At the Develop conference this year I was asked if I minded doing a quick interview for http://www.gamecareers.biz/ so I popped along and this is the result.
We had a very quick chat before and then we just blasted through in 1 take 🙂
I am in good company if you look at the actual site here
Between Colin Anderson of Denki and Mick Hocking of Sony.
The BCS and its role in careers may be of interest or resonate with some games industry people looking for some structure.
I am pleased with the points I got across too. Thanks to @davidsmithuk for putting this together and asking such good questions in the interview.
All in the aid of AR research
Here is another reason I should probably stick to using an avatar! This is AirBand on the Xbox Kinect. Which ever instrument you mime, guitar, drums or keyboard it picks up your position and lets you play the track (its kind of like a paperjamz guitar).
I hope mistsuzuki racing doesn’t mind the product placement of their shirt and logo in this piece 🙂
If you are having trouble with Kinect labs BTW, as it currently bluescreens for a lot of people then you can launch Air Band from the quicklaunch via the silver button menus, the save for Avatar Kinect.
I was trying to get footage of the predlets but they were getting so into it it was impossible to dive in and hit save on the video.
It is a pity you cant really play much in teh way of music it is a sequencer volume control, but can you imaging trying to do this 10 years ago? Brilliant fun and shows that AR doesn’t have to be all marketing and mapping
Expiranting on Nymwars with Avatar Kinect
Here is an experimental rant (expirant, of sorts) about Nymwars and why different identities are a choice we should be able to make. Using an avatar and a live recording starts to mix the virtual and physical. It is the same in any virtual world but I thought I would kill two birds (one real and one virtual) with a (mesh) stone and record something using Avatar Kinect which lets you use your body to puppet the avatar.
Just saying we should all have a direct tie to a physical face or name at all times it just plain silly. I guess most of us out here know that, but it has generated a lot of discussion on the web.
Real and Virtual game merging – 3D print armour?
I was just catching up on the gamescom content on Xbox Live and amongst all the variants of Call of Duty and other shooters there was a trailer for Skylander:Spyro Adventures
I must have missed this too in the E3 2011 press as it is an interesting evolution of the offline/online interactions in games. The game comes with physical toys, 3 or them who are characters from the game. They are amongst a large set of character collectibles. So unlike many games now with DLC that you buy to unlock new features, here you get a toy that act as your unlock. Now we have seen things where the to has a code on it to unlock features, kinectimals being the most recent and some of the pet virtual worlds with cuddly crossovers. This toy is, however, active. You place it on a peripheral base and that detects the toy, but the toy (or some online key combination with the specific instance of the toy) keeps its stats and experience. The aim being you can take you version of the toys to a friends has, and play on.
Again this is not totally new (what is!) as the old dreamcast version of Sonic had a Chao “Tamagotchi” in the VMU (a detachable battery pack/and LCD mini screen on the controller). That was of course a good few years ago, before we had such great connectivity and high end consoles.
The merging of online and offline and considering your brand and the experience as a real interlinked one is certainly a growing business direction in entertainment. Just take a look at how huge Moshi Monster has become (you can find mine at http://www.moshime.com/epredator). Much of this comes from the idea that things are experiences to be shared wherever you are. It is ironic that the video games that were once though to be isolationist, selfish experiences once connected to the internet have become a massive social movement with a knock on into what people might think of as regular product.
You can probably see too that the natural extension of this online/offline activity is for the online activity to create the offline for you with 3d Printing. It would be great with this Spyro example if after playing it was obvious you character had levelled up as you toy now had some new armour on it you got from your friends 3d printer after playing the game?
A very clever realtime 3d scanning using kinect
SIGRAPH 2011 always brings out some very interesting tech. I always think of it as being mainly high end very expensive leading edge graphics. This year though some researcher have provided something very cool and useful that side steps the expensive LIDAR scanning process to capture full 3d environments using just a (now) humble Kinect.
Point cloud data is often used to capture environments that already exist and then it is generally turned into a polygon mesh to be manipulated and re-rendered. Second Life is famously moving from its prim based display to start to allow these polygon meshes as that has been the traditional way yo show games graphics. However this is could all be up in the air a little with the guys at Euclideon who have this newer approach to rendering. Rather than polygons they use an atomic approach. it is really a 3d pixel or voxel.
