014
This week in MMO crowdfunding news, Kickstarter hopeful Seldon Crisis came back to earth when Isaac Asimov's estate took issue with the developers appropriating the Foundation IP. Star Citizen, meanwhile, showed off some spiffy planetside gameplay as well as a full livestream recording of its recent Citizen Con event. Oh yeah, and Skara: The Blade Remains moved to Steam early access. Click past the cut for the rest of this week's MMO crowdfunding roundup.
Scientists want you to find cosmic rays using your phone's camera
Cosmic ray particles hit Earth's atmosphere all the time, but finding them is tough; even the most sophisticated detectors can only cover so much ground. Scientists at University of California might just have discovered an easy way to pinpoint these exotic elements, however: the camera on your smartphone. The team's upcoming CRAYFIS (Cosmic Rays Found in Smartphones) app looks for high energy particles hitting the camera sensor on your device as soon it's both asleep and charging. While one phone wouldn't collect much data by itself, a gaggle of them would be extremely powerful; 1,000 phones in a square kilometer (0.4 square miles) would capture virtually every particle zooming overhead. They could actually be more effective than existing detection arrays, which tend to oversaturate quickly.
Make My MMO: October 5 - 11, 2014
This week in MMO crowdfunding news, Ascent got itself a new Kickstarter. The sci-fi title's been playable for a while now, but Fluffy Kitten Studios is aiming to improve both its visuals and its UI. Star Citizen surprised a few people by condoning the grey market surrounding its pricey pretend spaceships, and chairman Chris Roberts made additional headlines by reiterating his desire for a virtual world as opposed to a virtual shoot-'em-up. You'll find the rest of this week's crowdfunding wrapup after the cut.
NASA challenges you to design experiments for Mars and beyond
Want to play a significant role in NASA's space exploration efforts without spending years in training? You now have a better chance of making your mark. NASA has launched Solve, a site that makes it easy to find all the agency's public competitions and crowdsourced projects. You'll mostly see previously announced efforts there right now, but the inaugural offering is definitely worth a look -- the $20,000 Mars Balance Mass Challenge asks you to design an experiment or technology payload that will double as ballast on future Martian explorers. You'll have until November 21st to submit your brainstorms, and you'll find out if your work is Mars-bound sometime in mid-January.
Shroud of the Avatar preps PvP update and asks for player music submissions
Shroud of the Avatar is ready to pull the trigger on Release 8 and the game's PvP system. Release 8 will come out next week and feature a massive host of PvP changes that have apparently gotten the dev team hooked. "The team's 30 minute PvP play sessions every morning are growing longer and longer as we're having too much fun to stop," the devs wrote. Portalarium is also putting out a call to the community to help crowdsource Shroud of the Avatar's soundtrack. The team has a list compiled to guide player composers in creating and submitting their own music for the game.
Shards Online opens website with 24 hours left on Kickstarter
As of this writing, Shards Online has 24 hours remaining on its Kickstarter program and has yet to break a quarter of its funding goal. Odds are that it's not going to hit that marker, although fans are encouraged to jump in and donate while the campaign is still running. But the team at Citadel Studios isn't giving up on the project and has launched a website for the game devoted to all things related to Shards Online. Despite what you may have suspected from the last paragraph, the page is not currently fishing for donations. The team will be holding the game's first community roundtable discussion on June 13th, starting at 8 p.m. EDT, when the developers will discuss what comes after Kickstarter and why there are no plans to ask for funding on the site directly. It'll be worth watching if you're a fan of the game -- and if you're a fan and still haven't donated, now is the time to do so. [Source: Citadel Studios press release]
This is the wild work of art the internet asked for
The internet produces some strangely wonderful things when you ask it for input -- just ask anyone who saw Twitch play Pokémon. If you need more proof, though, you don't need to look any further than artist Ben Redford's crowdfunded opus, Internetopia. The bizarre-yet-beautiful drawing is the result of Redford agreeing to draw whatever online contributors wanted in the space they were willing to pay for; every dollar paid got a 1.5 by 1.5 inch piece of paper. It took three months to finish, but it's arguably worth the effort. You'll see Futurama-style heads, a plea to save a racetrack, and seemingly everything else in between. Only a fraction of the final piece is visible above, but you can check out the project in all its glory at the source link. And before you ask: despite the internet's propensity toward porn, all but three of the requests are safe for work.
