why are their world so separated from mine? i cannot see into these other places, the vectors of interaction are strange, and unpleasing. rejected by mind. i long for postcards from where you’ve been.
it is the ones trapped outside that will be most forgotten in the transition to a human/machine enabled self. reconstructed from the memories of their children.
The human experience must continually be improved. Our less is sloth.
So here we go with round 3 of AML for Justin… Well hopefully the end to it.
Marrow transplant happening this month, next 100 days will be quite scary – we’ve dealt with neutropenia several times now but this is full purge of existing immune resources and hopeful graft acceptance without major acute or chronic rejection issues.
We’ve moved 4 times in the last 3 years – we have to shut up the house and move to a Marriot extended stay place (free breakfasts!) for a bit.
Mercifully the hounds can come with us, being apart from them and Justin with me in a third place would have been awful.
This is all cripplingly expensive. I am scared to ask for family medical leave as I am in a same sex partnership in CA for a firm based in MD while being married in D.C… The legality of it might mean that I’m unable to attend to him in final hours.
To those who thought last week’s news about ‘the gays’ getting married etc. is just a silly thing let me tell you – people are being subjected to real legal harm now based on religious zealotry and age staunched bigotry. Time for that to go.
On a lighter note…
SUPER ADVENTURE CUBE IS AWESOME – pure unadulterated fun. I’d love to see them take this persona 4’s 8 bit way with that weird asuran in crucible of eternity or something… anything to ‘rework’ the dialogue in that dungeon’s story mode
it’d be wonderful to see an MMO based on a mashup of cyber generation (in punk the chars get too fast too soon, while in generation you’re in that world but can’t afford to play. Very different).
powerups / ability funding through galerians style drug abuse. like plasmids or vigors as more recent examples.
dreamed of a child walking by people coughing on them to infect / hack them. summoner class with spites (not sprites) like WHFB wood elf trees.
long term use of ‘skills’ etc leads to perma-character marking. cannot spec out of this marking, persists with character regardless of career – is made up of their choices. is long term effect of choices. permanent injuries a la necromunda / psychosis / mental imbalance etc. indelible. (might have affect of limiting desire to sell accounts). consider fallout addiction mechanics with much more detail and no simple ‘click-fix’
you could make a really good one I’d imagine. there’s a hole too.
also… new 2013 mantra (well if the xlate it in time for 2013 for us poor folk unable to speak Japanese):
In satisfying the luddites(?) a compromise of fortuitous outcome has come about.
Bioshock Infinite will have an inner cover, a whole hell ton. Which is great.
system shock 1’s cover was awesome. I remember picking it up in the stores seeing Origin on it, and having loved Garriot’s 3 through underworld I think it was at the time we’d got to.
I’d pleaded with my father to buy me a CD-ROM for the PC, a SCSI device when we got it (toshiba, did like 340KB/s which was awesome because that was faster than 2x!). They were very expensive. But the space meant real sound at last on a sound blaster. I’d left PC for Amiga for a bit after hearing what it could do compared to an ‘Ad Lib’ soundcard… but midi in monkey island was worth the adlib for sure alone.
System shock 1 was phenomenal. It was the shape of the place, Citadel was a beautiful data structure and a good shell containing a huge amount of memories. The logs were something new to me, so expansive. You had to actually search for things. The colors of the levels reminded you of your place. The ‘inside’ parts and fighting there was terrifying with crazy currents and strange collections of program that didn’t at all move like they do in tron… loops of citadel are burned into my head to the point where I see it in a lot of other games. The sounds of the command deck soothing. You programmed part of me – thank you.
Some parts of bioshock really brought that back, but infinite is calling sound wise again in a way I’ve not heard for a long time. I want to know how they do it.
I bruted the door to the laser because i couldnt find the code, I tried for a week to jump up to get the boots or to upgrade them or something. in a storage place I remember so vividly I could walk it but cannot find the item at the end of that trail when I try.
I remember engineering, and cats in an awful office.
