September 24, 2009 by sean.

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August 29, 2009 by sean.

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August 18, 2009 by sean.

This brings back some late 80’s memories…

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July 25, 2009 by sean.

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July 19, 2009 by sean.

Ze Frank talks with host Jesse Thorn about creativity, what works on the internet and why, and being a traffic whore. Plus a whole lot of other stuff, like rubbing his head on the microphone.

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April 1, 2009 by sean.

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March 31, 2009 by sean.

Some language may be offensive to some listeners. Either way, not a good idea to have the song in the second half of this video playing in the workplace.

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March 17, 2009 by sean.

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January 25, 2009 by sean.

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December 1, 2008 by sean.

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November 12, 2008 by sean.

The future-predicting technology that drives the premise of the sci-fi blockbuster Minority Report is silly at best. And when the film hit theaters in 2002, the gadgets seemed pretty unrealistic, too. But eerily enough the slew of dreamed-up gizmos showed off throughout John Anderton’s daring escape are hardening into reality. [via wired]:

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September 27, 2008 by sean.

Entertaining look at living in the GooglePlex [via gizmodo]:

The first Android phone is dropping next week, and the people who pick it up will be toting around mobile Google software in their pocket wherever they go. They’ll be using mobile Google apps, probably in concert with using Gmail, Gcal and Google Maps on their normal computer. We know that Google is tossing out all user data after 9 months, but you’ve got to wonder what kind of a picture Google is getting of its heavy users like that when it’s only getting info from how its apps are used. After the jump, an imagined day in the life of a Google user, as recorded and perceived by the Googleplex itself.

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September 21, 2008 by sean.

From virtual pets to virtual boyfriends [via techcrunch]:

In Japan, girls are crazy over virtual boyfriends. Webkare (Web Boyfriend in Japanese), a mix between a social network and dating simulation site, is Nippon’s newest web sensation. Geared exclusively towards girls, the site attracted over 10,000 members just 5 days after its release on September 10, racking up 3.5 million page views in the same time frame.

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September 7, 2008 by sean.

Rap about world’s largest science experiment becomes YouTube hit [via Daily Telegraph]:

After 14 years, the European particle physics lab near Geneva, known by its French acronym CERN, is preparing to switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), designed to seek out new particles including the long-awaited Higgs boson responsible for making things weigh what they do, the possible source of gravity called dark matter, as well as probe the differences between matter and its “evil twin” antimatter.

Now a larky but accurate rap song explaining the point of the 17 mile circumference machine, which formally starts up on September 10, has made a star of Kate McAlpine, 23, aka “alpinekat”, who stars with her friends in a YouTube video that has been downloaded more than 400,000 times.

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August 9, 2008 by sean.

Wired Magazine reports on how “swimmers, cyclists and even gymnasts making the most of tech — and legal — performance enhancements” [via Wired.com]:

In order to make perfect strokes during training, the U.S. crew team members watch their progress on a VR-style goggle set that receives a live feed of their movements as they row. With this feed, they are able to see instantly if their torsos are misaligned. By evaluating themselves in real time, the rowers learn to perfect their form. Once the race starts, however, they’ll ditch the glasses.

Posted in science, fun, bionics | No Comments »

July 28, 2008 by sean.

Don’t really have much more to say about “pitvetising.” [via Endgaget]

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February 21, 2008 by sean.

Daniel Terdiman of CNET writes about the new Emotiv “headset that seems a little like the one from the James Cameron-written 1995 film, Strange Days, complete with a set of sensors that are built to read your brain waves.

The software then is designed to interpret those brain waves in such a way as to allow users to manipulate objects onscreen with nothing but their mind.

Posted in fun, neuroscience, augmented cognition | No Comments »

October 16, 2007 by sean.

Clive Thompson investigates the science behind Cory Doctorow’s fiction:

This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative’s birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up. [via Wired]

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October 14, 2007 by sean.

I recently created a YouTube playlist re: Augmented Reality content including some amazing material from Total Immersion:

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September 15, 2007 by sean.