Trove empowers community to pitch biomes and classes
Trion Worlds is empowering the Trove community even further by inviting players to pitch ideas for a new biome and class to be added to the game. A Reddit thread has the details of how this process will unfold. Players will begin by brainstorming ideas for biomes, and after some time, the dev team will pick the best (and top-voted) submissions and allow players to vote on the very best one. Following that, the team will poll players for decorations, dungeon designs, and enemy ideas, and then get the biome into the game within the month. There are also plans for a similar pitching-and-voting process afterward in regard to a new class. On a phone call, Trion told Massively that it's looking to push the crowdsourcing aspect further and further as time goes on. The team is incredibly impressed with what the community has created so far with weapons, hairstyles, dungeons, and hats, and it can't wait to see what comes from this experiment. One thing that the team revealed is the upcoming addition of music blocks: Physical objects that make notes (and even chords) when walked on. We asked if Trion was looking to crowdsource the soundtrack for the game as well, and while the devs said that no players had yet stepped forward, they promised that if some did with great tunes, those would definitely be included into the game proper.
Pantheon's website wields crowd development tools
Visionary Realms is hoping that players will step up to contribute more than just money to Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. The studio announced today that it is structuring its website so that it can be used for crowd development going forward. The studio said that it wants to involve the community in the design and development of Pantheon with these tools. Fans can use the website to contribute to the wiki, talk with the developers, vote on Think Tank issues, create guilds, write blogs, and be a part of weekly roundtable discussions. [Source: Visionary Realms press release]
Twitch slays Pokemon after two weeks of non-stop action [Update: New game on Sunday]
The livestreamed crowd-play event Twitch Plays Pokemon has ended, as thousands of players pooled their efforts to defeat the Elite Four in Pokemon Red. The game was completed after 16 days of consecutive play and saw over 35 million viewers during that time. Twitch Plays Pokemon is a Pokemon Red mod that allowed Twitch viewers to control the game's main character Red by entering commands in the streaming platform's chat window. The event began on February 12 and reached 75,000 concurrent viewers after five days of play. There were plenty of doubts that players would even be able to cross the Safari Zone in the game, let alone view its ending credits, though the game's creator told Joystiq that "even when played very poorly it is difficult to not make some progress in Pokemon." The community that gathered around Twitch Plays Pokemon upheld a narrative that extended beyond Pokemon Red's initial scope and included the Twitter-trending Bird Jesus (Pidgeot) and the spiritual consultant and deity Lord Helix (Omanyte). Joystiq also talked with MIT associate professor T.L. Taylor about the event's place in network and game culture, who said it tapped into "something I think is very compelling. So I don't think we're going to see [crowd-play] go away as a genre." Considering how entertaining this has been, we certainly hope not. Update: As it turns out, the Twitch Plays Pokemon stream now features a countdown timer ticking away roughly 26 hours and 25 minutes as of this writing that notes, "A new adventure will begin." That pegs the start of what seems to be the next version of Twitch Plays Pokemon at 7:00 a.m. EST Sunday morning. [Image: The Pokemon Company]
The Daily Grind: Do you enter MMO design contests?
The Star Citizen community is in the midst of coming up with some pretty amazing designs for the game's Next Great Starship contest. Cloud Imperium's space sim isn't the first MMO to offer players a chance to get their creations in game, though. EVE Online has hosted a similar contest in the past, and SOE is of course collecting a ton of community-made assets both in Landmark and via its Player Studio initiative, so it's clear that content crowdsourcing is here to stay in one form or another. What's less clear is how the community feels about it, and how many members of said community participate in it. Fortunately we have The Daily Grind, in all its completely unofficial and unscientific polling glory. What say you, Massively readers? Do you enter MMO design contests? Have you ever won? 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!
Picture This is a crowdsourced scavenger hunt app for iPhone photographers
Picture This is a new iPhone app for social photographers that presents you with a different photography challenge each day. Though the daily scavenger hunt challenges are a blast, there is more to the app than the app itself. Picture This has a unique background. It was a crowdsourced effort that emerged from Dandy, a Canadian mobile development firm. Dandy allows people to submit app ideas to a community of users who vote and offer feedback on the project. The most popular app ideas then will be chosen for development. The startup's first project is Picture This, a photo scavenger hunt app idea submitted by Niger Little-Poole, a 19-year-old Columbia University student. Dandy coordinates the development and shares the revenue with the people involved in the app, including Little-Poole. The Picture This app provides you with both daily and ongoing photography challenges like the "Office Whiteboard Doodle" or "View Out the Window." You can submit your photos to a challenge and have the community vote, leave comments and share your creative efforts. You earn badges for your photos if they are the first in a challenge or become popular among the community. Like most crowd-enabled apps, Picture This requires an active community to keep it going. The app launched following a successful beta, which had a dual purpose -- it helped the developer work out the last-minute kinks and worked to build a small, but growing community. The trick in the coming months for Dandy will be continuing this momentum so the community continues to grow. You can check out Picture This for free from the iOS App Store. It requires an account if you want to participate in the community, but you can skip the account sign-up step if you prefer to poke around the app and see what it's all about.