So look out for Euclideon and their technology, it is an exciting time to see new and interesting ways for us to both create, interact and modify environments.
Both advances have implications for merging real and virtual spaces in either direction as part of augmented reality.
Inclusive gaming – An inspirational project
At Develop last month I got talking to the guys on the stand for the SpecialEffect loan library project 2011-2013. @SpecialEffect is a charity which aim to make all games accessible to everyone. The library aspect is to provide specialist controllers, emrging technology solution and software patches for young people with vary degrees of accessibility issues with games in particular.
SpecialEffect Loan Library Project from William Donegan on Vimeo.
The charity points out that many games can be too quick or difficult to play for many young people with disabilities. They aim to either provide new interfaces or changes to the games, or actually tell people which games already are playable with suitable settings for specific needs of a specific audience.
If you think about it this can be as easy as providing subtitling on dialogue to hearing impaired, or enough changes in speed and skill level to allow the game to still be enjoyable and a challenge.
On the stand there where examples of console games adjusted to take single oversize reactive button input, or shoot em ups that had context sensitive directions. It was very inspiring and thought provoking.
We have often talked about the affordances virtual worlds give us, a digital environment, haptic feedback etc all providing ways that anyone could interact. The reality though is that accessibility is not a focus of mainstream gaming, but Specialeffect are pushing the right direction.
There is also a games database called gamebase that indicates what features existing games already support to help people understand what can be done with them.
It is well worth checking out, and considering.
Fly like a bird – robots can
TED videos are always amazing but this physical demonstration of a robotic bird in flight is quite remarkable. It is the experts at Festo at work again.
There is more on the project and all its related cleverness here
The future of Virtual Worlds in your hands : vPEARL summit
Septmber 2011 sees an even in L.A. It is sponsored by the IEEE but it is not about the usual technical interchange standard. 
Instead it is about getting people from diverse fields and setting then some social challenges in a rich creative settings and seeing who comes up with what to harness both existing Virtual Environments and spotting the gaps missing for the future.
The event is titled vPEARL (Virtual Play Exchange Advise Renew Learn), it’s going to be on 20-21 September 2011, Los Angeles, California. In the US of A. Registration is $150 and spaces are limited to 100.
The official event page and registration is here: http://standards.ieee.org/news/vpearl/index.html
There is an upcoming page too here
Just so you know the context of this a large number of people from around the virtual world business, academia, film, the arts and many others have come together already to start this movement. As an example you can see Ren Reynolds post on the same event over at Terra Nova. You can also see some of the names of people gathering together to make this happen (as we all have good intentions to push the metaverse to its next level) here on the VeColab.org site.
“vPEARL Highlights
Keynote and Catalyst presentations
A set of real-world challenges developed by the VECoLab, a community of virtual world experts sponsored by IEEE and supported by e426.org
Summit focus on “Breakouts for Solution” teams with onsite and virtual participants facilitated by the VECoLab
A variety of virtual world platforms from sponsoring vendors for use by participants
A planned one-hour virtual world link to another conference in the UK to share key findings
Awards for the best solutions developed by the teams, based on creativity and applicability”
The UK conference will be a live link to ReLive 2011 I will be at that conference ready to do my Terry Wogan bit and say “Hello Los Angeles”.
Pass it on, check it out, lets make things happen.
Develop conference Day 2 and 3. A wind of change?
In all the google+ messing around I had not got around to writing up my remaining thoughts and experiences at the Developer 2011 conference in Brighton. Day 1 for me was the Evolve conference a sort of future thinking bolt on that is gaining some traction with the industry. The Evolve strand then blends into the next 2 days which are the official Develop conference when everyone else turns up.
