Possible Futures: The BirdsPad

07 June 2011

How long before Rovio enter the hardware market?

I’m serious. This is what Android was surely designed for: cheap, off-the-shelf, no-brand tablets, spruced up with a canny rebrand.

And what could be better than the inevitable $100-200 tablet, running Android 3.0 out of the box, and – even more crucially for the target audience – pre-installed with Angry Birds. One step further, maybe: Angry Birds Universe, the eternally updating, subscription-driven, physics-based puzzler.

The cherry on the top: by default, the device just boots into Angry Birds. What else were you going to use your tablet for? The whole Android universe is there, of course – it’s the extra-added-value – but it’s really just a footnote on throwing birds at pigs.

I’m not even sure that it wouldn’t fly off the shelves.

Take a deep breath; it might not happen. But given everywhere else Rovio are, it doesn’t feel like an extravagant extrapolation to move them into consumer electronics.

design , ,
  • "I’m excited to announce that I’ve been contracted by O’Reilly to write a book about the Microsoft Kinect. The book is tentatively titled Making Things See: Computer Vision with the Microsoft Kinect, Processing, and Arduino. My goal is to introduce users to working with the Kinect’s depth camera and skeleton tracking abilities in their own projects and also to put those abilities in the wider context of the fields of gestural interfaces, 3D scanning, computer animation, and robotics." Nice. Joining this stuff together is *hard*, and getting it into the hands of designers, rather than programmers, is very important.
    (tags: kinect processing books oreilly )
  • "Certainly as delivered through mobile devices, contemporary AR imposes significant limits on your ability to derive information from the flow of streetlife. It’s not just the “I must look like a dork” implications of walking down the street with a mobile held visor-like before you, though those are surely present and significant. It’s that the city is already trying to tell you things, most of which are likely to be highly, even existentially salient to your experience of place. I can’t help but think that what you’re being offered through the tunnel vision of AR is starkly impoverished by comparison — and that’s even before we entertain the very high likelihood of that information’s being inaccurate, outdated, or commercial or otherwise exploitative in nature."
    (tags: ar kevinslavin adamgreenfield cities focus optics sensing )
  • GameMaker-like tool for OSX and Windows – that outputs Flash games, built out of Flixel and Box2D. Niiice.
    (tags: games prototyping flash flixel box2d )
  • "Cole Phelps has no health bar, no ammo count, and no inventory. He doesn't write journal entries, and has no safe house or property. He doesn't eat, doesn't sleep, doesn't smoke or drink or sleep around or go out with his friends. I have seen nothing of his wife and children, his passions, his hates or his desires. He walks into a crime scene and barks his introductions like a dog, rude and abrasive; petulant and bullying. He carries himself like a child playing dress-up, weak-chinned, pale, and aimlessly angry. Cole Phelps is kind of a prick.

    But when I look at what's going on around him, I can't really blame him. What to make of this Truman Show-esque existence, this vast, toothless city? If I were trapped in such a purgatorial nightmare, I'd probably behave badly, too." This is good, and expresses in poetic and critical terms one of the many reasons I just don't care about LA Noire.

    (tags: killscreen lanoire criticism review videogames openworld hollow )
  • "The One Page Dungeon Contest is level design contest for creating a scripted RPG adventure that fits on one 8.5×11 page. All information, the map, story, encounters and more have to fit in one page. Sort of writing a haiku, short and sweet.

    The dungeons are RPG-system neutral and vary greatly in style. Several are classic hack-and-slash dungeon-crawls, while others involve mysteries, horror, solitaire play and lots more." Sounds great.

    (tags: games rpg system stories succinct short compact )

The System and The World

27 May 2011

11 million player deaths in Just Cause 2 – a big open world game – plotted in 3D; a map of the world made only out of player-deaths.

What happens is: the map becomes visible, but not it’s quite the “real” map. Unstead, you see obvious things like the really tall buildings – skyscrapers – and the really tall sites – mountains – becoming very evident.

Strange things happen underneath tall stuff – under the biggest skyscrapers, and the casino that hangs in the air like an airship – the shape of the object is very clear at the top, but then disappears into fountains and fluid shapes underneath it, as everybody falls off, hits things on the way down, corpses collecting on the ground underneath the airship – see 00:58 for a really obvious example.

So it visualises both the objects in the world, and the physics of the world. Yes, there are surfaces where people have been shot or run out of health for other reasons, but then there are all the points that extruded from those surfaces according to curves defined by velocity and world-gravity. The world and the system all at once. You could, I suppose, reverse-engineer one from the other. And, of course, what you’re seeing here isn’t geography – it’s just the visualisation of a systemic layer in the game (player-death).

And in that sense, the visualisation shows just how closely the world and its systems are linked. Pretty.

games , , ,
  • " For our project, we had to find three scenes from any movie or TV show and use physics to find out if something was or wasn't possible. I got 100% on it." In this case: 'Physical Impossibilities in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic'. He's really not wrong about the animation.
    (tags: physics science cartoons )
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