Terri Brosius and what it became was remarkable, you’d feel trapped (and held) in her loops. She’d remind you you’re an idiot. It felt in your ears and head like ringing command – the way it would build resonate and how she’d cannibalize even her own echo with disgust. She seemed twisted and inner eating, somewhat different to a cry from a Comstock or a Ryan, a scream of an infant god new born. Not undead, unborn or not-born. odd. good odd.
If it was an ultima, it was what 8 was to me – and you were alone. Breaking the server nodes was like smashing heads. )
SS2 is mandatory play.
The cover for infinite!
I was immediately drawn to the red one, the line art is stunning. But then I chose a man and a boy, which reminded me of laughing with my sister to a Disney cartoon called “your hat sir”. Then I liked the last one and the original, and couldn’t decided so voted with my laugh.
I was then hit by a thought that reminded me of a decision I made in grievous error and was overruled on as school yearbook editor, some 15 years ago. there was a spread of potentials before us for cover. I wanted, and fought for an odd presentation, quite out of fit but stunning. A rejected cover from the year before. I had never seen it, had never known the artist – but I fixated upon it without question.
I argued for its superior quality over the other entries and that it was crucial that this be the overwhelming factor in our decision making process; that the source be ignored.
I had failed to recognize the value of the book. I had undone myself in this mistake by stripping meaning for my yeargroup through arrogance in taste and summary dismissal of thought. When this was explained to me we chose and I supported the best of our years entries. I regret that process to this day.
It’s going to be very hard to pick a best of anything when you’re looking at an artist in a picture. Their output work’s the bit that sticks. That fans might trace to learn to draw themselves. That ends up sticking some memory for some 50 years. Long enough to last maybe, some of them in time.
The streaming to the pad is excellent. I’m getting stable signal around 50m away. That includes a direct line of sight(ish) from room to garden, and in most places of my home.
The device appears to be delivering content as a stream (like onlive or whatever on a local basis) by the way the interference appears more frame by frame tearing, rather than a breakdown of a logic stream or a crash out of synced bidirectional flow.
The xmit back is likely only sensor and input data from the player. I have no ideas yet on the transmission stream technologies.
The latency is acceptably low for dual sound – the pad is often streamed different music than the regular speakers.
The social aspects of mii universe are the biggest day one thing for me… We have forums for games and can leave messages as text or drawn bitmap. We can “yeah!” a post (like, bump, approve of / pick a vernacular).
We can make friends from people we recently played with, and can video chat call them right from the tablet controller, which has dual webcam, and an acceptable mic.
The single layer blue ray discs are rounded at the edges. This is likely to reduce the chance of material layers of the disc separating with repeated spinning use and age.
The system does feel decidedly Nintendo, it’s color scheme, icons, music, “feel” of the whole experience would make the foundations of a nice kiosk style OS.
So this tablet thing huh. Touch really is that good, and win 8 does it best.
So ill let Justin play with this new toy while I patiently wait on my “real” win 8 tablet – a maxed Sony Vaio Duo 11. For me a real windows os tablet that can be a laptop too, and packs enough processing punch that I can multi boot to crapnix for security tools, or server 2012 for a sharepoint / lync 2013 collaboration beacon.
Add in the presence of visual studio 2012 and a digital stylus for my photoshoppage and you’ve suddenly presented me with the ability to talk to machines and cast spells. The form factor is absolutely perfect for my body / hand size.
I’m somewhat lusty for this thing and am a self confessed fan of Japanese electronics device design.
They market these things over here to people who don’t need them. “an executive laptop” my behind. It’s got 8GB ram, an i7 that’ll burst up to 3GHz and sits at 1.9 on all solid state. It’s hd 4000 graphics are terrible by hard core gaming… But it’ll spin 60fps in eve online at 1366x7somethingorother, plays magic online just fine and can even handle guild wars 2 or Borderlands 2. Yes it will run wow, wow runs on a toaster (a triumph imo)
Now, please Microsoft, put out an sdk for those next xbox glasses and gimme some – for great justice and for what must be ^_^
The name should simply be xbox. Like a fucking imac. burn in the brand recognition. (forgive my break into cuss).
For some of us, we require eye-front tech and it’s successors. We require it to transform humans again, and to accelerate human tech integration.
Just like you are doing with touch and other nui research (laptop based gesturing by ultrasound looks promising). Why no laptop / integrated webcam version of Kinect?
