December 30, 2004
bbc rules
Your part in the news is important to us and we'd like to see the photographs and videos you are shooting using the latest digital technology.If you want to e-mail it to us, send it to yourpics@bbc.co.uk .
Why not add the above email address to your mobile phone and email address book.
If you want to send your picture from your mobile phone, dial 00 44 (0)7970 885089. You can send them from any network or phone. Please send the large full size images (usually 640x480 pixels) taken by the mobiles otherwise they are too small to publish.
click the link for guidelines (e.g. you have to add captions to photos).
in a few years, we'll all be potentially on the media payroll during media events we're witness to.
December 29, 2004
FBI Probes Laser Beam
2 hours, 41 minutes ago
CLEVELAND - Authorities are investigating a mysterious laser beam that was directed into the cockpit of a commercial jet traveling at more than 8,500 feet.
The beam appeared Monday when the plane was about 15 miles from Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, the FBI (news - web sites) said.
Read the Wire
Holiday Video Game Sales Record
"The video game industry is poised to enjoy a record-breaking holiday season. For that, it can thank Charlie Paulson, a 22-year-old garden store employee, and other 20-somethings."
"Aided by sales of games tailored for older teens and adults, the game industry is doing better than expected at what industry analysts say is the beginning of a normal cyclical downturn. Two games in particular - "Halo 2" and "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" - have each sold more than 3.3 million copies in the last two months."
"Overall sales of video games have been 11 percent higher so far this year than last year, according to NPD Group, a market research firm. Last year, the industry made 47 percent of its $7 billion in sales during the holiday quarter; this year, the holiday sales are expected to represent 50 percent of total sales, said William Lennan, an analyst with WR Hambrecht, a financial services firm. "It's going to be the biggest Christmas ever for video games," Mr. Lennan said. But he said the big question was whether sales would drop sharply next year as consumers put off buying games in anticipation of a new generation of game consoles expected in late 2005 and 2006."
Read the NYTimes Article
(you need to sign up if you haven't a membership)
December 28, 2004
Unrealscript Programmer Needed for Proof of Concept Demo - Paid
Found this ad on Gamedev.org, and thought I'd pass it along...
"We have been contracted to provide a limited gameplay proof of concept demo for a publisher that is deliverable before E3 this year. The majority of the work would be implementing the control scheme and creating systems our designer could use to author and tweak a simple melee combat system. We are producing all content and the demo will be on the Unreal 2.5 Runtime."
Read full ad & get contact info at Gamedev.org
IMD Site Update
A little site maintenance today - upgraded to Movable Type 3.14, which appears to offer more stability. And I installed the latest version of MT-Blacklist (2.03 beta) which is designed to further cut down on comment spam.
I've turned off mandatory comment registration for the primary blog; we'll see if this new software can keep the obnoxious free-riding pollution to a minimum, while allowing a wider range of folks to comment easier.
Finally, I switched the "Latest Entries" and "Latest Comments" in the left hand column; now the latest remarks come up top so we can see where the conversation's at.
December 27, 2004
Post-Earthquake - Anyone heard from Bleecker?
After reading reports such as "Thai officials said 431 people were killed and more than 3,600 injured in southern Thai resorts, including Phuket, the country's prime travel destination. Thousands of people were still missing..." and quotes from Thai resort owners such as "I am afraid that there will be a high figure of foreigners missing," I feel that I must express some concern for our dear Julian Bleecker, who is rumored to be vacationing in the area at this time. This is probably just idle worrywort-ism, but if anyone has heard news from him, for better or for worse, please let us know. The community cares, yes it does.
December 26, 2004
EA buys 19.9% of Ubisoft
"We have no control over what Ubisoft's management chooses to do with the company," said EA spokesman Jeff Brown.EA's stake would give it access to 18.4 % of the voting rights against 22.8 % held by Ubisoft's founders, the Guillemot family, Ubisoft said.
"Pending further information, we consider this operation as hostile," an Ubisoft spokesman told Reuters agency.
"We think this operation is aimed at securing the studios of Ubisoft that are ready to face the next generation of gaming consoles," he added.
bbc article
December 23, 2004
Narrative filmmaking for computational media
Just in time for Christmas, I am happy to belatedly announce that the class "CTIN 499 - Special topics : Narrative filmmaking for computational media" is open for registration.
You can find more details here.
The class is on Fridays, 12pm-3pm, and to adapt to heavy schedules, it is only 2 credits, instead of 4.
The class basically covers everything you always wanted to know about interactive filmmaking but never dared to ask, with a good retrospective of interactive cinema research history, some famous, some lesser known. We will cover the state of the art of database narrative, post-linear aesthetics, real-time editing, narratology, multimedia semantics and the different competing technologies/tools/standards (DVD-ROM, broadband web, interactive TV..).
