It seems the interwebs are awash with the horror of a much revered franchise, Star Wars, over stepping the mark of good taste and decency with respect to its characters. The recent Kinect Star Wars appears to not just be the light sabre and force push gestures that fans were looking for, but instead has thrown in some dancing sections where you get to boogie on down with Han Solo and the Princess.
After the backlash of the recut Darth Vader “Nooooooo!” moment and the amazingly tacky Vodafone Yoda adverts, combined with PC World representing the Evil empire it seems that nothing is sacred in Star Wars anymore.
It is easy to get po faced about the seriousness of a beloved icon that many of us grew up with, I was 10 in 1977 when Star Wars came out so it, along with Star Trek and Blakes 7 shaped what I do. I have fond memories of the characters and of the science. Games and games marketing has often had bad film tie ins, yet Star Wars has generally had a good run. The Star Wars lego games in particular would at first seem a disruptive cash in but they played more to playfulness of recreating the Star Wars universe as we all did after we had seen it for the first time and played Jedi. They are tongue in cheek because they are outside the actual virtual reality of Star Wars. The video above though is aiming to be photo realistic, not a lampoon and, along with Yodafone take something away from a cherished experience that then gets tainted with a cashing in bad taste.
For once I decided not to pre-order a game and left Star Wars Kinect for another day. I had heard tales of the content and style and I thought do I actually want to pay for the privilege of being annoyed by how a game does not fit.
This is an example of the sort of crossover that we often talk about not doing in Virtual worlds. Whilst people want content from place x in place y, unified avatar logins etc they really can mess things up for everyone culturally.
A crossover that does work is Little Big Planet Muppets. In a way this is like Star Wars Lego in that it is a cartoon lampoon of the muppets. Of course the Muppets are themselves cartoon lampoons so it manages to re-enforce the fun that is the Muppets. They are comedy characters that are based around odd things happening. Yoda was of course heavily related to the Muppets too. I think though that along with not doing appalling film tie ins of films there should be a responsibility to a brand to not overdo its game ripping off. It used to be the case that light sabres were not allowed in gamer controlled characters as George Lucas held them up as a higher order device that you needed to be a real Jedi to wield. That may have been to far the other way, but it seems he has given up and is just raking it in now which is such a pity.
As you can see above this is great fun, a fantastic blend of the muppet look and the homemade Little Big Planet materials.
I can’t wait to see a remix of this brilliant song done as “Are you a Han or are you a Muppet”
Teaching Programming and Tech at School – Can I?
We are seeing more and more good articles and the beginning of some motion towards us being able to teach kids programming and related technical skills in school. Things such as this article from the guardian. We see role model comments and I was also doing my bit by introducing all sorts of accessible future tech on kids TV.
However I thought I would look at me doing a bit more, I have already signed up as a STEMnet ambassador and I do a lot of talks for people. People have often suggested and commented I would make a good teacher. So I thought with all this need for experience, technical awareness, future thinking I would see what options there might be for me to move into teaching.
Surely, all this talk of closer links to industry, bringing experience into the classroom etc would be there on the home page of the Department for Education Teaching Agency?
But no 🙁 Good encouragement to be a Maths teacher, A physics teacher, chemistry or Modern Foreign Languages (MFL). All good subjects. Also active encouragement to convert to teaching from the armed forces.
Nothing about the business of powering and using technology.
Now most subjects do need to use tech so it could be excused as all this will be part of the entirety. However the specifics of computer science are not represented well or at all.
So which teachers are going to be the ones showing kids about open source projects, online etiquette, contributing to projects, building hardware with arduino, rasperry Pi, creating virtual worlds with OpenSim, games design, virtual good markets, social implications of computing etc…. Who are the teachers who are helping the next generation of makers with 3d printers?
I am sure it will come, but right now it is not there in any official capacity. Should I try and create it ? or wait until called? Maybe I need to send someone a Fax to ask?
