For this year’s Christmas presents I continued the theme of my Postcards project. I wanted to give everyone something screen-printed, and joyfully marked with the snail-mail ink stamps. I also wanted to work with fun, low-key online interaction.
I screen-printed a 2 colour drawing of a treehouse onto envelopes, and a gold-on-green card leaf to go in the envelope. Each leaf has a unique adjective on the back, as the end part of a web address. The web address went to a flash movie, which represents the tree and everyone’s leaves. At the moment people can change the colours of their leaves.
Friends and relatives reading this: If you haven’t got one yet, it’s because I don’t know your address. Please email it to me.
I’m still planning some extensions to the functionality of the tree. It’s really fun having a crisp, anti-aliased display platform to play with for interactions, too, and the PHP/MySQL/XML/Flash connection is not too complicated to work with. I’d love to hear your thoughts about improvements and extensions to the tree app, so don’t be afraid to comment.
Sorry for the lapse in posts; I’ve been working on making an interesting Christmas present for everyone, which I’ll blog once they’re all received.
I’ve just spotted Crayon Physics Deluxe – a 2D physics puzzle game – on IndyGames.com, and it fitted into my ongoing look at learning games. The game is scheduled to be available for the iphone in January 2009, and looks like it’s based on the more advanced Phun. Take a look at the video, but be warned that you might want to turn down the sound – the music gets repetitive.
Both this latest game and Phun are examples of “2D Physics sandboxes”, where you can create objects that operate and interact based on Newtonian Physics. The game solutions are open-ended, and it looks like you could have a lot of fun building needlessly complex interactions to achieve the goal. I also really like the aesthetics of the game.
A while back I built a mobile-controllable home automation system, and promised to blog it. It’s taken a while, but here it it…
DIY Home Automation via WAP and the Web – How-to
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Background
This how-to will provide a detailed guide to implementing your own Web/WAP enabled home automation system. The home automation system allows you to control the on/off state of up to eight 3A appliances via either a web browser or a mobile phone. The system provided is fairly cheap and effective, but has a few prerequisites:
An always-on internet connection (or at least on while you want to control things)
An always-on computer (see above)
PHP enabled Web space, or your own web server. (Of course if you are serving from home you already have the first two!)
WAP/web enabled phone if you’d like to use the mobile control features of the system. All modern mobile phones are capable of controlling the system.
Some beginner-level soldering skill. This project uses a PIC16F84, a cheap programmable chip.
Assuming the above, the total cost of building this system should be no more than about AU$50, plus AU$15 for each 240v switch. You can also extend the usefulness of the system by setting up an internet-viewable webcam, using a usb webcam and any freely publishing programs, providing some visual feedback.
This is fantastic; Researchers have used an fMRI scanner to map brain activity to “pixel” regions within a viewed image, and then used the map to reconstruct new images being looked at. They go on to suggest that (as brain activity in these regions occurs with both looking at an image and “picturing” it) they will be able to see peoples dreams and hallucinations.
The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.
Then, when the test subjects were shown a completely new set of images, such as the letters N-E-U-R-O-N, the system was able to reconstruct and display what the test subjects were viewing based solely on their brain activity.
As you may have noticed, neonascent has been buzzing about productive/educational games recently – I’ve spent too much time playing games that are totally unproductive. I can only imagine how much combined human effort is sunk into these computer games! More than anything, I tend to find myself playing just for the sake of advancing the storyline, so these last weeks I have been getting some design thoughts together for a storytelling game.
It’s about time I floated the idea to get some feedback and thoughts.
Background
“Play Well Together” is a collaborative storytelling system. The concept is to provide a fun and compelling alternative to other games, and allow players to collaborate together to tell a story. Collaboration will be through contributing content, and voting on different aspects of the story, as a sort of online madlib. The format of the story I’ve chosen is a three act play, on the basis that this is flexible enough for most stories.* The plays would also be “played back” regularly, although in the style of early computer-game cut-scenes (i.e. subtitles for speech). A global countdown within the program will give all players an idea of the contribution deadline, and once it is up, the slate will be wiped clean, and a new play created.
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