Halfway through the semester, you will get to shoot, edit, program and design your own narrative experimental film for computational media.
Make movies based on real footage that are elastic, generative, that use multiple windows, that adapt to the viewers, which can be different every time you watch them, which are explorable, non-deterministic, hypermovies, etc.
For these final projects, some groups will get to interact with other researchers (from MIT Media Lab) and other avant-garde filmmakers.
I hope to see some of you there and have some fun.
Please contact me if you have other questions!
December 22, 2004
"Cloud" chosen for Game Innovation Grant
Thanks to all the teams that developed game proposals for the Game Innovation Grant for Spring 2005. They were all really well conceived and very interesting ideas.
It was a difficult task to choosing a single team, but the winner is "Cloud" proposed by Jenova Chen. Congratulations to Jenova and his team. Cloud has unique core mechanic that will take a lot of testing and creative focus to execute. There will undoubtedly be a lot of opportunities for playtesting next semester for anyone who is interested in participating.
For more info on the project as it develops, check out Jenova's page for updates.
December 20, 2004
DataJockey mobile device interface
An novel interface to share images and content between mobile devices developed at Keio University's Shonan Fujisawa campus in a lab headed by Prof. Michiaki Yasumura.
December 19, 2004
IEEE VR 2005 Workshop CALL FOR PAPERS
I am co-chairing this workshop and would love to see your submission. . .
Emerging Display Technologies - New Systems and Applications:
From Images to Sensing, Interaction and Enhancement
13 March 2005 (Bonn, Germany)
The recent flurry of display technology development has produced families of technologies that make fixed and projected pixels cheaper, faster, more flexible, and of higher quality. These advances enable ‘smart pixels’ and enable a number of burgeoning applications ranging from displays being used for better and more flexible images, to user interaction, scene sensing, and environment enhancement.
The 3rd International Conference Virtual Concept 2005
Virtual Concept 2005 will bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss current advances, issues, and case studies in key technical areas of Virtual Reality dedicated to the product design, product manufacturing or industrial process implementation.
This international conference will be held at Biarritz, in the south-west of France, between the Atlantic Ocean and Pyrenean mountains.
Virtual Concept 2005 will bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss current advances, issues, and case studies in key technical areas of Virtual Reality dedicated to the product design, product manufacturing or industrial process implementation.
This international conference will be held at Biarritz, in the south-west of France, between the Atlantic Ocean and Pyrenean mountains.
Papers, invited sessions, tutorials from design, mechanical, computer science and industrial engineering fields may cover aspects of innovative theories and applications of Virtual Reality tools and techniques.
Papers and invited session articles will be published within the proceedings of the conference edited by Springer Verlag. The chairmen of invited sessions will co-edit the proceedings of the conference. Best papers will be selected for publication in an international journal and also best communication and poster awards will be organized.
Don't wrap the fish yet.
Today's Los Angeles Times has an article on page E6: 'Tangling with technology? It's an art'. Not worth running out to go buy the paper, but it is worth turning to the page before lining the cage.
Dept Mention
NY Times Sunday Magazine Feature Article: YOUR BLOG OR MINE by Jeffery Rosen
"The founding father of personal bloggers may be Justin Hall, who started his Web site, Links.net, 10 years ago when he was a student at Swarthmore. ''When I first started doing it, they called it a personal home page; then they said I'm one of the first Web diarists, and now I'm one of the first Web bloggers,'' he said. Hall's short biography says that he is enrolled as a graduate student in interactive media at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television. But if you follow the links to his unofficial biography, you will learn much, much more about him...."
December 18, 2004
ESP Game
Nice use of online game framework to generate metadata:
It's a simple game -- players who visit the www.espgame.org Web site are automatically and anonymously paired up and shown photos or other images. Each player types in words that describe the image until, without seeing the other's list, they have a match. Then they are shown another image and the game repeats. The less time it takes to match words, the higher the score...The players may not realize it, but the lists of descriptive words that they're generating could eventually be used by search engines such as Google to improve Internet searches for images. They also are doing something that no computer program has ever managed to accomplish: analyzing an image and accurately describing it in words. In effect, what von Ahn is creating with his game is a giant, special-purpose supercomputer that uses human brains to do the computing. And the 24-year-old von Ahn, a graduate student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, says this approach, which he calls "Stealing Cycles from Humans," could be applied to a wide variety of problems that are too great for any individual but also beyond the capabilities of conventional computers.
December 16, 2004
The Virtuality 2004 Conference: Italian F/X Up Close
....
With a prestigious background, it’s really not surprising that Torino has become a new center for audio-visual production and digital technology, which began with the birth of Virtual Reality & Multimedia Park (VRMMP), romantically situated inside the historic FERT studios area.
....