6 years in Second Life – Rez Day again – Constant change
Another year passes! Certain milestones in life act as reflective placeholders. When I started work full time in 1990 it would be unlikely to be celebrating, or even mentioning that you had been with an online service for any period of time. Computer systems were tools, things that you happened to use. You did not commemorate 2 years since your first email. However that was before we started to interact and have very deep experiences online. Interacting directly with other people, with personas, with environments. So it is now 6 years on I am able to happily shout that its my 6th birthday there.
A lot has also changed out there too. For instance, this birthday snap was taken in Second Life, but then posted to the Second Life personal web profiles, then curated (the new word for shared bookmarking 🙂 ) on Pinterest. Where it is then disseminated to both twitter and Facebook. Our virtual worlds were never really supposed to be isolated islands in the digital landscape, despite the use of islands to represent server space in this particular metaverse. It was always about integration. The integration of our thoughts and ideas with one another, mediated by rich digital channels.
Source: my.secondlife.com via Ian on Pinterest
Oh it is fun too despite that elaborate description 🙂
These environments, and the ones they evolve into and the new ones that get created are offering us richer and richer ways to meld our minds. Of course in the meantime we have to let everyone evolve their own digital persona through twitter, Facebook and now curation. Some forms of interaction become fire and forget, whilst others rely on conversation and personality. The great thing is we have lots of options, not one tool to communicate. Long may confusion reign. Not least so I can help people make sense of it as I find out for myself where this all goes. Constant change continues.
Spot the connection – 3d printing and toys
The last few weeks an interesting set of 3d designs appeared that have certainly got people thinking about the potential of modding and changing, mashing and merging elements together. It is the Universal Construcion Kit.
The Free Universal Construction Kit from Adapterz on Vimeo.
It does have an unusual acronym as the Free edition but all the pieces are there to download as open source designs
Being able to print just the right piece you need to mix Lego and Kinex is really intriguing. (not to self get soldering on the control board of your reprap !)
The great thing about the physical world is that it is starting to alter how people may see terms and conditions on software and other designs. Is this a breach of your Lego EULA to connect it to a competing plastic toy? Will the companies welcome this interoperability or seek to stop it through legal approaches? It has a correlation with what we see on other devices and software, that you must not modify or use in a way it has not been intended. However this clearly cannot be policed or enforced on kids toys as kids play with what they want in ways that suit them, not ways that suit the toy or toys.
So we could all learn a lot about modding and making from kids and be inspired by this particular development
Could this be the next Kinect?
I just ran into this video in several places, but props to Torrid Luna on google+ it shows a scatter approach to being able to reconstruct images of things that are hidden from view. I.e. see around corners.
It is a much more complicated and precise piece of equipment than the Kinect, but it shows an interesting future of being able to see and detect things close up that we could not detect before. We have come a long way from radar just a out detecting incoming planes during the second world war to being able to reconstruct things that are obscured from view. It is an interesting animation and presentation style too.
Outsourcing your brain
Last night on BBC Horizon there was an fascinating programme on the role of the unconscious mind. One of the most stunning pieces was at the end when Prof Paul Sadja of Columbia university showed how they are researching opening up the power of the parts of the brain we don’t know we are using.
As I am interested in how we communicate digitally at distance, and in person, and how we get ideas from one brain to another by transforming them this was bang on target for me, as in my very often used presentation slide 🙂
It was explained as something that is simple to do, and in principle it may well be, but it is still fascinating. A cortically coupled computer vision!
The principle was that a large hi res image needs to be analysed for anomalies. Scanning across the image consciously is tedious, difficult and inefficient.
So instead the professor wore an ECG headset, not unlike an Emotiv headset. He got a reading from the headset of the aha moment when he saw the sort of thing he would need to see in the image.
Then, and here is the clever bit, they broke the image into hundreds of individual and random chunks. The images were then blipped in front of the professor. His brain would spot the anomalies by generating the same aha spike as the control image without him even knowing. So relaxing and letting the images flow over him allowed the entire target image to be evaluated.
This was then put back together and the hot spot areas of interest highlighted.
It was stunningly accurate.
