Today I was viciously abducted by two 10 year old boys and a mum and forced to explain role playing and lead a game, or as I like to call it: uhh, this is kind of complex, quick! make something up before they sense your fear.
What's 'role playing'? Acting, playing 'Let's pretend', an active way to watch movies and read books, Saving the world with your friends. It's like a computer game without the computer. or cops n' robbers with dice and paper.
What do you do? Make up a 'character' to pretend to be, and take turns doing stuff. Usually there's one person who plays all the other people in the game world and keeps the story rolling, but if they're experienced they can do both at once. This lets them demonstrate the gameplay too.
Characters
name: original, copyrighted, David Hasslehoff, ninja playboy, whatever
picture: draw or pick one
stats: Strength, Speed, Intelligence, Charisma.. I set a maximum at 20
good at: Sneaking, Pickpocketing, Climbing, Jumping, Shootin, Swearin, Making people's heads explode with the power of your mind. My favourite on the night was 'Michael Jackson Dance Move to Impress Girls'.
Map: draw one! very fun for adults and kids alike. Be careful not to make any mazes too hard. We wound up with "2 Volcano Island", which is in a group of islands with undersea tunnels between them, pirate ships, trampolines that fire you across the map, and a Girlfriend to rescue in an underground maze with lava, traps, doors, plenty of deadends and a river with boats on it. Thankfully, some of the way is marked with road signs.
I let the kids have a free rein making up skills for their characters and features on the map. It started off as a Medieval setting, but guns and other modern things crept in. I felt it was better for them to exercise their imaginations than adhere to canon.. and besides, I should have enough imagination to make it challenging enough to be fun. I reminded them that usually each character is good at some things and bad at others, making for more fun working as a team.
We had a lazy play test and had a fun time. Bad guys were shot at and whacked in the nuts, we pioneered 'Embarrassment Damage' for when you screw up in front of witnesses, the river was frozen and I 'won' the game with some kind of teleporting flying car. Wheeee O_o
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Urban farms as Swine Flu factories?
A comment on the 'Dragonfly' urban skyscraper farm:
http://www.archicentral.com/dragonfly-a-metabolic-farm-for-urban-agriculture-18094/comment-page-1/#comment-1944
Like the urban farms that grew Avian and Swine Flu, this would be a concentrated petri dish for virii to mutate in. Thankfully, it would be a lot easier to isolate and destroy a rogue virus inside one of these buildings than on a bunch of scattered farms with no testing regimen - _if_ they have competent testing. It would be very embarrassing to grow the next lethal virus right inside the New York city limits.
What I wouldn't give to see one of these lit up from within by flamethrowers though.. one for our cyberwar future perhaps.
http://www.archicentral.com/dragonfly-a-metabolic-farm-for-urban-agriculture-18094/comment-page-1/#comment-1944
Like the urban farms that grew Avian and Swine Flu, this would be a concentrated petri dish for virii to mutate in. Thankfully, it would be a lot easier to isolate and destroy a rogue virus inside one of these buildings than on a bunch of scattered farms with no testing regimen - _if_ they have competent testing. It would be very embarrassing to grow the next lethal virus right inside the New York city limits.
What I wouldn't give to see one of these lit up from within by flamethrowers though.. one for our cyberwar future perhaps.
Monday, March 30, 2009
UI for AR?
Google Alerts are like the best little gnomes, they bring you shiny things, hoping that you like them. Things like "Multiuser interaction with handheld projectors". And the Youtube videos they spawned from.
I commented, I like my gnomes that much:
Interesting. That’s perhaps the very first example I’ve seen of real world tasks being performed in an Augmented Reality environment. I share your hesitance over the actual usefulness of projector technology, but I can easily imagine this kind of research being very useful when applied to a Heads Up Display environment - no issues of privacy there. In fact it could be worse - if two people are wearing HUDs and ‘think’ they’re seeing the same view, one of them could have been hacked, etc and could be manipulated into authorising something they wouldn’t otherwise.
I don't think anyone is thinking much about AR and security yet, unless it's the Defcon folks hacking Bluetooth.