It seems that even if you had more quickly reactive for point / touch tech than Kinect it’d have a harder time considering a large 3d space (like a room).
Dogs (border collies) are smart enough to play with projections on a wall.
There is so much to do.
Work hard, hire folk that give a damn. I mean really give a damn.
Ran across a forum post and felt compelled to respond earlier this morning. The OP’s post in purple and my thoughts below. from http://bit.ly/eXu8C1 :
“People will spout off nonsense about how casuals make up a certain large percentage of an MMO. For the most part, they are probably right. Casuals do make up a larger percentage than hardcore players do. When I say hardcore players I mean the ones that play the game to be challenged, don’t expect equal rewards for logging on an hour a day to accept and complete mindless quests, and most importantly want to GROUP up to tackle new adventures.
Hardcore people albiet make up a minority now, are still the most vocal when it comes to their games. If the hardcore players are not satisfied with a game, and subsequently leave, what happends to the game? Even a game like vangaurd with a devoited following of semi to hardcore players manages to survive. We are the ones that come up with the good specs, the strategies to defeat end game content in the most effiecent way possible, ways to pvp well, and we are usually the ones sending bug reports and feedback into the devs.
What does all of this mean? It means the devs shouldn’t listen to all this pander about casual gear and causual that. If you dont’ have time to play an MMO then there are other hobbies you can enjoy and get more from. Hardcore players are the ones which will always truely keep a game afloat…every game has them. Just because you can’t meet the system requirements of the game, (which along with a dual core processor should include 20+ hours a week of game time) you shouldn’t impose your watered down gameplay mechanics on all of us that want to play this game in a state that is actually concitered to be entertainment.
Thank you for listening to my rant!!”
remember OP – the ‘hardcore’ provide for the casuals an image of something they can never have. Its important to generate envy as a form of desire – “it should have been me, it should belong to me”… keeps them subs goin.
You’re not going to please both camps entirely when both follow the same pattern of loot lust and longing; and gone are the days where people put more time into their mmo than they do into their career / education / lives. This is not true for everybody, but a likely majority. I don’t think people have the attention span for such things any more, let alone the time. For the majority, like it or not, an mmo which requires 4-8 hours a day 7 days a week to be properly competitive with regard to progression has become an obscenity.
As the gaming populace continues to expand, the hardcore of the early 2000s and before move into career / familial / blah responsibilities that require their attention to the point where it impacts such devotion to a game. New folk come in, with a different mindset and fully aware of the hundreds of virtual worlds they can pay / free-to-play. As a concept, the online world is diluted, and no one of them is as unique as it used to be. When such wide choice exists, and with time as a constraint, the casuals seek maximum fulfillment per unit time invested. They’re going to pick the wow over the aion, if you catch my drift. Designers are of course aware of this.
Additionally we have artists and creators as game developers and the plethora of disciplines that surround creating such a complex system. Those creators are likely to want people to see their works. they’re going to lower the bar.
At best you’re going to get a world that is tolerable to the spectrum of playerbase (extreme fluff casual <-> darkest of hardcore). That’s going to require a flattening of requirement / complexity / what it takes time wise as investment to achieve goals.
As designers shift away from things like attunements, hard gap tiering etc. the hardcore player might feel disillusioned. but they’re forgetting something – status fades. if you want the best stuff available now then you need to work your ass off for it. but guess what?! in 6-8 months at most it’ll be garbage.
the system must continue to provide incentive. the most powerful incentive is loot.
the casual sees the Bugati the hardcore is driving around in and longs for that power… and now they can get it, it just takes longer and when they do they find the hardcore has the newer model with 10% more horsepower or whatever. stupid analogy aside the wheel of progression must continue to rotate for all players. just as the hardcore must compete with themselves and stay ahead of the scrubs, so exist multiple other tiers trying to do the same at all levels of player skill / time / capability. Hardcore chase the dragon, casuals chase your shadow.
least that’s why I think we see a flattening.
All hail the addiction engine! casuals and hardcore alike.
