I caught a post yesterday by Daniel Hengeveld (Link) over on his blog which resonated with some things that have been going through my head recently. I read a nice piece somewhere not long ago laying out how game controller design adversely affects the design of videogames (if someone know the one to which I’m referring, please post a link). I’ll admit to being someone who avoids controllers, but only because I’m tied to the keyboard-mouse combo. For a product designer, however, this kind of observation is interesting because … well … those controllers should be easier to use than the keyboard-mouse.

Well, for anyone following the news out of this year’s E3, the new Nintendo Revolution/Wii controller, which caught everyone’s eye when it was first unveiled (reLink), has caught on in a unique way. I thought we’d hear more divisive comments, but so far I’m hearing mostly positive reviews. More importantly, Hengeveld raises the point that some people are so impressed by the device’s ease of use that it might lower the useability barrier which I have little doubt keeps many potential users from trying anything 3D; effectively limiting them to the simpler offerings. For all we know, the growth in “casual games” owes something to this issue. I suspect to some small degree that it might.

The thing that occurs to me is that Nintendo may have something that shares qualities with another rather famous piece of hardware: the iPod. Their controller, if it lives up to some reports, may jump from their inexpensive console to other platforms and become a cash cow. It’d be like owning the entire computer mouse industry. The PC is an obvious option, but might we see one for the Playstations (all of them) or the XBox’s (both of them) – especially if the controller alone reinvigorates the play of old games? Could it affect game UI design on, for example, and XBox 360 if the developer knows players have this Nintendo controller? And where else could this device’s DNA migrate? Talk about disruptive – I can imagine some pretty interesting potential mashups should the hype prove to be all that.

I received an email from Michael Frumin over at Eyebeam alerting me to some fabbing efforts of his. I’d not bothered to really look at the geometry I’d captured in Google Earth some time back, but his comments on the OGLE website (Link) point out an issue to which I’d be especially sensitive:

The 3D buildings OGLE’d from Google Earth are not ready to be 3D printed off the bat. Each building is a composition of multiple vertical volumes that have walls and a ceiling but no floor. By computationally (i.e. hacked up OBJ-file-processing perl script!) copying all of the roof polygons to floor polygons, we got the job done:

A script that offsets a copy of the polygons so that thin-wall models can be fabbed instead of solid chunks is hopefully somewhere on his “To Do” list. I’ve not had much time lately to even visit the OGLE forum so maybe that’s been discussed. Will need to make time to surf over and see what kinds of cool things people have been doing.

{Image source: Eyebeam OpenLab}

I’ve been saying it since I first got into Second Life: In spite of the platform’s limitations and the difficult-to-control power handed over to griefers, Linden Lab’s virtual world is an excellent testbed for advertising in what will undoubtedly shape up to be a much more immersive future internet. I pointed out some of the problems in a comment over on Corante (Link) about a year ago:

…the real point of the entry is that as this kind of interface develops there will likely be new forms of irritants developing with it. I suspect there will be an entirely new kind of thrill motivating the people who would write these kinds of applications. In some ways we may see a kind of mash-up: the browser meets the first-person shooter. I’ve no doubt that there are capable coders who’ve not bothered to write a trojan (for whatever reason), who would be gleeful at an opportunity to create virtual entities that do nothing more than harass, insult, degrade, verbally abuse, flash their virtual privates, aso.

If you think that someone creating anti-corporate commercials is bad (example – reLink), just wait til you see what they do when things become more immersive. If someone doesn’t like a product (or worse, the company’s customer service set up to support it), there will be little to stop them from creating a virtual performance piece aimed squarely at that company’s customer base which communicates their displeasure in the most unforgetable way. Prepare to be offended.
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When I read about this over on Wonderland (Link), I thought it might be a nice change to check out the cell-shaded look I had hoped to see in the videogame “Seed” (which I don’t even want to discuss). Last night I took some time to give the PCD Music Lounge (Link) a try and while the interface could use some work, the look of the micro-world was impressive. I was hoping the cell-shaded avatars wouldn’t look out of place against realistic textures used on the world geometry. And they don’t. Compare the above image to another one in an earlier post (reLink). It’s like… visual convergence.

I’ve just noticed a truckload of hits landing here from popurls.com so I went to see what was generating the traffic. I’m not sure why, but someone has linked to an index listing on this site for the term “kirkyan” and labeled it “Kirkyans Are Futurebugs”. Ummm… what’s a “futurebug”? Anyone?