I commented, I like my gnomes that much:
Interesting. That’s perhaps the very first example I’ve seen of real world tasks being performed in an Augmented Reality environment. I share your hesitance over the actual usefulness of projector technology, but I can easily imagine this kind of research being very useful when applied to a Heads Up Display environment - no issues of privacy there. In fact it could be worse - if two people are wearing HUDs and ‘think’ they’re seeing the same view, one of them could have been hacked, etc and could be manipulated into authorising something they wouldn’t otherwise.
I don't think anyone is thinking much about AR and security yet, unless it's the Defcon folks hacking Bluetooth.
moar on the Vuzix 920AVs
Some happily specific details shamelessly scrobbled from some guy who had dinner with the Vuzix and MetaIO folks at GDC09. He said some other things, something about fMRI-driven missile launch systems, I dunno.
* They don’t know exactly what the price will be, but they are expecting it to be less than $500.
* Paul is very confident that the Wrap glasses will ship this year
* The displays are 800×600 in these glasses. That’s a step up from the 640×480 resolution that their other glasses use.
* The two displays are independantly controllable through a variety of methods, but if your software can handle it, you can provide 60Hz to each eye.
* The IMU for the wrap will include accelerometers, gyros, and magnetic sensors, and will provide yaw, pitch, and roll to the software at a very high rate.
* When they are in visual pass-through mode the Wraps will blend a translucent scene over the world. In this mode the brighter a pixel is the more visible it will be to the user. That makes black the transparent color and white the “visible as it gets” color.
* Paul was coy about exactly what the specs on the camera will be. I think they aren’t 100% settled yet. He was very aware of the issues with frame rate on USB cameras, though, so hopefully they will figure out a way to provide a reasonable frame rate (or at least crisp frames.)
So.. it sounds like they're getting better and more expensive all the time, which is ok with me. I guess they want to dominate the market for a while - my advice is to hurry and get that first-mover coolness established. Perhaps they can be the Apple of AR
Today I scared librarians by talking about RFID tags and security; waxed lyrical about AR goggles and made people jealous of my EeePC. It has been a good day.
Now it is a good day with beer in it. \m/
And I was lying about the missiles.
* They don’t know exactly what the price will be, but they are expecting it to be less than $500.
* Paul is very confident that the Wrap glasses will ship this year
* The displays are 800×600 in these glasses. That’s a step up from the 640×480 resolution that their other glasses use.
* The two displays are independantly controllable through a variety of methods, but if your software can handle it, you can provide 60Hz to each eye.
* The IMU for the wrap will include accelerometers, gyros, and magnetic sensors, and will provide yaw, pitch, and roll to the software at a very high rate.
* When they are in visual pass-through mode the Wraps will blend a translucent scene over the world. In this mode the brighter a pixel is the more visible it will be to the user. That makes black the transparent color and white the “visible as it gets” color.
* Paul was coy about exactly what the specs on the camera will be. I think they aren’t 100% settled yet. He was very aware of the issues with frame rate on USB cameras, though, so hopefully they will figure out a way to provide a reasonable frame rate (or at least crisp frames.)
So.. it sounds like they're getting better and more expensive all the time, which is ok with me. I guess they want to dominate the market for a while - my advice is to hurry and get that first-mover coolness established. Perhaps they can be the Apple of AR
Today I scared librarians by talking about RFID tags and security; waxed lyrical about AR goggles and made people jealous of my EeePC. It has been a good day.
Now it is a good day with beer in it. \m/
And I was lying about the missiles.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Sign language gestural interface
I just posted this in a comment on an article about sending sign language video to handheld devices.
How about a sign language to text interface? It could use the familiar skills of the hearing impaired person to read the gestures (with fingertip markers like MIT’s Sixth Sense, or gloves with accelerometers) and output the text to a display on a T-shirt perhaps. This would allow easy communication with non-sign language proficient ‘normal’ people.
They could just use a keyboard I suppose, but this would use their existing skills and potentially offer a totally hands free interface.
