Gaming

Are Your Users S.T.U.P.I.D?

How good design can make users effective

dunce-200It is an honest question: how smart are your users? The answer may surprise you: it doesn’t matter. They can be geniuses or morons, but if you don’t engage their intelligence, you can’t depend on their brain power.

Far more important than their IQ (which is a questionable measure in any case) is their Effective Intelligence: the fraction of their intelligence they can (or are motivated to) apply to a task.

Take, for example, a good driver. They are a worse driver when texting or when drunk. (We don’t want to think about the drunk driver who is texting.) An extreme example you say? Perhaps, but only by degree. A person who wins a game of Scrabble one evening may be late for work because they forgot to set their alarm clock. How could the same person make such a dumb mistake? Call it concentration, or focus, we use more of our brain when engaged and need support when we are distracted.

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Next Generation Technology for Full Body Game Controllers

Patent approved for Motion Recognition Clothing(TM)

Medibotics’ U.S. patent 7,980,141 for Motion Recognition Clothing™ (MRC) has been approved. MRC is an innovative technology for translating body motion into computer-readable signals that could power the next generation of full-body game controllers. The market for translating body motion into computer-readable signals is already very large. For example, over 10 million units of an existing camera-based full-body game controller system have been sold. With further development, MRC could be used for a variety of applications including not only computer gaming, but also virtual reality in general, sports training, medical therapy, virtual exercise, weight management, and telerobotics.

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The Future of Gaming: A Portrait of the New Gamers

In the spring of 2011, Latitude Research launched a study to understand the recent explosion in gaming, driven in part by the popularity of mobile phones and tablets. Specifically, the study sought to uncover how the profile of the stereotypical gamer has changed, various motivations for gaming, and the evolving role of games in moving traditionally online experiences into the “offline” world—suggesting new opportunities for game and technology developers, educators, and social innovators.

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Sony Says Games Will Read Emotions in 10 Years

Sony is talking crazy, indicating that games may be able to tell if you’re lying or depressed just ten years down the road. We’ll stick with growing crops, thanks.

Seriously, when do games stop being games and cross over into virtual reality? This was the question I asked Nvidia months ago at ECGC 2011, and was told there will always be a market for the high-end PC gamer with the rig nearly the size of a bookcase. But putting visual realism aside, what will happen when games suddenly stop acting like games, and become more like a self-aware super AI that could possibly one day sing you happy birthday or annihilate the human race?

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The Advanced Visualisation and Interaction Environment (AVIE) and Children’s Developing Brains

Image: The interactive experience at UNSW’s iCinema Centre. Source: The Australian

Lost in cyberspace

You only have to be the parent of a child over the age of seven to know what I’m talking about: the vacant eyes so preoccupied by what’s on screen that they can’t focus on your face for more than a few seconds before being drawn back into the cyberworld.

As you talk, your little darling types or toggles. “Are you listening to me?” you ask, only to be told in a precocious tone: “Yeahhhh. I’m multitasking, Mum.”

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How Microsoft’s Xbox 360 & Kinect Help Surgeons in the OR

Image: The avatar for Dr. Brian Ross welcomes participants to an online training session using Xbox chat technology (Stephen Brashear photos/PSBJ)

The sight of a surgeon playing “Grand Theft Auto” in the operating room might raise eyebrows, but it’s one example of how consumer technology is being repurposed to advance the practice of medicine.

Rising medical costs — bloated by expensive, complicated machines — are wrecking the nation’s economic health, while off-the-shelf consumer gadgets keep getting cheaper and more powerful. So the health care industry has discovered it can tap into the innovative wonders of an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 or an Android smartphone app.

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Sony Predicts Return of Virtual Reality

Not content with attempting to usher in the advent of 3D console gaming, it seems Sony now has its sights set on the next quantum leap – virtual reality.

Speaking in a video interview to promote next month’s b.tween 3D event in London, SCE Studios exec Mike Hocking explained that Sony’s recently announced HMD device could represent the future of 3D gaming by allowing users access to a full ‘virtual’ world.

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2011 E3 Coverage: New Wii, Kinect Games and PS Vita

New Nintendo Wii, Star Wars Game Using Microsoft’s Kinect, and PlayStation Vita Portable

Coverage update from the world’s leading video game conference: the E3 Expo in Los Angeles

Situated Research is bringing you the hot news from the world’s largest annual video game conference, the E3 Expo, which began this week in Los Angeles. So far, Nintendo has announced it’s next-generation console, called the Wii U, and Sony has launched a new handheld called the PlayStation Vita. Microsoft has announced some interesting new games for the Kinect, including Star Wars, Disneyland Adventures, and Halo 4.

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For IBM’s Watson technology, What Happens After “Jeopardy!”?

 

IBM’s Supercomputer Has Implications for Healthcare, Information Tech and More

Wouldn’t it be nice to have your very own supercomputer in your pocket?

If your laptop crashed while you were working on a major presentation, you could ask your portable expert to help diagnose the problem. If you wanted to bone up on Middle Eastern history, you could ask it to comb every document available and then wrap it all up in a simple summary (annotated, of course).

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