In his latest 'Persuasive Games' column, game designer and writer Ian Bogost examines both Natal-like gesture control devices and Brenda Brathwaite's experimental board game Train, suggesting: "Perhaps the souls of our games are not to be found in ever-better accelerometers and infrared sensors, but in the way they invite players to respond to them."
It's called the aware home, and in this case, home is where the smart is. The house is actually a cutting-edge lab where Georgia Tech researchers look at how we live now and how we might live in the future. Brian Jones, Aware Home Research Institute: The overarching theme has really been health in the home. And that's really where the future is for health care and health care delivery. Here you'll find phones that help the deaf communicate with 911. Computers that recommend a healthy meal based on what's in the fridge. Even high-tech gloves that identify objects for the blind... One of our areas of research has been in providing a device that can help older adults better communicate with their family. No one lives in the aware home full time, and most of the products won't be available to the public for a few more years, but it may be a glimpse of a new way to live.
CNN - June 24, 2009
[06/18/09]
'The Piano Etudes Project' A Space for Play
One of my older brothers played a stand-up bass, and unlike my brother I had no formal musical training. The musical notation that my brother could read and the instrument itself were part of a closed, mysterious and privileged society from which I was excluded. But still, I loved to flail away on the thing. The Piano Etudes project by Jason Freeman (Georgia Tech), with Akito Van Troyer and Jenny Lin, is a move towards opening the forbidden city of musical composition. The project is based on piano etudes, musical compositions in which the pianist can rearrange connections between some open form pieces. Site visitors are invited to create their own etudes from four short compositions by Jason Freeman. Each etude is transcribed graphically into something that resembles an organizational chart.
Tegra Might Power Zune HD, Definitely Does Augmented Zombie Reality
Ready for a double dose of Tegra newsbits? We've been wondering what's packed in the Zune HD for some time now, but apparently PC Perspective has had the answer since Computex and didn't realize the newsworthiness until now. opes up... In other news, a group of researchers from Georgia Tech and Savannah College of Art and Design are showing off some of CPU's impressive potential with an augmented reality game ARhrrrr. Using a Tegra-powered mobile dev kit, the game projects a 3D town based on a two-dimensional diagram where you tap the screen to shoot zombies, or lay Skittles in real life to serve as virtual bombs. We've seen similar implementations before, but we're admittedly quite infatuated with this one, and as a bonus, there's video of the demo after the break.
Now That We’ve Augmented Some Reality, How About Blasting Some Zombies?
You Tube video that features augmented reality for mobile devices from GVU Center at Georgia Tech (prof. MacIntyre) and SCAD.
Wired - June 14, 2009
[06/12/09]
Mobile Augmented Reality and Mirror Worlds: Talking with Blair MacIntyre
Blair MacIntyre is one of the original pioneers of augmented reality and an extraordinary amount of creative work is coming out of his Augmented Environments Laboratory at Georgia Tech - see YouTube videos here. The screenshot below is from, ARhrrrr, a very impressive augmented reality shooter game created at Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab and Savannah College of Art and Design, (SCAD- Atlanta), and produced on the NVidia Tegra devkits - watch the demo here.
Blair has spent much of his career working on immersive augmented reality and more recently the integration of augmented reality with mirror worlds. Blair explains: “I am interested in the intersection of mobile devices - whether they are head mounts or handhelds - and parallel mirror worlds…I think that parallel mirror worlds are a direct manifestation of the intersection of the virtual world we now live in (the web) and geotagging. As more and more information is tied to place, and as more of our searching become place-based, we will want to do those searches about places we are not at. A 3D mirror world may provide one interface to that data. Want to plan your trip to London; go their virtually and look around, see what is there (both physically and virtually), teleport between areas you want to learn about, and so on. More interestingly, talk to people who are there now, and retrieve your location-based notes when you are on your trip.”
John Etherton, a graduate of Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia, is a "post-war correspondent." He is part of a school program called GTV, or Greater Truth through Voices, that dispatches people through Liberia to record the experiences of war victims like Chea.
The Georgia Tech program isn't just concerned with the past; it's preparing Liberians for the future. The collected stories will be sent to Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a group formed to rebuild trust among Liberians by identifying war crimes and encouraging victims to come forward. The commission is holding its final hearing this month and is expected to release its final report soon.