Bernie DeKoven of The Coworking Insitute describes “coliberation“:

How we have found a viable alternative for everything that people used to call “work.” How we join each other in some kind of virtual, actual coworking effort, coworking environment, doing something together for fun, on this particular page of the world wide web, thinking about making it more fun, and maybe even profitable for people to work together. [via smartmobs]

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September 14, 2007 by sean.

Wired Wiki: HOWTO Amp Up Your Brain

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July 24, 2005 by sean.

“Game hackers have probed, tweaked and enhanced everything from Halo to The Sims 2 over the years without incurring the wrath of game makers — despite widespread click-wrap contracts prohibiting unauthorized modifications, and ambiguities in copyright law that make distributing the hacks legally uncertain.” /Wired News/

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May 25, 2005 by sean.

“Ultimately we’re talking about creating characters, worlds and systems that have the flexibility and generative power of simulations, but are designed to temporally progress at a good pace, perhaps integrated with drama management, to keep the pace of the experience moving forward and avoiding play that devolves into repetitive, rote labor or long stretches of inaction.” /Grand Text Auto/

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May 21, 2005 by sean.

In Will Wright’s new game Spore, “You start off as this insignificant bit of bacteria and you grow and evolve through advantageous mutation that the user determines through an engine that Wright has designed that has different parts (depending on stage of development) that you can add on and manipulate, like size for example. As the slide states, you go from being bacteria to a galactic god.” /Cool Hunting/

“When he fantasized about Spore years ago, Will Wright admitted, ‘My own imagination was my biggest bottleneck.’ He encouraged designers with ideas for games that are far outside the box not to give up on those ideas, but instead to cultivate them and revisit them later, when the time, the team, and the technology might be right. The demonstration of the ’stellar zoo’ that is Spore might have given hope to a new generation of game designers.” /GameSpot/

“The whole concept was dependent upon this technology that did not exist, what I’m calling procedural animation. The fact that the player can create any creature, and then we figure out how it would walk and move and behave.

“We went through all the research work in that field that we could find, and we ended up having to go several years beyond it to get to where we are, to where we felt confident that we could solve this problem to the level to where we can base a product on it.” /Wired News/

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March 21, 2005 by sean.

“Recently I’ve been thinking about text-only work. It seems there are great opportunities here… of course, we could also use text-only interfaces such as SMS and IM. While I don’t know any SMS novel projects that encourage us to message back, it could certainly be an interface for these projects.” ” Grand Text Auto/

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March 16, 2005 by sean.

“Do games tell stories? Answering this should tell us both how to study games and who should study them. The affirmative answer suggests that games are easily studied from within existing paradigms. The negative implies that we must start afresh.” /Games Studies 0101/

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March 14, 2005 by sean.

“Greg Costikyan — the award-winning game-developer — recently brought down the house at the Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco with a speech calling for games to be created outside the burgeoning, strangling ’studio system’ that’s cropping up in gameland. Now he’s posted a request-for-proposals on this — a public discussion aimed at mining the web to see what comes up…” /Boing Boing/

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March 12, 2005 by sean.

“Alice continues to take fantastic, exhaustive notes at the Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco. She’s just posted her notes from the closing panel in which eminent game developers were invited to rant about the state of the industry. What follows is lewd, hilarious, and very, very true” /Boing Boing/

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March 3, 2005 by sean.

R. Garry Shirts wrote a great article on the Ten ‘Mistakes’ Commonly Made by Persons Designing Educational Simulations and Games.

“If someone were to ask me to identify the mistakes most often made by game designers, including myself, I would, after assuring myself that the questioner understands that game design is a very personal activity and that there are no right answers, reply in the following dogmatic manner…”

Shirts is also the author of Ten Secrets of Successful Simulations:

“The most satisfying experience in training or education, no matter what the subject, is the so-called ‘Aha!’ moment, that instant when sudden, spontaneous insight cuts through the tangle of loose ends in a learner’s mind to reveal a simple, memorable truth.”

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