Obsidian CEO eyes a quick return to crowdfunded games
Though the newly-titled Pillars of Eternity has yet to debut, Obsidian Entertainment is already working on ideas for its next crowdfunded roleplaying epic. "What I'm trying to figure out is, how could we make something that is more like a Skyrim for PC – forget console for now – with the engine we made in Unity for Eternity?" pondered Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart. "Where we are with our conversation, quest, data editors, and all of that. If we were careful about scope and let Chris Avellone go wild with creating a new world, more of an open world, what could we do?" Good question, but given Avellone's earlier epic roleplaying games, giving him free rein could very easily result in George R.R. Martin-style roleplaying game that's 500 hours long and involves 200 different characters. Even with modern technology that's not feasible. Solution? Episodic games. "Would it make sense for it to be episodic? Because going out there and saying, 'We're gonna make 100 hours of gameplay,' everyone goes, 'Oh my god, how could it not cost millions?" states Urquhart. "But could we create ten hours and have people pay ten bucks? And generally when we say ten hours, it's usually 15. But if we go with five episodes, then people get between 50 and 75 hours." Obsidian's plans are actually further along than anyone suspected, and as Rock Paper Shotgun grilled Urquhart, he let slip that the company is working toward creating a game based on a licensed property. "There's something we're talking about that I think would be really cool, but it's not an original property," said Urquhart. "It's a licensed property ... It's something we can still do a ton of creative stuff with, though. And then the other thing is an original property. Also, there's a third thing that somebody approached us with, but I really don't think that's going to work out." It appears that the massive outpouring of crowdsourced cash and support has emboldened Urquhart and his colleagues at Obsidian. There's no telling which of these project they'll aim for once Pillars of Eternity is complete, but we can always cross our fingers for a new Planescape: Torment, huh?
Planetary Resources and NASA team up to crowdsource the search for asteroids
Planetary Resources really wants to mine asteroids for valuable materials, but first it has to find them. So the company is partnering with NASA on a crowdsourcing project that would put the American public to work identifying and tracking near-Earth-objects (NEOs). All the data generated will be open sourced and made publicly available on the web. The effort will center on a series of challenges and contests designed to lure in citizen scientists and the results will be reviewed by Planetary Resources. Obviously, the company will be looking for mineable hunks of space rock, but it will also be giving back to the scientific community by using the data it collects to improve algorithms for detecting asteroids. And, obviously, the more of those we're able to detect and track, the less likely we are to be caught off guard by a meteorite apocalypse. To be notified when the program kicks off, sign up for more info at the Planetary Resources site.
Weather Underground iPhone app gets crowdsourced weather, iOS 7 style
Weather Underground, now part of the Weather Company that also encompasses the Weather Channel, has just delivered an update to its free iPhone app. Not only does the update provide compatibility with iOS 7 and a new look to boot, but it also adds something completely different -- crowdsourced weather reports. Weather Underground currently uses a network of about 19,000 personal weather stations across the USA and 11,000 elsewhere on the planet to provide accurate local forecasts. Now the service will ask users to report and verify weather events through a simple interface, and other users can view conditions that were observed within 10 miles of their location. The Weather Underground weather map -- aka "WunderMap" -- has always featured a number of layers that can be turned on or off, including precipitation, temperature, wind, radar, cloud cover and more. The crowdsourced information now appears on a separate layer. The app also adds a landscape mode, more interactive graphs showing data trends, history and forecasts, more webcams and access to weather-related videos. As before, the Weather Underground app is available for free from the App Store.
Foursquare gives Superusers web links to map editing tools
Foursquare switched to editable OpenStreetMap data for its check-in services over a year ago, but many of its users wouldn't know it when there hasn't been a way to tweak maps through place pages. As of today, Foursquare is encouraging a little more interaction: Superusers (frequent contributors) in Australia, Brazil, Germany and the UK can now click a web link to edit a location in OpenStreetMap. Those who aren't keen on signing up for OSM can still leave a note with their proposed changes. There's no mention of plans to expand access to regular users, but the firm expects additional rollouts to Superusers in areas where map data is less than trustworthy.