Liberia is trying to move away from its violent past. But Etherton says the country still feels on edge. "It really feels like the Wild West," Etherton said. "It's an eerie, surreal feeling to know that this was a war zone five years ago, and people were dying here."
Now Liberians are trying to learn how to live again. Part of that journey begins with listening to one another's stories. That is part of the rationale behind Liberia's commission: A nation that can confront its violent past will have a better shot at a stable future.
"It's necessary for people to talk and share their stories and engage in debate," Mike Best said. The Georgia Tech professor says GTV uses a cartoon character who looks and speaks like a typical Liberian to show war survivors how they can record their stories on the mobile video system.
"Ultimately, some transformative truths will allow people to see themselves in a new way."
The annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, known as E3, attracts tens of thousands of hardcore gamers and industry figures to Los Angeles each June ... Here, we’ve sifted through the dodgy RTS titles and lazy console ports to pick out the most important PC gaming stories to emerge from the three-day conference, so take a look at our top stories and let us know what you think. Indie Innovation – Indiecade is a roving organisation that celebrates independent development, and its booth at E3 is ‘the de facto lounge for indie developers’ according to Celia Pearce, Indiecade’s E3 Festival Chair. The last two years’ E3 finalists have included Braid, And Yet It Moves, Machinarium and Everyday Shooter, so there’s plenty for this year’s contenders to live up to.
Word to those who think the Internet spells the end of traditional print media: "hacker journalists" have arrived to save the day. A cadre of newly minted media whiz-kids, who mix high-tech savvy with hard-nosed reporting skills, are taking a closer look at ways in which 21st century code-crunching and old-fashioned reporting can not only co-exist but also thrive. And the first batch of them has just emerged from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism... Medill isn't the only higher education institution blending computer programming and journalism; at other schools such as the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, traditional J-school programs are incorporating a dose of tech-thumping... At the Georgia Institute of Technology , a three-year-old program in "computational journalism" helps computer science majors study how journalists gather, organize and utilize information, then take these workflows and see how technology can make the processes easier. Says Professor Irfan Essa: "We're trying to get people aware of what computations and software programs can do for their day-to-day work. This kind of thinking has enabled technology to streamline workflows in dozens of other industries. There's no reason it can't work in journalism, too."
At the Electronic Entertainment Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center, KPCC’s Brian Watt observed the hordes of gamers looking for the next fun time... Celia Pearce: All you have to do is look at the show floor at E3 and you'll see that this is a recession-proof business. Watt: Celia Pearce teaches digital media at Georgia Tech. She used to design interactive attractions in Los Angeles. She says the computer game industry has grown every year for the last 10. Last year in the U.S., it raked in close to $12 billion – up from 9-and-a-half billion the year before. Pearce: You know, parents will go "Oh, uh, video game, that's not a career choice." Actually, it's a pretty good one. It's a pretty bulletproof economy.
2009 Life. Love. Game Design Challenge Winners Unveiled
Is it possible to educate about teen dating violence through a violence-free video game? That's the idea behind the annual Life. Love Game Design Challenge, now in it's second year. The games include versions of tower defense games, a music game and even a few click adventure titles. Other judges for the challenge were . . .Persuasive Games co-founder Dr. Ian Bogost, and professor Brenda Brathwaite.
In what he describes as the first ever simultaneous game release on both the Atari 2600 and iPhone, developer, author and researcher Ian Bogost (the producer behind the previously mentioned airport security game Jetset) has released Guru Meditation to the App Store, a portable version of his "zen meditation game." The background: the game was originally developed for an obscure 'Joyboard' peripheral for the Atari 2600 -- the retro-tech equivalent of the Wii's Balance Board -- which, instead of using the controller for an action game, required the player to sit as still as possible on the board. Remain motionless and your guru score rises, move a muscle and you crash back to the ground and start again.
