This is pretty awesome digital pop star action.

Japanese pop star takes the stage as a 3D hologram. – via LA Times

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.

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.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE ON WIRED.COM

From Benneton via the NY Times. An article, slides and video about transportation and the end of oil.

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.

Sponsored by Ballantine’s – an animated tattoo

Via: Digital Buzz

Neuro-controlled fashion accessories. If that doesn’t scream body modification what does?  Awesome. I want a pair. Maybe we can put them on babies before they can speak to help us communicate more effectively. Neuroware “necomimi”

From: JapanTrends.com

Here’s a bit of tech that is definitely going to change our world. The full article is over at Bloomberg Businessweek.  I can see this making it’s way into interactive map and driving displays, as well as surgical feedback.

Swedish engineer John Elvesjö is developing a device that lets users control computers just by looking at them.

These kinetic sculptures could be a very cool reference for the birdhouses and also for elements of the Skynests. These could be like BodyMods for buildings, where the buildings themselves are almost alive and functioning on their own – with strange organic junk sculptures that do things like power elevator-like conveyor belts.