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Oaxis' health devices track your water, weight and workouts
You may not have heard of Oaxis, but it's determined to get on your radar if you're a health maven. The young firm is crowdfunding a Wellness Suite that includes not just the obligatory fitness bands (the O2 and Ji Cheng), but also a smart water bottle (the Vita) and a scale (the Glo). To us, the highlights are the non-wearables. The Vita helps track your hydration levels, and will tell you whether or not your water is both chilly and safe to drink. The Glo, meanwhile, keeps tabs on everything from your total weight to subtle factors like your body fat index and metabolic rate. Ironically, the bands are the most humdrum items here -- the Ji Cheng is a "fashion" band that measures daily activity, while the O2 is built for exercise with real-time heart rate updates.
WildStar explores the design of Veteran Shiphand missions
Veteran Shiphand missions are coming to WildStar, and that's great, but their design also posed a lot of unique challenges to the design team. Those challenges are outlined in the game's most recent development diary, starting with a core set of assumptions that had to be true for these missions: They had to remain scalable, they had to still be soloable, and they had to offer appropriate rewards. This meant making challenging combat that could scale up or down for party sizes and didn't require tanks, healers, or pre-made groups. To settle nicely into the gap between other solo content and Veteran Adventures, the Shiphand missions reward Renown even for solo play, as well as various appropriate bells and whistles for higher medal performance. Renown vendors will soon sell variety of gear as well as social items to ensure that playing through feels rewarding. Veteran difficulty will also offer remixed elements of the missions to give players a taste of something novel even if they've been through the base mission before. If you've been looking for more scaling content in the game, this one's for you.
Drop's internet-savvy kitchen scale is now available
If you're already fretting over getting a holiday dinner just right, you'll be glad to hear that Drop's smart kitchen scale is at last available. Plunk down $100 (£80) and you can both weigh ingredients as well as walk through app-based recipes that tell you when you have enough of a given foodstuff to move on. The scale also includes a few thoughtful touches, such as a "next step" button (to keep dirty fingers off your device screen) and its own timer. Drop won't guarantee that guests like your choice of dessert, but it'll at least make sure that you get the meal you were expecting.
PantryChic's Bluetooth ingredient dispenser is for lazy, type-A bakers
Earlier this summer, we showed you a smart kitchen scale that worked with an iPad app to make sure you were adding the right amount of each ingredient to your recipe. At the time, it seemed like the Internet of Things had reached its peak. Jumped the shark, even. Well, apparently even that requires too much effort. Meet PantryChic, an airtight food canister that dispenses ingredients into a digital scale, so that you never even have to break out a measuring cup. All told, if you were serious about your baking (and seriously OCD), you could buy any number of these stackable canisters, and fill each with a different ingredient, like baking soda or brown sugar. Then, when you need one, you attach it to the digital scale, which is pre-programmed to dispense 50 ingredients (meaning, it knows how to convert volume to weight). Oh, and don't worry about pushing any buttons: You can connect over Bluetooth using the PantryChic app, at which point the machine can "see" what recipe you're using and know, for instance, that you need three cups of flour.
Drop opens pre-orders for its smart kitchen scale, early-bird price is $80
Hey, not all of us are Marissa Mayer -- most of us don't have the time to make a spreadsheet outlining the optimal ratio of cupcake ingredients. If you never know which recipe to trust -- or you're simply afraid of screwing things up -- a startup called Drop hopes to take the pain out of baking. The company just launched pre-orders for its connected kitchen scale, which not only weighs ingredients, but works with an iPad app to serve up curated recipes, complete with photos of what the food should like after you complete the different steps.
EVE Evolved: Designing EVE Onland, part 2
When it comes to living sandbox MMOs, there really isn't a bigger name than EVE Online. Throughout its decade-long history, EVE has produced some huge gaming headlines, delivered record-breaking in-game thefts and heists, and played host to the complex political machinations of dozens of warring alliances. EVE's sandbox design has even made it remarkably resistant to changes in the market, with subscription numbers remaining relatively stable in the face of new releases and the free to play phenomenon. It comes as no surprise then that the sandbox genre is seeing a triple-A revival, with games like Star Citizen, EverQuest Next Landmark, and Camelot Unchained on the way. With the sandbox genre due to explode back onto the fantasy scene, I've been left wondering how much of the core gameplay that makes EVE tick could be easily adapted for an avatar-based game on land. Even features such as EVE Online's trademark territorial warfare and player-run economy have roots in classic fantasy MMOs like Ultima Online, so they should be easy to convert to modern fantasy equivalents. Last week I started this game design thought experiment with a territorial warfare system and free-for-all PvP with harsh consequences for attackers, but there's a lot more to a good sandbox than smashing people's heads in. In this week's EVE Evolved, I delve into the hypothetical world of EVE Onland again and tackle issues of realistic world scale, exploration, economics, and the evils of global banking.