Here’s a view of kinect’s arced grid of IR dots it projects its its field of view. Its easy to see how (but more than likely tricky to implement) it could track objects depth based on size and movements of localities within the projected known dot count grid. By the distribution of the dots, it may not even know the exact dot count but may look at changes in ‘shape’ of clusters of the dots. Ripples on the water if you will.
I’m guessing that about the worst thing you could wear is a polka dotted dress with the dots being about 1/4 inch in diameter and made of UV reactive glow in the dark material. That way it couldnt find your legs under the flow and it may confuse elements of your outfit as feedback from its projected grid.
We’ve killed countless thousands in video games, often tangible reward is measured from split skulls and dismembered corpses. After no time at all the crimson tide that accompanies the grand theft auto enthusiast or hero of legend x becomes a muted background – a vehicle for and mantra in delivery to progression. So much so that anyone thinking video game violence will somehow motivate a player to war must take note that most of the butality is SO amplified that it becomes unreal in the mind of the player. A distilled vision of dark elements of the mind. The flailing overdone ragdoll physics as a protaganist zaps some poor sod’s ruining with arsenals that range from the modern soldier’s wet dream to the ancient, powerful and arcane is something that’s neat to do and watch but is more about the experience of doing than taking with you after play.
That was… until earlier today.
Imagine the scene (from fallout: new vegas, a game I heartily recommend). My fellow is dark, and almost impossibly strong. He wears armor he stole from the corpse of an official; a member of a group of beleaguered militia men known as the New California Republic. My character and these folk are not friends. He is in their territory looking for a place to sleep away the battles of the day. Its not a nice place, this distopian Las Vegas. It was devastated in the nuclear war of 2077 with China (no prizes, mutually assured and realized destruction), and much of the surrounds beyond the damaged but still workable Hoover dam and Vegas strip are overrun with neglect, the worst of mankinds mind, and radiation which has seeped into the ground over the 11 years that precede my character’s birth in this land.
So there’s houses, it looks like a beat up part of Baltimore, MD (really Novac) – wooden buildings with metal roofs, left in the rain too long. Stuff’s rusty. Hardly surprising considering the developers, Bethesda Softworks is based in Baltimore. Like Fallout 3 before it (set in and around DC, a blast to play if you’ve lived in the area) you can see the influences of baltimore architecture (particularly the slummy areas, all twisted, cave like industrial era) echoed in the games art and map design, a mark left when transposed to the Mohave by Obsidian Entertainment.
I open the back door of the home; one of my skills for the apocalypse is a proficiency at lock picking – and a good supply of bobby pins. I make for the bedroom to rest. There’s a lady though, a wastelander woman. There may have been kids once, there’s a sodden teddy bear stained with spilled sunset sarsaparilla next to some surgical tubing and a spent needle. yep… Baltimore. Her dead kids or not i need a bed. She challenges me, dragging my character into a dialogue.
Typical Days for Wasteland Cowboys
In New Vegas your character has many options to customize him or herself. In conversations with the various ai NPCs throughout the game options will vary greatly based on how you’ve chosen to customize your character as well as how you’ve conducted yourself with both an NPCs faction and as a karmic alignment you can consider as -1000<x<1000. If a character has great knowledge of science they may be able to command robot to cease guarding an arms cache, or a woman with special customizations or ‘perks’ might be able to use her charms to convince bandits to let her by ‘unharmed’. The result is wildly varying play experiences throughout the path of a character’s advancement based on forcing development into areas all of which one character could not easily achieve high aptitude with.
My guys strong, smart, cant handle big iron cowboy gun crap worth a damn but can swing his fists to the point he can punch the head off raiders who dare approach him. When you save your game the file is titled with a summary of your character karmic standing. Mine now is refered to simply as ‘fiend’. Apt.
“Who the fuck are you? Why the hell are you in my house. Get Out!” This seems reasonable, I’ve broken in at night – a big afro-american brawler in bloody leather armor with a machete.
“Hang on, I just want to ask you some questions…” I’m still thinking she might be another generic plot advancing blip of xp I can milk before slaying.
“I don’t care who you are or what the fuck you want. you get out of my house right now!” I’d be terrified, and would like to think I’d muster the same response. I’m about to leave, she’s basically right – I did come into her house.
