Month: December 2008

Anoth­er Jonathan Har­ris piece. This one fea­tures lush 3D graph­ics and touch interactions.

“Coup is a mod­er­ate­ly mul­ti­play­er game of high chival­ry, quar­rel­ing aris­toc­ra­cy, and grue­some back­stab­bing.” On of the games devel­oped as part of IPerG.

The lat­est game by Daniel Ben­mer­gul is exper­i­men­tal indeed. It’s par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing to com­pare this game with pre­vi­ous efforts and see how mechan­ics have evolved and have been com­bined. True craftsmanship.

Simon Oliv­er’s upcom­ing game for the iPhone and iPod Touch looks like one of the first titles to ful­ly exploit the capa­bil­i­ties of the plat­form. High pro­duc­tion val­ues as well.

A news­pa­per piece on per­son­al infor­mat­ics. Huh. I guess this has hit the mainstream.

Koster mus­es on Tale­b’s con­cept of the ludic fal­la­cy. He wor­ries that games are not prepar­ing peo­ple to deal with black swans. This needs to change, if games are to become teach­ing tools. “Rather than just bemoan this, I’ll instead issue the chal­lenge: what is the fun game that fea­tures black swans, phase tran­si­tions, and the cat­a­stroph­ic 100-year flood? How do you sculpt a sys­tem that does this with­out chas­ing away the newbies?”

Win­ner of the EUROPRIX Mul­ti­me­dia Awards 2008. Nice to see a mul­ti touch appli­ca­tion that does not cater to geeks or the jet set. Cer­tain­ly an impres­sive effort con­sid­er­ing this is a stu­dent project.

“Stil­lAliveDS is a puz­zle game inspired by Por­tal: The Flash Ver­sion which is a 2D renew­al of Por­tal, devel­oped by Valve Cor­po­ra­tion.” Need to play this. I like the fact that it includes a map editor.

“I real­ly like the idea of the pop­u­lar mini game Cray­on Physics: You draw an object on the screen and it instant­ly becomes phys­i­cal and inter­acts with oth­er objects. The first thing that sprung to my mind when see­ing it was “This would be awe­some on the DS!” And Pock­et Physics is what I came up with after two weeks.” On my flash cart now. Awesome.

“It puts arrival infor­ma­tion for all the stops near me on one page, and puts the empha­sis on when I need to leave the house to catch a train. It tells me whether I need to get going right now, or whether I have 5 min­utes to play with my kid before leav­ing.” This is love­ly, because besides being some­thing devel­oped to scratch an itch, it is well designed too.

“most pub­lic objects — and cer­tain­ly all munic­i­pal objects — should offer APIs” Amen to that. It would have made the mak­ing of my trav­el time map of NL much eas­i­er, for one.

“So we here­by present the out­comes of an exit­ing day with 23 peo­ple who crunched their brain on the sub­ject of “Adding val­ue to com­modi­ties“.” Results from the 1st Ser­vice Design Con­fer­ence. More work­shops should share their out­comes like this.

Draw­ing hands is a bitch indeed. I pre­fer to do it myself, but for those who pre­fer ready-made ones, here’s a sten­cil you can use to visu­al­ize mul­ti-touch interactions.

Habi­tat was one of the first (if not THE first) vir­tu­al world. I nev­er knew they did an actu­al pro­mo­tion­al video, but they did. This is from 1986. Awesome.

A phys­i­cal com­put­ing project from 2005. “Cre­ate a com­po­si­tion by lay­ing out the box­es. Make some dif­fer­ent shapes and press play on a box to see how your com­po­si­tion sounds. Now pick up one of the box­es and move it to change your piece of music as its play­ing!” I imag­ine this would be so much eas­i­er to build nowa­days with stuff like Arduino.

An inter­est­ing indie game made in Flash that com­bines physics based mechan­ics with music loops, result­ing in a pleas­ant aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ence. Via Tom.

My friends at Netlife Research have out­done them­selves with this crazy plan: an UX con­fer­ence in the Arc­tic, where design­ers get to tack­le a big problem.

Ton’s start­ed a blog to keep track of his for­ay into the world of net­worked objects.

Old, but nev­er got around to book­mark­ing this. A slight­ly sil­ly ser­vice that allows you to keep track of stuff and dis­play the data in a dash­board-like fashion.

The dev­il is in the details. An extreme­ly well-craft­ed online sto­ry by Jonathan Harris.

A library that makes it easy to get Adobe Kuler palettes into Pro­cess­ing. Might come in handy some time.

“Worldmap­per is a col­lec­tion of world maps, where ter­ri­to­ries are re-sized on each map accord­ing to the sub­ject of inter­est.” Ugly, but interesting.

“On-line news­pa­pers, infor­ma­tion agency, blogs and per­son­al web­sites, the­mat­ic media are mon­i­tored to high­light the pat­tern of per­cep­tions on the urban space” In this case, Madrid. No idea how they’ve man­aged to map this, but it looks inter­est­ing. Via Yohan.