Tag Archives: #interfacedesign

q, Meet qDot

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If you didn’t read the Wired articles I mentioned in an earlier post, this one may seem to come out of left field. The point of that post was mostly to show how technology seems to be driven by the *needs* of the extremes of human behavior. On the one hand you have the military developing swarming robotic/remote-controlled fighter aircraft (see this early post as well), and on the other hand you have the “pron” industry feeding technology into the public arena – whether it be vcr’s or webcam peepshows. And because they were both about telepresence technology, they were relevant to what I write here.

Now here’s a guy who’s integrating things with videogames (see related post here). From the Wired article:

His fascination with teledildonics — sex toys that lovers can control for one another over the internet, whether they’re in the same room, the same house, or 3,000 miles apart — grew out of his interest in video games.

Well, that does it. Videogames are most definitely eViL.

(p.s. I hope it’s not lost on you that this guy has hooked up a sex toy to a game called “Quake”)

The Wizard’s Toys

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Screenshot from Wizard of Funk

To be honest, I don’t pay as much attention to Sony’s Eyetoy as I probably should. Not that new interfaces aren’t interesting. They certainly are. It’s just that I’ve been waiting for that Power Glove-VR Goggle style 3D interface the title character from the movie Johnny Mnemonic whips out to retrieve data from a hotel fax machine(!) in Beijing. Guess I’ve been blinded, so to speak. Anyway, although it’s not a major product hit afaik (edit – at over 5 million sold according to reports, I guess it’s doing pretty good), it does seem like the Eyetoy is carving a nice niche for itself. Case in point is this entry over on Gamesblog:

Despite the proliferation of rap, guns and cars there were a few examples of gaming innovation tucked away in the darker corners of the E3 show-floor. One of these was Wizard of Funk, the world’s first, get this, EyeToy RPG.

Maybe I need to go back and listen to Eyetoy creator Richard Mark’s 2004 talk at Accelerating Change. The SLFuture Salon has a blog entry with links, so if you want to catch it, here’s that entry.

Spore Creation Just Another Procedure

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Spore screenshot

Last night I caught a blurb over on Blue’s News that the website for Will Wright’s Spore is now up and running (and kinda cute). Above is one of the cool screenshots from the game… and there’s another one on a previous entry of mine here.

Today Wired online has an interview with the Creator himself in which he even mentions Eames’ Powers of Ten. From the interview:

User-created content has two extraordinary benefits. No. 1 is that when somebody makes a piece of content, they are so much more emotionally attached to it. It doesn’t even matter if it’s good or bad. If they made it, it’s really cool, and they’re totally interested in what happens to it. No. 2, players love trading and sharing and spreading this stuff around and having it come to them, and building up their worlds.

This may be the future of online content. Did he say “parametrically”?

Bits About Bits

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Thought I’d just post some links to some interesting and (semi-) related stories.

“Get Your Game Off” (Wired) – gaming and sex.

“Minority Report”-style interfaces (New Scientist) – interaction on steroids.

$1B by 2010 (Yahoo/Reuters) – games and advertising. And since Yahoo story links die quickly, here’s a quote:

Advertising within video games, a hot new field for marketers, will likely surge eightfold to more than $1 billion in the next five years as companies court consumers who have cut back on television viewing, according to industry estimates released on Thursday.