Breakfast Serendipity
The day started heading down in the lift from the 6th floor. I was already wearing my badge and a fellow delegate asked me at the lift where the registration desk was. we got chatting and then sat and had breakfast. The usual sort of conference chat, who are you what do you do. The bizzarre thing was that my fellow delegate was called Iain, (I am Ian of course). It also turned out we were both doing a presentation at 3pm that afternoon. This was Iain McCaig who was going to be doing the Art Keynote as an artist and conceptual designer. For those of you who don’t know he has worked on some the biggest movies and characters including creating Darth Maul! of all time. Clearly I was going to lose a “who does the coolest things” competition but we were actually talking about our shared interest in inspiring kids to create. For him it was drawing for me it was tech. We talked about 3d printing a bit too. As he is from the movie biz it was the first time anyone has said in a matter of fact way “yes we use those all the time”. I left breakfast completely inspired and to be speaking some of the same language and ideas as someone so successful gave me a real buzz.
More Media Molecule
In a reprise of last year the opening keynote was the guys from Media Molecule talking about their journey with Little Big Planet. It was done as an interview style with Phil Harrison. For anyone at previous Develops they will have heard many of these stories before. However it is interesting stuff. There was, of course a little more about Phil and Sony’s side of things. The key people who green lit LBP.
TV to Games and Back Again
The next session I popped into was part of the Evolve track, it was also in the room I would pitch in later so it all fitted nicely. Simon Harris of BBC worldwide explained the different approaches BBC Worldwide (the commercial arm of the BBC) is approaching tight integration of TV and games and the various other offline media. In many ways it was similar to the Moshi Monsters direction from the day before. It is not about bolt ons or after thoughts to cash in but about enriched branded experiences. There was a lot about Torchwood and how the growth of this to a US based series was also joined with specific threads being written for episodic games that track and augment the TV show. Top Gear also was very prominent with the deal to weave Top Gear into the Forza 4 experience. Though they did have to get Clarkson to re-record he dialogue as when it went to the certification boards it was not longer a 3+ game but had moved up to teen ranking. The future of the BBC in games and related interesting content seems assured with a lot of focus and investment and this very rich integration. A great session.
Mickey Mouse gaming
The post lunch keynote was the gaming legend David ‘elite’ Braben talking about of all things a virtual world 🙂 There were some amusing moments with the projector, that decided to clip the presentation (which did get sorted. Not a great picture but ‘king Disneyland’ made me laugh anyway.
This virtual world is Frontier’s new game in conjunction with Microsoft and Disney. It is Disneyland adventures. They have completely and perfectly modelled the California disneyland and players are able to wander around the park using where they then join in in rides, quests, minigames etc. This did look very cool though we did see the same attract loop a good few times. David talked about the language of the Kinect and how we are all forming the vocabulary of interaction. In his game you navigate by pointing, but not with a tiring arm out point, but an elbow at your side at 90 degrees movement, using a turn of the shoulders to go left and right. The attention to graphic detail had to be obsessive as this is disney, and being a real place that millions have visited and will visit it had to be a mirror world location.
So you think virtual worlds aren’t important
This was me and my first foray into persuading people in the game industry of the changes brought about by virtual worlds and 3d printing. I gave a live demo of Opensim too. Of course The Cool Stuff Collective features as well as this is validation that if you don’t get this tech and its uses then next generation already are because we are telling them about it. I also dropped in unifier and kitely as examples of services that are evolving to support the demands for virtual worlds. This was very handy as I had an audience question that it was too much messing about to get into a virtual world to have a meeting. My answer was that people are trying to simplify it, but it is also based on demand. if the games industry applied its approaches to running and hosting, and to usability they would have a whole new market to reuse and expand into. They wont do that until they are made aware there is a need.
I also did a straw poll in the room of how many people had heard of the BCS. There was only 1 hand went up which is indicative of the work we have to do to help people in their careers in the games industry.
Raspberry Pi
It was back to David Braben again, this time at the other strand of the conference Games:edu. I already explained a little about this over here. Create a computing device so simple and cheap that allows kids to explore and program. As opposed to just being able to play and consume. This fills the chasm between the creativity of little big planet and other creative tools to the world of computer science. I am very hopeful as whilst we harped back to the 80’s back then we only had the computer to write code on. we did not have the feeder of the creative platforms, the virtual worlds and UGC were not a thing we experienced.