Game dev story: The final, agonizing moments of a Kickstarter campaign
When a Kickstarter campaign enters its final seconds, the page begins counting down in real-time. The widget that normally displays the number of days remaining for a project switches to read out seconds, starting with 100, 99, 98, 97 .... "Two minutes to go," says Steve Swink, the creator of Scale, over a Skype video call. "I just want balloons to come down – oh. It transferred to a second count. It's counting down 100 seconds. That's weird." Swink started the Kickstarter campaign for Scale on October 17 from his house in Tempe, Arizona. He watched the project's final seconds tick down on November 16 from an exchange house outside of Stockholm, Sweden, where he and his fiancee, Gravity Ghost developer Erin Robinson, were staying to teach a three-week college course on game development. Though he'd just spent more than 20 hours traveling across the world, Swink stayed awake to watch his Kickstarter page, pointless as that was. "I've been up for like 30 hours, I think," Swink said, with 15 minutes to go on the Scale Kickstarter. "It's pretty gnarly. Actually, I feel happy. I just have the Jurassic Park theme running in the back of my head the whole time .... There's not really anything I can do at this point. It's like Pinewood derby: I feel like I got my car all ready and everything, I sanded it down, and I just pushed it down the hill a while ago. I've kind of just been blowing at it and I don't think it's doing anything." Scale is a puzzle exploration game starring a genius ex-con with a gun that can shrink and grow everything, with the talents of Ashly Burch of Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'?, Sarah Elmaleh of Gone Home, and music from FTL's Ben Prunty and Super Meat Boy's Danny Baranowsky. It ended up raising $108,020 of a requested $87,000, so whatever Swink did (or didn't) do worked.
Adventurous sizing puzzler Scale tips past funding goal
Imagine Portal, but in a whimsical dreamscape, and with a gun that can make anything larger or smaller at will. You're getting closer to imagining CubeHeart's Scale, a game that will transcend imagination and enter reality after achieving its $87,000 Kickstarter goal this week, with just days to go. That means the ambitious-looking first-person puzzler is on its way to PC, Mac, Linux, and Steam Machines. Scale is based around a prison break, admittedly a very bizarre-sounding prison break. The game's heroine is Penny Prince, the inventor of a powerful resizing device who accidentally uses it to destroy the entire east coast. She's convicted on more than 9 million counts of "Depraved Heart Murder," but manages to construct a makeshift version of her invention and use it to escape. The game seemingly follows her exploits as she searches for freedom - and her confiscated cat. There's still time for CubeHeart to hit some stretch goals, with the $100,000 target for Oculus Rift support looking eminently realistic. At the other end of the Scale, the $200,000 goal for a PS4 version looks out of reach.
Runtastic's Libra scale tracks bone and muscle mass, ships mid-November for $129
We've seen connected scales that provide oxygen levels and heart rates, but they have nothing on the sheer range of data coming from Runtastic's imminent Libra scale. In addition to basic weight and body fat measurements, the Bluetooth-based sensor can also calculate body mass index, bone mass, muscle mass and body water content. Got all that? As you'd expect, there's a mobile app to process the flood of information; it's iOS-only at launch, but the company promises an Android equivalent in early 2014. Runtastic ships the scale itself in mid-November for $129.
Scale tells a tale of prison break, atomic science, a cat
Take a moment to watch this trailer for Steve Swink's Scale. You're welcome. Scale takes cues from Portal and The Swapper, blending first-person scientific gunning with a mysterious, whimsical setting ripe for exploration and adventure. Players embody Penny Prince, an inventor jailed for accidentally destroying the east coast with a gun that sucks the size out of objects and injects that mass into other things. While imprisoned, Penny slaps together a hodge-podge sizing gun and escapes with the rehabilitative therapy coordinator living in her brain, seeking freedom and her cat. This is the first declaration of the narrative driving Scale since its unveiling at GDC 2012: The fresh story details come from the Scale Kickstarter, launched today and seeking $87,000 over one month. The game has players resize objects, animals and worlds to solve puzzles and uncover secrets in a beautiful 3D environment, all while the makeshift sizing gun becomes increasingly unstable. Scale is the brainchild of Cubeheart Games, led by Swink, with voice work by Ashly Burch of Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'? and Sarah Elmaleh of Gone Home, and music from FTL's Ben Prunty and Super Meat Boy's Danny Baranowsky. Scale is due out for PC, Mac and Linux, and Swink is sure to point out that Linux support means Scale is coming to SteamOS and Steam Machines. Check out the Scale Kickstarter details here.