Many of us know that the best ideas come from the sub conscious when we are not forcing them to arrive. This brain outsourcing proved even more power sat there to be discovered.
There is an article here in case the iplayer link doesn’t work to see the actual thing.
Monkeying around in a virtual world
MonkeyQuest is a kids virtual world well worth taking a look, from Nickolodean, as it has quite a few things going for it.
1. It’s created in unity3d which is always great to see
2. It has great high end cute visuals
3. It is a Free 2 Play
4. It’s a side scrolling MMO platformer
It is a simple platformer at its heart with some very accessible (for younger kids) puzzles and collections.
It has a constant RPG style levelling up system and lots of things to earn and buy to custom up the your very own monkey.
As you are playing and moving around the lobby style areas you see lots of other fellow players, and some of the level gates need 2 players to work together to get through to them.
There seems to be a large crafting section too though we have not needed, not come across the tutorials for that yet.
Both the predlets have got into playing. Of course being f2p it is enticing with memberships just as club penguin, moshi monsters and bin weevils. It remains to be seen if we need to do that, a bit more free playing first I think.
As usual with these things they are in the world but I signed up to see how the game works and so we can work out together the level of communication and friending. it is always good to gauge this and help set some parental rules.
You sign on is separate from your monkey, it uses a fixed names list in 3 parts to let you have some control over the monkey name without giving details away. Though you will see from the image above mine is called Elvis Wildswing.
When I said it was a 2d scroller the visuals are very 3d but you traverse in 2d occasionally moving in or out of the screen to a new 3d plane. It does give a good sense of depth and avoids any confusion about moving around in full 3d.
I am looking forward to seeing how this evolves and what else there is to play in there, in particular when they get to the crafting.
See you in there?
Adaptive camouflage – Hiding in plain sight
This is a great piece of inventive marketing combined with a use of technology that has been talked about in labs and a few high end demos.
It is basically taking what is behind an object and bringing it forward onto the screens. Giving a form of invisibility.
Earlier this year BAE unveiled its shapeshifting adaptive camouflage,primarily for infra red spectrum that re-emit a different signature for a military asset. Making a tank look like a car, but putting large pixels on the side of the tank.
So you can’t always believe everything you see. It is a kind of live photoshopping!
Free Unity3d for iOS and Android
I noticed a few tweets on the #unity3d hashtag about there being a free licence for the already free Unity3d for iOS and Android. Sure enough if you pop along to download Unity3d at the store you can add the ability to publish directly to iOS and Android. (offer expires april 8th 2012)
I already have the iOS basic licence and unity3d installed so it was a little less clear what to do.
On the store page there is a licence upgrade link in there you have yo paste in your existing licence number then you are able to “buy” for free the upgrade you need.
Unity will then send you a new licence number that you reactive in the unity client with the menus unity/serial number and away you go you now have targeting for publishing to web, windows, mac, iOS and android all enabled.
What are you waiting for ? It is a brilliant dev environment.
NB. As I point out at conferences when I rave about it I don’t work for unity3d I just really like what they do 🙂
Thinking out of the music box – Physical/Digital blur
A rather brilliant use of Quadrocopters has been doing the rounds this week with this James Bond theme. It is a very physical creation of music, powered by robotics but with the jeopardy of free flying and the physics of the real physical world thrown in.
It is mesmerising and obviously very geeky!
This expansion of the old fashioned music box principle, with mechanical parts playing notes based on their physical spacing in a roll of punched paper, or as pins in a metal drum out is always being expanded. Many people are thinking out of the very literal music box.
Along these lines is the wonderful car driving video from OK Go, exponents of the unusual video.
Notice this even starts as a music box principle on the front of the car before becoming stunningly huge in its layout and concept.
Many of the games that have any sort of sound capability and user created content or modding often end up with layout builds of music machines too, as we see in Minecraft
This gets taken to an even further extreme with games like FRACT osc which is shaping up to be a stunning game set in a musical synthesiser world.
This is looking really interesting. This level of creative interaction is all part of the waves of Maker Culture in an unusual form.