Anthony Ko

stationary bike, adruino, and hmd glued together with some javascript and perl to provide a vr ride through google street view.

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VS.

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Venturebeat has a story of where all those Facebook farming games originated from.

When I was in Tomo's class before graduating, we came up with a mechanic based on stealing for a mobile and social media game concept, so I found the following quote particularly encouraging.

Some fear that this new social farming revolution may not contribute to the positive development of society. A central feature of social farm games in China is stealing vegetables. Official state media People’s Daily reports that 70 percent of users on Kaixin001 cite it as their favorite feature, and it has even spawned the popular phrase “How many vegetables have you stolen today?” This key addictive feature has created news stories of business executives “obsessed” with stealing vegetables and broken relationships over vegetables stolen on the night shift. The game is so addictive — with players setting alarm clocks at all hours of the night to check crops — that it 
“destroys jobs and relationships.” Simplicity and stickiness are behind the global epidemic of farm games. Anyone can learn to grow crops within minutes and reap a reward for getting friends — or the entire office — addicted too,” said BloggerInsight Co-Founder Lucas Englehardt.

Another fun fact:
Season Xu, the co-founder of Five Minutes Inc. looks to be in the USC business School.

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These guys use an an HTC Magic running the built in Google Street View and a box to make themselves a primitive pair of VR goggles....minus the whole 3D part.

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DDB Stockholm recently launched a campaign with Volkswagon to get people to change their lazy ways (and buy an environmentally friendly car in the process). The videos show how a little feedback can change the way people interact with everyday objects.

It doesn't look like the English site (thefuntheory.com) is live yet, but the Swedish site is and has a link to a contest where you can submit your own ideas for a chance to win 25,000 kronor (€2,430, $3,590). Seems like a fun project to take on.

Thanks to Victoria for sending me the initial video.

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Check this mobile app out, especially if you are in the San Francisco area!
You can currently get on the list for a private beta invite.

Cabulous and Find my Friend Presentation from John Wolpert on Vimeo.

This is a project I was able to work on thanks to an introduction by the USC Stevens Institute. Best Buy Corporate had set up an innovation program and I was lucky enough to get invited to create some location aware concepts for their connected personal navigation device. A few months later, the project was spun off into a separate company and now it's ready for some beta testers.

Sign up here.

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From mobile phone developers to marketers, everybody seems to be getting into augmented reality lately. The latest from the United Postal Service(yeah, the guys who deliver your mail) and interactive agency AKQA comes a clever utility to help you determine what sized shipping box to use. Print out the glyph, point your web cam at it and you'll see a virtual shipping box. You can change the transparency of the box and place objects you plan to ship inside the virtual box to see if it will fit. Pretty slick.

(via an augmented reality blog)

Posted by Anthony Ko at 1:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Word's out!
2K is bringing The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom to XBox Live Arcade.
Congrats to Matt, Paul, and the whole Winterbottom team!

The game will be shown at the Penny Arcade Expo. Though hopefully these guys will give a sneak peak to some of the Trojan Family.

Kotaku article here.
Associated Press article here.

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Pretty damned clever

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