The Real Ribba
This is pretty awesome digital pop star action.
Japanese pop star takes the stage as a 3D hologram. – via LA Times
Truck Driving
Everyone’s job sucks. I get it. I’m not promoting this sob story, heartbreaking though it may be. But these are interesting facts about truck driving.
“… His truck is governed to 68 miles an hour, because the company he leases it from believes it keeps him and the public and the equipment safer. The truck he passed was probably running under 65 mph to conserve fuel. You see, the best these trucks do for fuel economy is about 8 miles per gallon. With fuel at almost $4 per gallon — well, you do the math. And, yes, that driver pays for his own fuel. He needs to be 1,014 miles from where he loaded in two days. And he can’t fudge his federally mandated driver log, because he no longer does it on paper; he is logged electronically. He can drive 11 hours in a 14-hour period; then he must take a 10-hour break. …”
ps. I always respect truck driver’s on the road. I had great teachers (mom and dad) who imparted that road wisdom and etiquette of how to warn your fellow road warriors of the impending smokey around the corner. And a quit tap o’ lights to let the trucks know you’re letting em’ in to pass.
Brain Powered Slot Cars
This just in from the late-night research dept (Geek). On the mind controlled slot car tip, Watch the video below then read the article over at DigitalBuzz.com. They have another article about a project from Prius, a mind controlled bike with an iPhone interface. Mind controlled tech is coming… Here’s a
yep. Proudly drinking coffee from my father’s day mug there. it’s 6am.
Chain World
Just read the wired article
Jason Rohrer is known as much for his eccentric lifestyle as for the brilliant, unusual games he designs. He lives mostly off the grid in the desert town of Las Cruces, New Mexico. He doesn’t own a car or believe in vaccination. The 33-year-old works out of a home office, typing code in a duct-taped chair. He takes his son Mez to gymnastics and acting class on his lime-green recumbent bicycle, and on weekends he paints with his son Ayza. (He got Mez’s name from a license plate, and Ayza’s by mixing up Scrabble tiles.)
On the morning of February 24, Rohrer took a break from coding and pedaled to the local Best Buy. He paid $19.99 for a 4-gigabyte USB memory stick sheathed in black plastic. The next day he sanded off the memory stick’s logos, giving it a brushed-metal texture that reminded him of something out of Mad Max. Then, using his kids’ acrylics, he painted a unique pattern on both sides, a chain of dots that resembled a piece of Aboriginal art he had seen.
The stick would soon hold a videogame unlike any other ever created. It would exist on the memory stick and nowhere else. According to a set of rules defined by Rohrer, only one person on earth could play the game at a time. The player would modify the game’s environment as they moved through it. Then, after the player died in the game, they would pass the memory stick to the next person, who would play in the digital terrain altered by their predecessor—and on and on for years, decades, generations, epochs. In Rohrer’s mind, his game would share many qualities with religion—a holy ark, a set of commandments, a sense of secrecy and mortality and mystical anticipation. This was the idea, anyway, before things started to get weird. Before Chain World, like religion itself, mutated out of control.
Sci-Fi That Foretold the Future
Fun little article in Google’s design mag about sci-fi catching up with reality.
The lightbulb moment came during the movie I, Robot. In it, the robot says – thoughtfully – to an angry Bridget Moynahan: “Is everything all right, Ma’am? I detected elevated stress patterns in your voice.” Watching that, two Portland teens asked themselves a simple, profound question: is it really possible for machines to detect feelings? I mean, could that really happen? A year later, their emotion-detecting algorithm won the team grand prize in the Siemens Competition. Read More at the site…
Armadyne / Blomkamp
Perhaps needless to say, that I’m very excited for Neill Blomkamp’s follow up to District 9. Tetra Vaal has been in the reference folder for The Gatecrashers for many years.
Peep this piece of world building.
People Powered
From Benneton via the NY Times. An article, slides and video about transportation and the end of oil.
LA Noir & Open World Games
This is a great article from Grantland about the complex challenges of immersive storyworlds and narrative video games. It is primarily a review of LA Noire by Tom Bissell.
Press X for Beer Bottle: On L.A. Noire
Can Rockstar’s latest release change the face of gaming, or is it just Red Dead Detective?
Those who are immune to the pleasures of video-game storytelling argue that games have far more in common with music and visual art than film and literature. According to this view, games are primarily rule sets or interactive systems, and it is in these arenas where the true art of video games resides. This is undoubtedly true, but must it be an excluding truth? No one, after all, ever gathered around a campfire to hear a rule set. It may be that our existing storytelling models are, in many ways, ill-suited to video games. Perhaps the video game medium is not a storytelling medium at all but an experiential medium in which storytelling possibilities are allowed to occur.
I haven’t read Tom’s book Extra Lives, but I do like to share a little link love, when praise is due.
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