“Instead we are great content creators. So the main strategy is to have the Park as a meeting point between digital technology innovation and content; that’s why the city of Torino must re-acquire the abilities to work on them, studying methods and tools to represent [this] content with a new and advanced feel, and to become also widely competitive.”
....
http://vfxworld.com/?sa=adv&code=57c5ed8a&atype=articles&id=2326
blog redesign
So, I understand that there will ultimately be private/exec design decisions made for the blog redesign, but with that in mind, can we discuss / create some suggestions?
I for one would like to see the banner at the very least change soon. It's just old and tired. As well as a much more professional look, while at the same time preserving some of the indie feel. I like pictures on top of text, as well as some color beyond blue!
One example that has some nice aspects, but isn't necessarily what I'd envision: http://www.interaction-ivrea.it/en/index.asp
anyone have points of inspiration or design ideas?
if the president died, I would feel nothing
gotta love this shit.
Bush is preparing to shut down GPS during a national crisis so that terrorists can't navigate using the satellites.
Cory Doctorow I think said it best
Nice one, George: why not shut down the fire-departments, too, so that 'terrorists won't be able to survive fires started by careless smoking?'
So todd, how are you going to get anywhere ever again without GPS? Or better yet, how am I going to do my thesis? ha!
Thanks Bush, for making me feel so much safer. Maybe if you weren't president anymore, I would feel safer.
Illinois Seeks to Curb Explicit Video Games
Today, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich will formally propose the nation's first statewide legislation to regulate the sale and rental of these games, propelling Illinois into a national debate over what to do about this burgeoning and controversial form of entertainment.
The two bills he is promoting would make it a crime for retailers to rent or sell such violent or sexually graphic material to minors, policing video games in much the same way as cigarettes and alcohol.
If approved by the Illinois Legislature — and upheld in the courts — the bills would make it a misdemeanor to sell or rent sexually graphic or violent games to anyone younger than 18, punishable by as much as one year in prison and a $5,000 fine per offense.
Read More
December 15, 2004
Rethinking The Narrative Thread
Panel description for next SIGGRAPH:
Rethinking The Narrative Thread: Where Do Movies End And Videogames Begin? Discussing The New Storytelling Paradigm
The narrative novel used to be held between two covers and a binding. No more. The video game market unites the traditions of storytelling and character development. For the most part we're still absorbing these stories as a whole, rather than interacting with them. Will this change? And if so, how? This panel seeks to answer these questions and others: What will it take to change storytelling? How has narrative changed, if at all? What are new storytelling forms, and have they changed the way we think? Is the book obsolete? Panelists involved in various aspects of the storytelling process will discuss the evolution of interactive story; where we might be going; the fully-immersive story experience; how we might experience interactive stories composed of not only plot and characters, but also visuals and audio.
ea monopoly on football games
excuse me if i come across as bitter about this.
i dont play sports games, this wont really matter to my personal life too much.
but the liberal in me is outraged.
ea has bought the right to be the exclusive video game developer for the nfl.
from the article:
"Under the terms of the deal, no one else will be allowed to develop or publish a video game (for any system) featuring NFL teams, players, stadiums or footage for the next five years."
this is outrageous. totally legal, but totally whack. or jacked. or whatever term you want to use.
ea managed to create (or rather, managed to buy) a complete monopoly on football video games. madden is now the only game in town. because not too many people are going to buy games with completely madeup players, teams, stadiums or footage.
im amazed.
December 11, 2004
SoCal WUG meeting 12/16
Going to go check out the next meeting of the SoCal Wireless Users Group if anyone is still around and interested in joining me, I'm driving, and the event is free (except if you want pancakes, you'll probably have to pay for them.
There will be a brief presentation by Redline communications concerning some of their current wireless hardware research, but there is a lot of meet and greet time that people may be able to establish relationships with folks who are interested in doing wireless stuff, and would probably love to brainstorm new projects.
details are as follows:
# Pasadena IHOP Restaurant (rear meeting room) # 3521 E. Foothill Blvd # Pasadena, CA 91107 # Map: http://ihop.know-where.com/ihop/cgi/site?00006 # Wireless SSID: www.socalwug.org # GPS: N 34° 09.032' - W 118° 04.645'
December 06, 2004
EIN HOLIDAY PARTY
Looking for a break from working on final projects? This year's EIN Holiday Party may be the solution:
When: Sunday December 12th starting at 8:30pm
Where: The Bungalow Club--7174 Melrose Ave.
The EIN will take over the entire venue and guarantees NO WRISTBANDS (for those of you at the last party). Hang out with other CNTV students feeling the same way you do at this time of semester. There will be good food, drink specials (TBD), a DJ and dancing upstairs, and a raffle of "relevant" prizes.
Hope to see you all there!
Senior Thesis Presentations - This Wednesday from 1 - 3 PM in ZML.