Box drum rhythm with a lot of work, a robot percussionist might expect a miserable heap. But not Haile. Gil Weinberg, developer fromGeorgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, claims a battery rather than block their assistance. Haile with wooden weapons, and India play drum assembly, a drum and the outside The Edge of the same drum. Robot to recognize rhythm, pitch and volume of the drum a perfect model and mimic them. Haile then improvises by dividing, multiplying or skipping beats. "This change means that users, while maintaining the rhythm early," said Weinberg. Weinberg now plans to use genetic algorithms to shocks in real-time, create a new pattern.
The video game industry was about to get its first major game based on a current military action, only to have publisher Konami pull the plug. What’s wrong with releasing a realistic war video game? Six Days In Fallujah, which was announced and then abandoned by its publisher last month, was a game both hyped by its developer for its potential to be a game-documentary and scrutinized by game critics who questioned some of its Gears of War influences. To the public it became a flashpoint, a warning of video games perhaps going too far... When approaching a game that realistically depicts a modern combat situation, one criticism that often arises is the subject of fun. Can a realistic military shooter be fun? According to Ian Bogost, that’s the wrong question to ask. “We use the word fun as a placeholder, when we don’t even really know what we mean when we look for some sort of enjoyment in a serious experience,” he said. Fun and entertainment aren’t mutually exclusive, especially when it comes to entertainment based on real-world military conflicts.
The world is a scary place, especially for kids these days. Turn on the news or check online and stories and headlines about the swine virus are everywhere. Thanks to a new serious game developed by Persuasive Games, the same studio behind DebtSki, parents have a new avenue of discussion and a non-threatening visual way to explain flu epidemics to their kids. The free online game, Killer Flu, is also a great resource for educators to enlighten kids about how to prevent the spread of flu viruses. "With respect to pandemic flu, the game shows how a new strain of flu develops (in our case it's in birds; the current H1N1 strain is a combination of human, avian, and swine flus), becomes transmissible to humans, and then spreads among humans," explained Ian Bogost, Ph.D., Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founding partner at Persuasive Games. "Most importantly, it shows the process by which a potentially pandemic strain does or does not spread across the globe, depending on the geographical and epidemiological situation that flu finds itself in."
How to Make Atari Games Look Better by Making Them Look Worse
You might find it comical that someone's concerned with the graphical presentation of emulated Atari games -- after all, they're pretty much beyond help, right? It might be even more amusing to think that emulation (and modern TV technology) makes Atari games look too good. But it's true! Atari VCS games running in Stella or other emulators don't look like they look on a CRT, and artificial scanlines alone don't make for an authentic presentation. Ian Bogost presented the challenge to a team of Georgia Tech computer science students, who then modified Stella to simulate the characteristics of a CRT -- texture, afterimage, color bleed, and noise.
Anyone, Really, Can Make and Share Music with ZoozMobile's iPhone App
The ZoozBeat iPhone app we had so much fun making beats with in December just went social. A new sharing feature lets you save the loops you make on a sharable web page. The lack of export and sharing features had been our only real gripe with this otherwise excellent app. Now that it's fixed, you can now share your sonic sketches by uploading them to MyZoozBeat, from where you can send them to your Facebook profile or Twitter feed, download them as MP3s for e-mailing and posting elsewhere, or listen to the tracks other people have made... Back in March, Zooz Mobile founder and Georgia Tech professor Gil Weinberg demonstrated a direct, person-to-person sharing feature for Wired.com that ran on two Nokia N95s, which allowed two people to literally throw beats back and forth between phones, each adding new elements. Weinberg says implementing that sort of thing on the iPhone has been more difficult, but that peer-to-peer music creation could be coming to the iPhone when Apple releases the 3.0 version of its iPhone software.
Games As Journalism: A Quick Fix For A Dying Medium?
An Online Journalism Blog article says that traditional news outlets need to start making video games that either replace or improve the delivery of news stories ..."It's much more complex than that," Georgia Tech Professor Ian Bogost – whose Journalism and Games Project is sourced several times in the article – said. "The correct question [the article should be asking] is: ‘How can the institution of journalism benefit from video games, and vice versa.' This article is a great example of what's wrong with journalism in general. It assumes simple fixes: take news, add games, stir – profit."