Addendum: I worked at a service station once - 6 hearing impaired people rocked up wanting to buy some food and this one moderately good at speaking guy interpreted for the rest of them. It was hard (especially through the intercom/window). This idea could have been quite handy..
How about a sign language to text interface? It could use the familiar skills of the hearing impaired person to read the gestures (with fingertip markers like MIT’s Sixth Sense, or gloves with accelerometers) and output the text to a display on a T-shirt perhaps. This would allow easy communication with non-sign language proficient ‘normal’ people.
They could just use a keyboard I suppose, but this would use their existing skills and potentially offer a totally hands free interface.
Addendum: I worked at a service station once - 6 hearing impaired people rocked up wanting to buy some food and this one moderately good at speaking guy interpreted for the rest of them. It was hard (especially through the intercom/window). This idea could have been quite handy..
Thursday, March 26, 2009
moar Augmented Reality goggles
There's been some more movement of late in the Augmented Reality/Heads Up Display space.
Vuzix have partnered with AR company MetaIO to market an addon for their VR920 video glasses (the older, Star Trek style, non-transparent ones). The package features a USB camera that clips onto the front middle of the gogs, and a 3-axis accelerometer pointer/wand thingy for poking stuff in AR space. The camera assembly also packs some capacity to sense the users position and orientation - no mention of precisely how it does this, though given that they're prepping another addon for the as-yet unreleased (transparent) Wrap 920AV model that features accelerometers for head-tracking, I assume they're using the same hardware on the VR920 AR upgrade.
http://www.gizmotron.co.uk/2009/03/26/vuzix-augmented-reality-accessories-let-you-interact-with-virtual-worlds/
Carl-Zeiss have come to the party with a shiny looking pair of video glasses - the 'Cinemizer'. Technology wise, these basically look to be on-par with the un-upgraded Vuzix VR920's. They're non-transparent with extendable earphone arms and feature a screen similar to a 45" tv at 78" distance. Whatever that means in terms of resolution, they're not saying, though apparently it's really really good. They're going to be available in May for US$499. Though for that price you're probably better off waiting for a few months for Vuzix's Wrap 920AV's - they look better, they're transparent so you won't walk into walls and they can actually do Augmented Reality.
http://www.zeiss.com/C125679B0029303C/ContainerTitel/Cinemizer_EN/$File/index.html
In other news, I found a grinder/hacker/whatever. b.zerk is making his own sensor gloves to go with his Vuzix VR920 + Webcam that he hacked up to run with his OS X laptop. Some cool photos on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33676318@N06/3297008280/in/photostream/
Vuzix have partnered with AR company MetaIO to market an addon for their VR920 video glasses (the older, Star Trek style, non-transparent ones). The package features a USB camera that clips onto the front middle of the gogs, and a 3-axis accelerometer pointer/wand thingy for poking stuff in AR space. The camera assembly also packs some capacity to sense the users position and orientation - no mention of precisely how it does this, though given that they're prepping another addon for the as-yet unreleased (transparent) Wrap 920AV model that features accelerometers for head-tracking, I assume they're using the same hardware on the VR920 AR upgrade.
http://www.gizmotron.co.uk/2009/03/26/vuzix-augmented-reality-accessories-let-you-interact-with-virtual-worlds/
Carl-Zeiss have come to the party with a shiny looking pair of video glasses - the 'Cinemizer'. Technology wise, these basically look to be on-par with the un-upgraded Vuzix VR920's. They're non-transparent with extendable earphone arms and feature a screen similar to a 45" tv at 78" distance. Whatever that means in terms of resolution, they're not saying, though apparently it's really really good. They're going to be available in May for US$499. Though for that price you're probably better off waiting for a few months for Vuzix's Wrap 920AV's - they look better, they're transparent so you won't walk into walls and they can actually do Augmented Reality.
http://www.zeiss.com/C125679B0029303C/ContainerTitel/Cinemizer_EN/$File/index.html
In other news, I found a grinder/hacker/whatever. b.zerk is making his own sensor gloves to go with his Vuzix VR920 + Webcam that he hacked up to run with his OS X laptop. Some cool photos on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33676318@N06/3297008280/in/photostream/
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