But the system presents me with a couple of dialogue options. One of which is too hard for my character to resist:
“<ATTACK> Bitch you had your chance!”
Now this is it! We’ve gone past ludicrous to a sublime of satisfaction. She wouldn’t answer my character’s questions, wasn’t instantly helpful. So she would pay the price. I punched her head off in a special slo-mo version of combat a player can invoke at will for extra damage, accuracy and death cinematics.
I’m chuckling away to myself even after hours of doing this. A perfect capture of how a situation can escalate from tense to absurd in seconds – what it would be to exist as a ‘fiend’, an unhinged murderer in a post-apoc lightly steampunk vegas. Best not get in his way.
So you can tear through however you like. Its really nice to see how the writers have given options even in tiny encounters like that for you to play however you like.
Vegas is all busted
I hear were I a woman character, and if I were both highly charismatic and a good talker that I could have a brief evening of sexy time with my character’s poor murder victim. So that NPC you brutally slaughtered – in some other player’s universe – is watching the radon glow of the sunrise after a night which went entirely differently. That kind of lets you disconnect yourself from the violence.
You really need to, and look on games like this as reflections of aspects of yourself. I’m not saying the player is a murderer deep down. But the ridiculous amplification of violence being repeated over and over is a form of meditation on the subject, and on the root delusion of hate. The video game experience allows the player to examine the thoughts that arise when this part of the mind is given attention. Compassion be extended to the person who chooses to over-nuture and encourage abstraction of that examination of the extreme into something they take with them into the real world.
Warping of art, that being the said meditation on violence or other negative aspect of humanity, can occur as vividly via any media – and if present strongly in the person, sponteneously. A book or speech can motivate a man to war as feverently as the giggled-up on ritalin angst filled teen is moved by Modern Warefare: Covert Ops to beat street people with a stick.
enjoying himself? sounds dangerous!
Why then the perception that video games are a special case? I would suggest that it is an acceleration of the media’s capability to interact with the user’ mind, and the changes we’ve seen in media form factor and interface. There is an immediacy of message delivery associated with intense visual and auditory stimulation, coupled with ever increasing interactivity that older media simply cannot replicate. I am physically tired after my ‘kinect adventures’ – running in place or about to some dance game or swinging my arms slicing people up or holding a fake rifle which appears on the screen where I point it. Chucking grenades for 2h is tiring. I’m sleepy and dreamy after Alice in Wonderland but I’m not exhausted and I’ve had no physical experience tying me to the media’s plot. Different. Maybe better? More capable as a delivery vector of content producer stuff into the minds of consumers? yes, ultimately more than likely.
The multi-sensory stimulation of video games, and the grip the experience has on people, can be intimidating to the onlooker. To those not familiar the practice appears to border on obsession. This is because the media experience is more intense than what can be otherwise achieved and users tend over time to seek like entertainment as other stuff seems ‘boring’. Why play the scrabble board game when I can play with 31 friends in a virtual tournament with voice and video chat? Statego or Civ 5? Why read a book for 4 hours a day before sleep (once upon a time a common practice) when my villages in Fable 3 require upkeep so that shop keepers do not strike and my renters keep paying? In a world where time exists as a currency of cost the value of the family bonding that comes from playing a board game or the relaxation of reading fiction is not undone but is diminished by instant gratification and what amounts to simply more experience per unit time. The rate of experience is higher when a more interactive medium is utilized for the experience. In gaming terms better xp.
The human seeks maximum return on investment for its leisure activities. Thus after exposure to a medium which delivers entertainment more effectively per unit time the user can find other media lack luster, and will gravitate towards the medium providing maximum return on invested time. The user may appear to become ‘addicted’ to video games, as an example. But this can happen with anything. Hand’s up all the children who were a bit spacey and disconnected from the real world (because it didnt seem quite real) and really enjoyed reading. The activity encourages the activity but also disassociation with the ‘real’, and rewards interface proficiency with further capability to exploit the topic proficiency, and awards knowledge or emotional growth to the user. A cyclical model which tends to reinforce the patterns of behavior. The better reader moves on from Harry Potter and Tolkien. ‘Pro’ gamers do not play Hello Kitty Island Adventure.
note the 110$ cost, nice though
Couple now with a culture with uniforms of non-conformity and special bits and pieces ranging from keyboards which look scary when placed by the standard office affair to porcelain blue designer ear-phones with utility bottle openers tucked inside the band, or a Darpa Hoodie mathematically designed (at 110$) to keep you a little less windy and to substantially buff your outfit’s cosplay points. The gamer kid offends the eye of the outsider, not through his activities – but because he is a reflection of societal change. His periphery as eccentric as the ‘leisure activity’ is hard to equate to paradigm change in interaction.