GVU at the College of Computing 18th Awards Celebration
Outstanding Graduated Teaching Assistant
Christina Gardner
Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant
Christopher LeDantec
CS7001 Research Project Award
Andrew Miller
Intel Opportunity Scholar
Betsy DiSalvo
[04/20/09]
Screening for Autism
RESEARCHERS AT EMORY AND GEORGIA TECH HAVE JOINED FORCES TO CREATE A NEW SCREENING FOR AUTISM. IT S AN EARLY DETEXT SCREENING AND THEN INPUT THOSE RESULTS INTO A STATEWIDE DATA BASE. ARE YOU FEELING BETTER TODAY? GIVE ME FIVE. THIS DOCTOR SAYS HAVING A UNIFORM SCREENING FOR AUTISM COULD BE HELPFUL IN C ATCHING PROBLEMS EARLY IN LIFE. . . THE TECHNOLOGY THAT GOES WITH THE STUDY MAKES T RACKING DEVELOPMENT EASIER
The unmanned bombers that frequently cause unintended civilian casualties in Pakistan are a step toward an even more lethal generation of robotic hunters-killers that operate with limited, if any, human control. The Defense Department is financing studies of autonomous, or self-governing, armed robots that could find and destroy targets on their own. On-board computer programs would decide whether to fire their weapons. "The trend is clear: Warfare will continue and autonomous robots will ultimately be deployed in its conduct," Ronald Arkin, a robotics expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, wrote in a study commissioned by the Army. "The pressure of an increasing battlefield tempo is forcing autonomy further and further toward the point of robots making that final, lethal decision," he predicted. "The time available to make the decision to shoot or not to shoot is becoming too short for remote humans to make intelligent informed decisions."
First Computer Games Started so Small They Now Boggle the Memory
It is an unmistakable artifact: the woodgrain deck with its bank of switches, the rubber-gripped joysticks with their single button in inviting PUSH ME orange, the primitive-looking games with their bright, blocky graphics and bleep-blorp sound effects. But for authors Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, the Atari VCS – more popularly known as the Atari 2600 – was and is much more than a piece of '80s iconography; it is a unique piece of technology that changed the world forever. . . ."It's just a wonderfully weird computer," laughs Bogost, an associate professor at Georgia Tech and founder of game development house Persuasive Games. He is understating; by today's standards – and even by the standards of its day – the VCS hardware was bizarre in the extreme. With an internal RAM memory of 128 bytes – a tiny fraction of the memory required to, for example, store this sentence on a modern computer – and a capacity for accessing only 4K of cartridge data, it forced programmers to extremes of economy. On top of that, the minuscule RAM made the now-standard graphics technique – setting up a complete frame of the display and then sending it to the screen – impossible.
A video produced by Kurt Luther and Erika Poole from Georgia Tech, and several other collaborators, won Golden Mouse Award for the Best Entertaining Video at the CHI 2009 conference.
The video called "CHIstory" (a play on the conference name, CHI, and the word 'history') is a playful history of the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). CHIstory was one of 25 videos accepted for the CHI 2009 Video Showcase by a jury of HCI experts.
CHIstory short summary:
"How might the world view human-computer interaction a century from now? In this video, set one hundred years in the future, we playfully re-envision the early history of HCI. As the video opens, the Great Usability Cataclysm of 2068 has erased all previous knowledge of HCI. The world has been plunged into an age of darkness where terror, fear, and poor usability reign. Unearthing fragments of previously lost archival footage, a disembodied HCI historian (Jonathan Grudin) introduces a first attempt to reconstruct the history of our field. Pioneering systems like NLS and Sketchpad are reviewed alongside more recent work from CHI and related conferences. The results may surprise and perplex as much as they entertain, but most of all, we hope they inspire reflection on the past and future of our field."
Watch the winning video on YouTube!
[04/08/09]
Phone Software Reminds Muslims When to Pray
Muslims typically pray five times daily in a routine based on the sun's position. But in cloudy weather, or indoors, keeping the schedule can be tricky. A new mobile phone application developed at Georgia Institute of Technology reminds users when its time to pray. But unlike similar applications that rely on text commands in a "pray now" fashion, Sun Dial uses audible prompts combined with graphics of the sun and green circles that show a direction for prayer and suggest a general time.