Day 3 – More 3d
Day 3 began rather like day 2 with a reboot of a previous years presentation. This was Mick Hocking of Sony talking about a year of PS3 3D. Last year it was a lot of slides and a quick demo we all had to crowd around. This year we were all in the Odeon with passive 3d specs on. It was a good pitch when we saw examples of design considerations actually played out in 3d. breaking planes, reversing images, forcing convergence and divergence past comfort levels. However a lot of it was 3d powerpoint which was really very annoying. It was a waste of the tech and the time to float bullet points IMHO.
I missed the next session as I was having a few meetings and conversations about beta’s and new tech with people.
Finally the next 2 sessions were the best of the entire conference.
Happily ever after: The Story of one girl’s refusal to delegate
Nat Marco from Honeyslug told a brilliant story of how she was persuaded into learning to code a game in LUA and XML by Ricky. I knew this would be good as I was enthralled at the Kahoots story last year from Honeyslug
How this led to a whole host of remote working relationships with artists around the world producing content for her. She also talked about the relationship with a script writer and how Nat made sure she imposed her own direction and creative will to keep her project how she wanted it to be. It was lighthearted, yet covered some very important points. The team that worked around Nat was global, it was not about co-location. The programming she had to learn was a start, and she saaid it was not as bad as she thought. She was also completely immersed (and supported in that immersion by a publisher) in the project in order to maintain its quality at every stage.
Another year down the gaming toilet
I met Ricky back at the first independent keynote I did at the ACE conference in 2009 and I know we share a lot of the same ideas and humour. Last year he told me I must go to this one particular session. I didn’t get to it but this year I made sure I did as it was running again.
Jerry Carpenter is an artists and developer, he has spent years, each day on a bus on the way to work, writing down short crazy, eccentric and bizarre games ideas. He has a completely different presentation style to anyone else as it kind of rambles, bumbles then hits you square in the eyes with a flash of genius or comedy or both. His inspiration for describing mad/bad games was someone commented one of his games was like watching paint dry. So he made a watching paint dry game that you could only win by sitting watching the paint dry for 24 hours 🙂 So his entire site is now dedicated and full of these brilliant cartoons and succinct ideas for a game. Much of it is NSFW BTW :). I loved 1080 qwerty extreme – a game where you turn you keyboard upside down and stand on it to snowboard, and Ultimate feline optimal area tester (a cat swinging game in a room). The ideas do stand up on their own buy the way he tells about the train of thought had us all in stitches and was brilliant. He should have his own show 🙂 Much of what he shows hits at the heart of some of the terrible grind that is part of social gaming at the moment and is combined with film and political references too. if you get a chance to see him speak please go!
I decided I needed to get back home after that. I could not see anything topping those two sessions for inspiration so I headed on back, collecting all my 3ds spot pass new connections one the way. I look forward to another great conference next year.
My personal journey : A little more on identity profiles and plusgate
This is a watershed moment in online and offline identity and expression that Google has brought to the fore for a lot of people. It’s apparent heavy handed policy on who you express yourself else on their profile pages for Google+ highlights many of the things I have been looking at, talkgin about and experiencing for atleast the past 10 years online.
This was and is the discussion and discovery process that people in “business” and “corporate” life have been bumping into. It cuts across virtual worlds, web 2.0, forums, IRC chat and almost any form of online communication. It also though, when you look at it, amplifies what happens in the physical face to face world.
When you engage in communication with another human being you use lots of cues to judge who it is you are talking to. Generally the main feature is the face. This is the pattern that you brain has remembered as the container for the thoughts and feelings of the person you are communicating with. It is a very strong, very rich and ever changing canvas of emotions and expressions. We think we can usually tell someones mood and intent by their face, and those expressions. In general we can, but it does not stop someone playing us, putting on an act or even entertaining us by pretending to be someone else in a play or movie. When someone is not present and we don’t have that face or that meeting we have word of mouth reputation, or the result of their actions expressed as products, buildings, statues etc.
When we go online we do not have that rich canvas of expressions and motion of a face. Even with a video conference we are translating and losing many of the cues we rely upon. Luckily though we can use more direct self expression, we can leave a trail of actions and intent as digital dna across the very systems we interact upon. We are evolving to understand what actions and what parts of the trail are of use for each of us in determining the viability of another digital representation in being worth interacting with. This applies to business as much as individuals. “They don’t even have a website/twitter account/facebook page/telephone number I am not going to bother shopping with them”
Profile pages, such as the google+ ones that are being policed in a rash way by google are merely a little bit of text and a picture (they do attach to many other things like a dna marker, but for now lets stick with the entry point). They are not your face, they are not you, they are a small veneer and advert to express to people what you do. In the old world that might be called a business card.