The modern user adopts persona for interaction as interchangeable as the game cartridges they stuff into their 3DSs on the way to their Tokyo Beijing (LA) schools.
gotta catch em all
An element amplified (like bright blue over-ear earphones) is not out of place when the user sees objects in a different way. As distillations of aggregrate elements their games individually examine, given form. Like waving wii-mote at icon effecting response requires hand movement and specific motion, acts become rites of invocation and objects become their expression in form. Thus sound requires equipment, equipment is blue. There’s little thought beyond that, other than perhaps blue is pleasing.
odd black hoodie completing 'look' - check.
Video game masters (I do not use this term lightly) behind the Shin Megami Tensei series of video games have for over a decade explored the concept of gaming as meditation. There is a defined flow of subject matter and pace which directs the player towards a personal realization through trance like repetition, and literal mantra. If you have not played Nocturne do so.
best look twice
Their latest will come in 2011, Catherine. There’s not too much known on the plot as of yet. But this is my game of 2011 already. SMT is just that good.
beats carrying around a schoolbag weighing 40lbs
Perhaps we should not let our infants play with iPads so they learn to use touchscreens before they can talk? I think not. To do so limits us, it is scary that they surpass us – but we must usher in their ascendancy, not shy from it and cling to ancient precepts.
We need to start thinking of interface as intimidating, not art as bannable (burnable).
A curse on these fingers, no! A curse on the keyboard; cracking and snapping, discordant symphony of carpal tunnel. Damnation be upon the mouse; uncomfortable sweat caked lump of plasti-steel I drag around with a tired hand.
One must ask one’s self if in today’s edge of multi-petaflop computing (2.51! congrats Chinese! Tainhe-1a) if we have neglected the human interface. Without doubt we have considering that we interface with computers largely by hitting things with our hands rapidly – a keyboard is nothing more than the typewriter, invented in 1867!
Apart from actually causing pain and physical injury the interface is highly inefficient. One simply cannot output commands to a computer at the rate one’s mind operates. The interaction is also foreign – we’ve all seen the elderly struggle to use a cell phone or a computer, they’re simply not used to it and didn’t train for it since day one. They have a harder time adapting, and thus their use rate of technology declines as the Human Interface bars their access – it’s not that they cannot ‘handle’ what a computer does in concept or don’t know what they’d like one to do for them.
Cochlear Implant
Dobelle Artificial Vision System
We are some time from direct neural interface – our understanding human brain operation is increasing but is truly still frontier territory. One need only look at the wild (unsafe) methods used in neuropharmacology and psychiatric care to clearly see how rudimentary our understanding really is. Having said that there’s been direct neural interface and real life human cyborgs. This has primarily been publicly directed towards sensory substitution for the disabled. Since the 1970s we’ve used cochlear implants which have allowed the deaf to hear. The blind have already been made to see with work such as that done by the brilliant William Dobelle and team and the like, and there is a plethora of animal experimentation that has been going on since mid last century. So this is merely a matter of time and moral acceptance (the Abrahamic faithful will likely have objections if they follow the pattern they have for the last several thousand years).
Clearly the ability to directly interact with digital systems via the mind is the foreseeable endpoint, but this is not something that will be seen in a cycle which can do things like generate near-term revenue for a corporate entity.
So what do we do in the meantime? PC form factors are changing – the PC tablet and touchscreen everything. But these still require you to hit the device. Fundamentally no different from when man picked up a stone.
The gaming industry is actually forging ahead in the area of Human Interface Devices. A simple IR projector on a remote control combined with some gyroscopes == a Wiimote. Nintendo managed to, with a different way of controlling human / digital interaction, involve entire generations of people in activities that legacy control systems precluded access for.
