Some Game Joos

John Carmak was at the Apple conference. WHooooolllllyyy crrrrrr***p.

If you need to, search on “iD Games”, and/or one Mister “John Carmak”, king off all that is gaming engine design. Much too much to put into this little message. Anyway… Turns out the new iD engine will run on almost anything – and get this – a lot of iD developers use Mac OS X now. In fact, a lot of developers use Powerbooks. Is the tide turning against the MS giant?

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,132823-c,games/article.html

 

Why can’t we get this on the handset? (See prior comment about Flash being too expensive.)

http://www.ferryhalim.com/

 

This game actually encourages you to google answers.

If you ever beat this game, you are r00t. I got to level 5.

http://deathball.net/notpron/

 

WoW Pwns

I’m not saying that we should put MMOS onto a mobile-enabled platform like a UMPC, but if someone WERE to do it, they might want to enable WoW based on this data:

http://gigaom.com/2007/06/13/top-ten-most-popular-mmos/

Cinema Joos – Webstyle.

http://angryalien.com/ Bunny reenactments in 30 seconds.

http://muffinfilms.com/ Yeah. Animated muffins.

A Smattering of GOOG:

Google YouTube is now mobile: http://mobilecrunch.com/2007/06/18/youtube-mobile/

How GOOG works, (sort of): http://blog.ted.com/2007/06/googles_quest_f_1.php

Whazzup with GOOG Labs? http://mashable.com/2007/06/18/google-labs/

The Multimachine

Open sourced machines. To me this seems to be a great intersection between the open sourced community and mechanical engineers who always wanted to get in the game; the push to embitter developing countries with sustainable and cheap technology through good design; and DIY fanatics who love their MacGyversisms. I like to think of this as the combination of all three, plus some heapings of pragmatic design and ingenuity driven by necessity. Think of it as the poetry of klude.

Enter the MultiMachine, a humanitarian, “open source” machine tool project for developing countries. The mechanics of this machine attain a nearly zen-like beauty in simple mechanics. The machine, which starts as a drill press/lathe/mill is designed around using an old engine block and reusing the exact machining and tolerances of the cylinders as a means of making a precision tool. Beautiful.

http://opensourcemachine.org/node/2

If you want to rock it old school, here is text from Farm Blacksmithing from the same site:

http://opensourcemachine.org/files/Farm%20Blacksmithing%20-%20J.%20Drew%20(1901)%20WW.pdf

 

Does this inspire reusing an old tool in an elegant and uplifting way?
It may be ugly, but it may also be cheap and effective.

LBS Lawsuit, GPS more accurate.

Geomas has a patent on LBS being used as a search mechanism and is suing Verizon. As LBS becomes a key enabler in mobile technology, I’d expect this to be a story to follow.

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/06/location_patent

And while that lawsuit moves forward, an innovation in GPS allows greater accuracy than ever before.

http://hotfromsiliconvalley.typepad.com/hotfromsiliconvalley/2007/06/gps_that_never_.html

So once the capability makes it through court and onto the street, at least we know that at some point it will be useful.

Spectrum Wars

Here is the latest posting in what I’ve called the “spectrum war”. In a nutshell, the UHF spectrum is up for auction by the FCC due to TV going all digital. A group of internet companies want to make a block of the spectrum open-access as long as the devices meet a standard. In the other corner, the telecom companies want to make sure their networks operate under standards and in a controlled fashion.

http://www.forbes.com/2007/06/08/wireless-fcc-auction-tech-intel-cx_bc_0611wireless.html

A great write up of the topics is here:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/05/uhf_spectrum

Zoom Zoom

Part I: It’s a Zoomable World

Zooming and scaling is a creative way to simply express vast amounts of data in a way we are used to seeing. I blame Google Earth for endlessly exposing detail.

http://www.loosewireblog.com/2007/06/at_last_a_zooma.html

Part II: Photosynth and Seadragon

The ability to realize the human collective potential of the visual web. Prepare to be stunned by Microsoft’s Live Labs.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

Joe Haldeman explored the concept of sharing of our common humanity for war and for peace in the book. He also extended the concept to include humanity as a single hive-mind. Although frightening, and enlightening, and just plain bad at times, the concept of AI shaping mankind is not a new idea. However, using the social web with limited computer “AI” may be the practical method that will shape our culture for a virtual world as seen by the cyberpunk following. I’m sure not ready to wire up my head.