All IM students, faculty, staff, guests and committee advisors are invited to participate in the 555 presentations this Wednesday from 1 to 3 PM in ZML. If you think you can make it, please drop a note to bolas(at)well(dot)com, thanks.
One page project descriptions written earlier this year are posted on my IM blog page
December 03, 2004
Nintendo's Game to Produce Own Pix
Hmm, another way to combine film & computer games...not so sure about this approach..."
from Daily Variety: "Mario and friends are on their way to the bigscreen, this time in their own way. Japanese vidgame giant Nintendo is preparing to get into the film biz, likely by creating an inhouse unit to develop animated features based on the numerous properties owned by the company behind the GameCube and Game Boy systems..."
Continue reading at: Daily Variety's Website
BBC hoaxed on Dow Bhopal responsibility story
(EMEA News, 12/3/04) The BBC has issued a retraction of an interview aired on BBC World this morning, which purportedly showed a Dow Chemical spokesperson taking responsibility for the Bhopal gas tragedy and promising huge compensation to victims. More
(London Times, 12/3/04) The Yes Men are Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, two enigmatic activists who use the internet and media to lampoon corporations and politicians. Although it is unclear which of them fronted the elaborate hoax that tricked the BBC into broadcasting a fake apology for the Bhopal disaster - the so-called spokesman looked like Bichlbaum - the stunt carries all their hallmarks. More
grand thieves audio
bunk magazine is doing a cool hack of GTA Vice City where they hijack the soundtrack, and put someone into the car with you (via the new audio).
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, an earth-shaking game of theft, prostitution, drugs, and beautifully animated racist depictions of Cubans and Haitians. You are free-wheeling Tommy Vercetti, driving any car you can pop the lock on, taking hookers out to the lighthouse, enjoying all the pixilated pleasures the 80s can offer you.Bunk is making the game that much better because we're putting somebody in the car with you. We're carjacking the game with a mod of our own. Choose from one of the many options.
This is only the beginning, the first in a series of monologues (or modologues) and performances we're testing out. Send us yours and we'll feature them on the page. Download too slow, send us a few bucks and you can get the entire CD!
samples of some of the audio "personalites" are at the link below.
December 02, 2004
"Localizing Digital Games"
This month's Journal of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) contains an article by Alexander Thayer and Beth E. Kolko. The article "focuses on blending, the most challenging and potentially effective form of game localization and asserts that technical and professional communicators should learn more about blending, digital game localization and their place within this burgeoning industry."
Journal is available by subscription or by loan in my office...
Come play Surrealist games with the Game Design Community, 2-4PM Friday 12/3 at the Annenberg IML
Enquiry, discovery, poetry, and epiphany – unlock the door to your unconscious in a day of Surrealist games with the USC Game Design Community.
Word games, visual plays and re-inventions are the heart of Surrealist games and activities, a sort of “provocative magic” that results in unexpected and surprising results. Come explore imaginative games like “The Exquisite Corpse” and “Would You Open the Door?” By playing these games, we hope to spur creative thinking in our community and introduce playful practice and procedure into our game designs.
2-4PM on Friday 12/3 at the Annenberg IML.
December 01, 2004
found magazine reading
this magazine came up in mobile class the other day. they are having a reading on sun here in la. ive been to one last year and it was fun, even though will thinks its too hipster. (but he lives in los feliz, so i think it might be the pot calling the kettle black.)
more info:
http://foundmagazine.com/
Sunday, December 5, 2004
Gallery Nineteen Eighty Eight, 7 pm, 7020 Melrose Ave,
323.937.7088
almost certified (grade A noise for non-discerning consumers)
a distributed network of sixteen precarious egg tapping robots. carefully designed software conducts calculated emergent sequences as a shifting range of curious patterns. the result: a peculiar acoustic spatial drum machine.
we present our extensive research on the egg industry as an example of a broader lack of industrial modernization. by promoting social consciousness and self sustainability, we may live better through decentralization.
by k.cain and b.crabtree
a mechanical installation and informative publication.
opening 12.04.04 7pm. showing through 12.19.04
at machine project. 1200 d north alvarado street. los angeles, ca 90026.
tehn (bcrabtree) http://nnnnnnnn.org/
SACHIKO KODAMA @ Telic
This Saturday, December 4th, 7 - 9 pm, join us for a Preview of "Breathing Chaos" and Reception for the artist. Exhibition Opening is Saturday December 11, 7-9pm.
Telic
975 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA 90012
http://www.telic.info
China rushes to animate its film industry
"Early next year, Global Digital Creations Holdings, a fledgling animation studio that has mostly labored in anonymity, is aiming for the big time with the worldwide release of its first 3-D feature film, "Thru the Moebius Strip," a science-fiction adventure about a determined boy's time travel to another galaxy to rescue his stranded father."
http://news.com.com/China+rushes+to+animate+its+film+industry/2100-1026_3-5472686.html