Not to miss out on cash Sony followed up this Autumn with their version of a magic wand you wave at the screen. But these systems are fundamentally flawed – they require a ‘piece’, a peripheral, to function. Like the {mouse, keyboard, joypad, …thing you hit in some way…} the human is not the interface in its mind, the peripheral is.
MS Research's LightSpace
MS Lightspace Hardware
MS research just (Oct 3rd) put out a paper where they’ve created a room in which a user can interact with the environment without any kind of peripheral. The system uses projectors to provide indication to users of interactive areas of the room, and also responds to particular gestures the humans make within the space. The hardware used to do all this was a series of 3 regular projectors coupled with three strange little camera devices made by an Israeli firm named PrimeSense.
Looking closely at them you might recognize them. It is indeed a prototype of the Microsoft Kinect system.
If you’ve read this far you’re probably willing to take 10 minutes to watch these two videos. When you do think beyond gaming – think of this like a really large tech beta.
Microsoft Kinect
For 150 american you get… a motorized camera / projector array. There are two cameras – an RGB one which processes the same light wavelengths humans see and another which captures infrared. An infrared projector from the device projects a pattern at what infrared camera is looking at. Analysis of the feedback from this pattern when correlated with RGB data gives a value of depth to every pixel in a process unlike but at a rudimentary level similar to radar.
Couple with this an array of several microphones which allow the Kinect to determine direction of sound.
Software behind the thing gets really nice. What it does is attempt to map objects it sees in the ‘play space’ to a 20 point human skeleton. When the system believes it is looking at a human it will attempt to identify them. It does this using many considerations (videos explain some) which it aggregates into a certainty value for a particular known user, or for verification that the user is new to the system. So what we have here is a biometric tracking device which creates a digital ID for. Each Kinect unit can track 6 users simultaneously while running full interpretation of the data on two of those 6. This limitation was partly introduced to limit CPU usage on the game console, which MS claim does not exceed 1% CPU use at stated full load.
So now we have a human interface device which is cheap (150 at entry price point means you’ll buy these things for 20 dollars in 5 years) that doesn’t require any peripherals or for a user to hit a surface with their hand etc. None of these technologies are terribly new (besides the software behind it) but it is the aggregation of several technologies to track multiple factors in biometric identity, motion and auditory tracking in real time without absurd resource consumption AND coming in at a low price point that makes this unique.
A device you can talk to to control a system – MS has gone to great lengths to provide systems for noise cancellation e.g. first thing Kinect will do in setup is play a known sequence of tones though the console sound output to determine from the echoes the shape of the room and tweak its noise canceling config.
I can think of no more natural interface than being able to just gesture and talk at the system – besides the aforementioned direct neural link.
So MS will be gathering over the next year or two a vast amount of data from xboxes throughout the world which is associating complex multi component biometric identity information into their live accounts. There is nothing stopping that information being made available to other systems, so that a user could walk up to a given xbox system and be correctly identified by their live ID.
Anyone got pictures of personalized advertising being sent to your xbox live enabled windows 7 mobile phone as you walk past kinect sensors? or a spherical array of the devices in an ‘orb configuration’ that could scan a conference room for attendees, track attendance, categorize speakers by voice / appearance and capture their output immediatly tagging it with metadata which could be determined by aggregate considerations of ‘mood’, yawn count, vivacity of tone etc. Or simply dump a voice file / the voice to speech output and a video capture of a speaker to a timeline which allows for per presenter, text search enabled playback of a seminar or presentation.
One of my areas of interest for this would be if the system can be adapted to recognize the skeletal structure of other animals, such as dogs (which shape wise is like a person on all fours in a lot of ways). Providing strong visual / auditory / olfactory feedback (a scoosh of a spray bottle of bacon scent for example) for when a primate or intelligent dog looks at something, and then learns to look at something to effect an output.
You might end up accidentally enabling animal / human communication. I beware the tweets from my dog saying “food please, food please, walk time, food please…” Even if it only barely worked – there are many pet owners and you’d make a fortune.