The Star Trek Effect

I mentioned what I called the Star Trek effect the other week. Let me explain.

Science Fiction, when done well, can be enlightening. New ideas, new ways of thinking, and sometimes, new constructs lead to visionary outbursts. Sometimes it becomes rooted in the cultural lexicon or just the right group to the point that it’s absorbed into the cultural lexicon. Jules Verne put people on the moon. Robert A. Heinlein got us a bit closer with some pragmatic writing to the point where “Waldos” was adopted as technical language. Asimov brought us the three laws of robotics. All of these were adopted by the geeks of yore, probably until Star Wars, which made the future mainstream and marketable.

Of all of these, Star Trek seems to have been the most pervasive – the modern PDA is close to tricorder-ness. Maybe the next-gen plasma screen will be nearly as large and refined as the Enterprise bridge screen. Microsoft is chasing the Holodeck.

What I mean to say is the modern sci-fi is an interesting feedback loop. Concepts are rendered nearly-real by visual effects, where the common culture absorbs them. By embedding an expectation, the skids are greased for new technology adoption.

Our visionaries now have a distribution channel for their ideas – and we want them.

The next interface?

Pardon me a moment while I put all the Joos of the last month on simmer and concentrate it for you on one topic. Just let me ramble. Please? Thanks.

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It’s been 30 years ago that Apple launched. Listening to Steve and Bill talk last week, one of the points made is since the Mac in 1984, the GUI has only evolved. Nothing radical or different has occurred since going from command prompt to GUI. Quote: “It’s the same old crap we’ve had for the last 30 years. (Bumptop)” Actually it’s been 26 years. Rounding error. Moving on…

The same thing was mentioned to Jobs and Gates and they alluded to their companies’ strategies. I’m going to guess where they are headed.

The iPhone is coming June 29^th, and with it a touch interface. This is a practical implementation of technology demonstrated by Jeff Han at TED in 2006. Since then, Jeff has additional demonstrations at his company. The hardware has been around for a while, in use by artists, but Jeff and the movie “Minority Report” and “The Island” really showed the means to make something useful and added a way to make a usable touch screen to the geek cultural lexicon (I call this the Star Trek Effect). And boy, do people love to touch their mobile device screens. So much that Apple is pursuing the technology.

So, make that one checkbox for Apple and the Jeff Han camp of touchscreen technology.

Of course, another piece of Joos indicated touch and interaction from the Microsoft side. Microsoft Surface. The user interaction seems the same, but what is really happening is a whole separate technology using video cameras to detect and sense motion and interaction. The screen is not touch sensitive, there are cameras at work. It seems the military and others are also traveling down this road of camera image recognition for a new interface. Using camera technology also has implications for teleconferencing which may be a telecom disruptor.

So, make that a separate checkbox for Microsoft and the camp of camera recognition technology. And Jeff Han (again) if he uses video cameras instead of touch.

So what?

Expect Apple to go for the touchscreen/GUI of the future in the iPhone and later with a new OS. You could argue that the tablet PC is already here, but using your hands is not the same as wielding a pen. It’s not the what but the how. Jobs loved his Newton. If the tricorder is the PDA, think of this as halfway to the HAC (just add the Sonly OLED). There is another technology demonstration out there called the Bumptop. I’m going to guess that it would align with the touchscreen future, adding physics to the experience.

The MS camp meanwhile is looking to build the Holodeck. Cameras with special and image recognition bring you into a 3D immersive world. Office roundtable will recognize who is speaking. Surface recognizes motions and items placed on it. I’d think that the Reactable for musicians falls into this camp as well.

Both of these will be slow to come, but think about how these can improve a retail experience, or maybe improve the device.

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