Wonderland

Living in the future

I've had lots of "wow the sci fi future of tomorrow is here today" moments here at ETech this year. Hacking people's finger-RFIDs. Swarming via Twitter. Robot DJs. Then I get this email in today looking for startups to gather at a conference - check out the subjects they're after:

UNDER THE RADAR | Entertainment & Media | June 28, 2007

Nominate your company here.  

Dealmaker Media is announcing a call for companies for our eighth Under the Radar one-day event, featuring 32 emerging startups, on June 28, 2007, at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, CA.
   

Entertainment & Media Categories we are interested in:
  * Casual Gaming
  * Advertising
  * Commerce
  * Measurement Tools
  * Virtual Communities
  * Social Media
  * Search
  * News
  * Messaging
  * Communities
  * Place Shifting
  * Time Travel

TIME TRAVEL?!?! Hoo yeah!

Mass Effect

Best RPG of E3 2006, Mass Effect is out soon for the Xbox 360 (good for playing on the Elite). The game engine looks amazing: have a nose at these movies for in-game footage.

Good, solid futuristic Bioware-y game, heavy on story. I'm very there.

Boku

Boku is Microsoft's new tool designed to help kids learn to program computers. Tool? It looks like a game. It uses a game controller as an interface - no typing, no text - and XNA.

Boku’s programming model is extremely simple as it does not use a textual language or wiring diagrams. Kids use simple behavior cards to enable a small virtual robot to navigate its world and achieve specific tasks.

The goal is to provide a gentle introduction to some of the foundational elements of creative programming to children who may not yet be ready for the complexity of classical computer languages.

The user is exposed to behavior arbitration, generality, representation of an abstract state, real-time experimentation and feedback, simulation, sensors, physics, and message passing.

It's pretty neat! "Let's play around a bit because that's what this is all about," says the Microsoft guy on stage. They've turned this around in 4 months, and they're about to start releasing it to kids to see how they want to tweak it...

Love it.

Etech 07: What do people want?

Looks at their life stages, says danah, to understand their needs:

Check out Raph's liveblog of her excellent talk.

Etech 07: Raph Koster on magic

Raph is high information in short time bursts, so I've taken staccato notes on this one. He usually puts his slides online after a talk, so check over at his site for such nuggets of gold.

[UPDATE: He's posted up his full slides here.]

Things that work have underlying structures.

Art, social media, physics.

Sometimes they get crazy elaborate: Solar by Miles Davis. But it follows a blues grammar.

We can identify this by the ear.

The best computer programs doing harmonic analysis have trouble, but humans don't.

This structure is grammar.

Grammar is underlying all ways in which we communicate.

In grammars the logic is fractal, the structure is fractal.

Blues structure has recursive quality to it. All of music is about the leading tone.

This is deep structure.

Disney's digital ents future:

This is one avenue of Disney's very near future.

Giant mario statue

Check this out, you can buy a 150cm high - that's a metre and a half!!1! - Mario statue.

Nintendo is currently accepting orders for a large and very heavy Mario figure which measures 150cm or 59.05" tall. We've sold similar Mario statues in the past to stores and retailers but never to normal customers.

I'm tempted to buy one and turn him into a freestanding lamp. Oh. Except he's $3000. Someone is hallucinating.

Club Penguin

Raph's obsessed with Club Penguin, and rightly so. It's not unique (same model as Habbo, pretty much), but it's interesting and successful, and they're chucking out useful soundbites, especially if you work in television:

One thing that attracts them, experts say, is the sense of power that children get in a virtual world but rarely experience in real life. "This isn't rocket science," says Club Penguin founder and CEO Lane Merrifield. "A lot of virtual-reality companies look at these games like television--'We are going to entertain you, and you are going to enjoy it.' Ours is a two-way stream."

That's obvious stuff, sure, but still useful at, say, budget time..

Alternative Reality Game for the public good

Jane McGonigal's on stage here talking about ubiquitous gaming (or alternate reality gaming, although I really prefer that former definition there). She's got some really juicy slides up here; here's one: she's just referenced A World Without Oil, her new game launching soon, and she calls it "an alternate reality game for the public good". It's a public service game...

Looking forward to this one.

Cute Mariolego stop-motion

Somebody put a lot of work into this, and it's heartwarming.. I'm particularly fond of the really home made look of the lego. I think it's pretty vintage bricks, I'm sure that green isn't available any more. It's got that nice faded look to it, and the grey bricks are that particular shade of 1970s grey.. oh.. hum.

I'll stop there.