The union of Scale, Gravity Ghost and the indie devs making them
Scale and Gravity Ghost share a surprising number of characteristics, especially considering how different their core mechanics are. They're both serene, soothing experiences, at least at first: In Gravity Ghost, players control a girl as she flows around the gravity fields of planets, searching for her fox, collecting stars and bits of the universe that were destroyed in a recent black hole. It's a physics game and an odd type of platformer, and it can be a simple exercise in circling planets or a completionist's dream, completely up to the player. Scale is a first-person shooter, but the gun is a shrink-and-grow ray, allowing players to suck the size out of one object and blast it into other objects. Doing this, players can either complete esoteric challenges or simply play around in bright worlds of flowers, pretty houses, green grass and happy trees. Gravity Ghost and Scale are made by Erin Robinson and Steve Swink, respectively, and both games were selected to participate in the PAX East and Prime Indie Megabooth this year. Robinson and Swink both live in Arizona, in the same city, in the same house, and they have been dating for four years. This month, they got engaged. To each other. See – so much in common.
Phoenix Art Museum hosts indie game showcase on Sept. 21
The Phoenix Art Museum will be overrun with 20 indie games from local developers on September 21 from 10AM to 4PM, the final weekend of the museum's The Art of Video Games exhibition. The Arizona Indie Game Showcase is hosted by the Phoenix IGDA and Game CoLab, a productive collective of developers in the city. Scheduled for display at the showcase is a slew of high-profile indies, including Indie Megabooth participants Gravity Ghost from Ivy Games, Scale from CubeHeart Games and Aztez from Team Colorblind. Other developers include Kyle Pulver (Offspring Fling), Corey Nolan (Growing) and Abstrakt Games (Protein Pirates), with music madness in the hands of Adventureface. Connect with the Game CoLab and RSVP for the Arizona Indie Game Showcase on Meetup.
How a couple of indie devs snuck into E3
Two days before E3 began, Steve Swink and Erin Robinson finalized plans to attend the convention. They packed their laptops with the latest builds of their games, Scale and Gravity Ghost, threw some clothes in a suitcase, and started the six-hour drive from Phoenix, Arizona to Los Angeles, California. This is a process similar to what thousands of developers go through before showing up at E3, but there was one thing different about Swink and Robinson's trip. They didn't have passes.
Yahoo buys social gaming software company PlayerScale
While Yahoo was in the news recently for its acquisition of Tumblr, it was also busy buying up another company this week: PlayerScale. PlayerScale's CEO Jesper Jensen announced the company's acquisition on its official site. Founded in 2011, PlayerScale creates software that aids developers in scaling their games across social, mobile and casual platforms, including XBLA, Facebook, the iOS App Store and Google Play market. Its service has over 150 million users across 4,000 titles, according to the company's site. Hard numbers on how much Yahoo spent to pick up PlayerScale, as well as Yahoo's plans for social gaming going forward have yet to be revealed.
Researchers help give the kilogram a fundamental equivalent
Much to the consternation of scientists, the cylindrical platinum-iridium artifacts that represent the kilogram (see image above) have been gradually packing on extra weight due to surface contamination. Since that unit of measure is the last to be based on an artifact and not a physical constant of nature -- for instance, a meter is the distance light travels in a vacuum during 1/299,792,458 of a second -- it means that scientists no longer know exactly how much a kilogram is. That makes experiments requiring extreme precision more difficult, so researchers from Mettler Toledo, CERN and the EPFL have been working for the last 15 years on a so-called Watt balance, which works on the principle of electromagnetic force restoration. The team managed to created a "load cell" that's accurate to a 0.3 µg resolution for a 2kg weight, well below the desired level of 1 µg -- meaning the goal of replacing a hunk of metal from 1878 with something more, ahem, solid is within reach by the 2015 target date.