The name or names and text description of who are are representing yourself as are not the same as your physical collection of carbon atoms, that are recognisable by your face and may have a parental assigned label on them. You need to get across (should you choose too) why someone might be in the slightest bit interested in connecting with you. Now for people who already know you you given name may be the way they spot you, for others it may be that they have heard of you in some way and need to check you out and for other sets it may just be a serendipitous connection of interest. Each of those is not served by the same pieces of data.
Take the name. I am Ian Hughes I have no middle name, thats on my birth certificate etc. Government issued documents (i.e. validated by some people on the word of some other people). Yet my nickname/handle online of epredator is also how I am known. So we meet at a conference I say my name is Ian, you read my face see I am honest and upstanding but thats it. You meet me online I am Ian/epredator and you see that I have a nickname one that may intrigue, one that you may have even heard of. It may lead you to the conclusion that I have invested some time and effort in certain areas in order that I even have a nickname to share. It provides instant insight.
The same goes for photos.
The First picture is of me, its my face, you can tell I am wearing glasses, white male, getting on a bit. Smiling. Without the movement and expression of the face though does that really help you with who I am? Sure if we are going to meet then that may help, but so will the fact I will be wearing my striped leather jacket.
The second picture is of an avatar. A digital expression of me, labelled as epredator, wearing my striped leather jacket. However you can tell from a glance I am a science fiction fan. You may also guess if you are a fan of the culture that the predator character is very strong but full of honour. At no point is there anything where I do not represent who I am. “I wear a mask but don’t hide behind it”.
This just scratches the surface of identity, of me letting you know who I am using the restricted online means we have at our disposal.
This is me as an integrated identity, it is one of thousands of use cases that do not fit the if its you use your name/picture etc.
We are all learning this stuff, I am with me and who I am exploring, the problems and the benefits, I have been for years. “taking a bite out of technology so you don’t have to”. Hence like many I look at google+ and wonder what on earth they are playing at. They are missing some huge opportunities and hitting early adopters and explorers which will backfire on them. Nothing is too big to fail.
***UPDATE email from the google name police 25/1/2011
Hi,
Thank you for contacting us with regard to our review of the name you are
trying to use in your Google Profile. After review of your appeal, we have
determined that the name you want to use violates our Community Standards.
You can review our name guidelines at
http://www.google.com/support/+/bin/answer.py?answer=1228271
If you edit your name to comply with our policies in the future, please
respond to this email so that we can re-review your profile.
Sincerely,
Geoff
The Google Profiles Support Team
So I replied (and complied to get back in and see what the process is)
Hi,
I have edited my name back to Ian Hughes removing the Ian/epredator Hughes.
epredator is in other names I assume that will not give you a problem in the future.
Or am I allowed to be epredator Hughes? I am known mostly as epredator. I was assuming the / was the problem but hearing what is happening to others I assume you would fail that?
Thanks
Ian/epredator
Director of Feeding Edge Ltd
Taking a bite out of technology so you don’t have to.
Metaverse Evangelist
http://www.feedingedge.co.uk
http://www.twitter.com/epredator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hughes_(epredator)
http://www.epredator.com
UPDATE 27/7/2011
I have been allowed back in
Hi Ian,
Thank you for contacting us with regard to the name you want to use with
your Google Profile. After further review, we have determined that your
name is within our Community Standards policy. Thank you for your patience
while we reviewed your profile name. Nicknames should be put in the
“Nicknames” or “Other names” section.
Sincerely,
Geoff
So I am now Ian Hughes on google+ though epredator is more than a nickname. It is part of my actual name. It feels that Google has cut off who I am to other people. I have complied, but will see what they manage to do to address this. It is NOT fixed. I will now get mixed up with a footballer from wales, the high commisioner of Sierra Leone and a journalist and an MD in the car industry. Nice one Google.