Now the 20th century mindset business folk amongst you might be thinking – well this all sounds like too much fun and this has no relevancy in my corporate world! I don’t play games, I move mountains! This all sounds like gen y nonsense and an excuse for not doing real work!
Then consider this…
Software piracy is a massive ‘problem’. The real problem is that people, in a relationship inversely proportional to age, do not consider software as something they should have to pay for – because they can obtain it for free, or because they need/want to use the software in question to participate in activities which require its capabilities and they cannot afford the often exorbitant cost at the end-user level. People have become used to obtaining free software and media – DRM is cracked on the day of release (or before on occasion) nearly all of the time. People have come to expect software to be free. To the child of 2010 music has always been free, and they have never had to pay for software. The coming generation, those who will grow up and become the next round of adults will have a fundementally different view of their ‘entitlement’ of free software / media. What those industries must ask themselves is do they choose to muster all their resources in an attempt to halt what has already happened and become integrated into culture or do they accept it and attempt to determine what the next big thing will be / other ways to make money?
When you were a child you likely did not have a web enabled smartphone in primary school, or carts of laptops / tablets being given out to classes of 5 year olds to get them familiar with tech early on. Much as every other generation, due to pace of advancement, these people will have very different expectations of how a human should interact with techology – and yes, some of this will come from what they do in their leisure time – they will want menu systems that they can sweep through with a dismissive flip of the wrist (hell so do I). They will expect to be able to talk at a machine and have it do a damned sight better than dragon dictate in the 1990s. They will not want to use a remote control – such arcane trappings are of ancient and limiting HID design and world – perhaps they might be kept hollowed out as umm.. glasses cases? for novelty / retro sentiment but little more besides.
Adults amongst us in the IT industry can likely easily see this in themselves – how well can you write with your hands? Me, I can barely scrawl for more than 10 minutes without discomfort through pain from atrophied muscle and movements which have become unknown after many years of non-use. We moved from the interface of pushing pen on paper to striking a keyboard instead and going back is as infeasible as it is undesirable.
Facial Recognition Logon
MS isn’t going to be missing out on this… they’re taking what must be a plethora of data and using xbox and games to better their software. To the left you see a picture of a leaked set of slides concerning Windows 8. MS’s plan in this regard is to be able to have a PC determine if someone enters a room, turn itself on at a gesture and if it reaches a certainty level about the user allow for biometric logon where a user is identified visually and then must match another factor – voice as an example and also available in the kinect unit / software. Clearly the experience would not halt after logon – it is simple and intuitive to be able to reach into the air and affect the deskop by picking up thing by simply tightening the shape of the hand around where you point at it.
This, and versions and vendor wars after it, are something that will fundamentally change the manner by which we interact with machines. and the most experienced users, who will encounter the least culture shock moving to such a system, will be the gamers – the ones that have used such a system for years before it hit the business market. These users will demand that their computers be able to interact with them in a peripheral free manner.
From the development perspective it is important then to understand the core methodologies by which recognition and tracking take place. Interesting from a biological standpoint is the fact that MS must have constructed some form of anatomy of the human body and real time matching algorithms against it as a structure – it must be able to deal with 60 pound children to the 400 pound man who’s really hoping that get fit game will do the trick.
I see these things mounted on the top end of a tablet, providing a vertically casting surface when placed on a table that allows one to control the lights, change channels on a TV, etc etc. simply by intersecting the field of its vision in particular patterns. I see advertising corporations deploying such technology to be able to pull up a passing persons transaction history in a city center and providing data of those patterns correlated across a crowd to shop subscribers who might then decide to initiate a micro sale on particular items a prominent demographic might desire from one hour to the next. Basically having a much better picture of demand and then turning that information into a commodity very rapidly.
I have to wonder what apple’s answer to this will be – better be good because if its anything like the console market right now Sony and Nintendo just got left 5 years research behind by something which is truly a step forward in human interface technology.
MS plans to spend 1B$ advertising kinect – you’ll definitely hear about it if you’ve not already.
The barrier and gateway to our evolution may well be our ability to interface directly with machines. This appears to be a step in the right direction as peripherals have been eliminated.
Dissemination Machine 