Chef Sleeve's Smart Food Scale sends nutritional info to your iOS device
Seeing as how Chef Sleeve is best know for its combo cutting board / iPad stand, the company's latest product isn't a huge leap. Sadly, the it didn't actually have a prototype of its Smart Food Scale at its booth here at TechCrunch Disrupt, but we did get a chance to chat a bit about the product, which just had its Kickstarter page open up. The device is a food scale that communicates via Bluetooth with your iOS device. Put the food on, input what it is and it will send that information to your iPhone and iPad. The app offers up USDA nutritional information, letting you keep track of calories, fat, vitamins, minerals and other information. The company's also looking to expand the functionality of the software, to open things up to chefs and other folks who might appreciate such info. The Kickstarter page still has 29 days left to hit its $30,000 goal, and pledge of $79 or more will get you access to the scale. When it hits retail, it'll run closer to $99.
Samsung Galaxy S 4 wireless charging pad and S Health scale hands-on
No phone launch is complete without a few accessories added to the mix. Samsung had a whole bunch to announce alongside its Galaxy S 4, but only a few were on hand to check out up close and personal. We did, however, find a nice surprise hiding under those glossy white table covers -- a wireless charging pad. Yes, it turns out the the GS 4 does in fact have Qi wireless charging capabilities. Provided its available in your region and your carrier chooses to support it. The charging pad itself has a glossy plastic base that matches the phone, but there's a nice rubbery gray top that keeps the handset from sliding around too much while it's juicing up. We also got to check out the companion wireless scale that looks quite a bit like the Fitbit Aria. Though, with a square LCD and a healthy-sized Samsung logo on it. The scale is just one part of the larger S Health equation which also includes a Jawbone Up-like monitor (S Band), which was sadly nowhere to be found in the demo pit. The scale of course sync with the baked in S Health app over Bluetooth, which makes it quite a bit easier to track how that diet of yours is going. In addition to simply tracking your total poundage, there will be bands for tracking heart rate and the S 4's various sensor can help judge the comfort level of your environment. The requisite glut of photos can be found below in the gallery.%Gallery-182903% Edgar Alvarez contributed to this report. Check out our event hub for all the action from Samsung's Galaxy S 4 event.
Wahoo's Balance Smartphone Scale ships today for $99
Remember that Bluetooth-enabled smart scale from Wahoo? The one with the companion iOS app to keep you motivated? It was meant to ship in the first week of December, but that timeframe turned out to be as accurate as weighing yourself while leaning against a wall. Nevertheless, the device isn't too far behind schedule: the company just let us know that it'll start shipping today and will definitely reach customers before the holidays. In the meantime, stay tuned for our hands-on with the rival WS-30 scale from Withings, which should go up on the site in a couple of eons around lunchtime. Correction: We initially reported they'd ship tomorrow, but we're told that devices are actually departing from warehouses on this very day.
Wahoo Fitness launches a Bluetooth smart scale for $99
With its new Balance Smartphone Scale, Wahoo Fitness clearly has designs on Withings' corner of the fitness gadget market. There's no phone dongles or shoe clips here -- simply step on the scale and your weight will be recorded and synced to the companion iOS app. The Balance can record up to 130 weigh-ins before needing to push the information to your iPhone or iPad via Bluetooth, which you can then share with the usual cloud services (should you need further reason to feel ashamed). The scale can manage the profiles of up to 16 different users and keep tabs on everyone's weight and BMI goals. Unlike its competition, there's no WiFi option, which means you can't sync your shame directly to the web. But, having to take the intermediary step of pulling out your phone presumably has helped the company shave the price down to $99. You can pre-order the Balance now for delivery the first week of December.
IndieCade at E3: Sizing up Scale
I also ran around the IndieCade tour at E3, and while our own Jess Conditt took a lot of creepy pleasure in the grim philosophical horror title A Mother's Inferno, my tastes ran more simple and colorful: The best game I saw in that section of E3 this year was called Scale.Scale, developed by Steve Swink (who teaches interactive design in Phoenix, but might be better known as Kyle Pulver's roommate?) is similar to Portal, which is a quality ascribed to a lot of great indie games these days. That's not surprising, given that Portal was also an indie student project, before it got processed through Valve's chaotic engine of creativity. Scale is similar to Portal in that it too has a gun that doesn't kill, but is instead used to manipulate a colorfully-rendered 3D world.Portal, it could be said, played around with the functions of space, creating portals to bypass and bend it. Scale, on the other hand, is all about that stuff in between space. Namely: mass.
