Mobzombies iPhone

oh, I guess I forgot to mention: mobzombies is available on the app store. Read more here.

Mobzombies is a truly mobile, location-based iPhone game that pits you against zombie hordes generated by human activity at real places. Unique movement controls allow players to use their bodies as joysticks, turning mundane physical things (barstools or people, for instance) into tricky obstacles obstructing the path towards zombie destruction.

Mobile Gamer 1

I’d totally forgotten about this piece by my former classmates Vince Diamante and Shelby Wong until it showed up in freaking edge magazine online! There’s something so dramatically cool about this project, it makes me want to get 10-20 of these things and make them accessible, zip-car style, around the city.

Human / Robot Hybrid Path Finding

[from here]

Ok? I’m immediately reminded of that little guy in WALL-E, you know that guy? (not WALL-E, that other little guy).

but hrm — is this something you like, watch, then replicate IRL? Or are you kind of like, moving and path-following the green line until you get to starbucks, with the thing tracking you? I mean, is that dude’s paper map was entirely insufficient? Or the GPS directions? Wasn’t GPS supposed to solve the “starbucks” problem first? It seems like the biggest problem with on-foot navigation systems is heading, especially if you have a bad sense of direction. I’ve used slippy maps + GPS, using the “walking directions” routing a few dozen times in various places I’m not super familiar with (most recently in Portland, OR, where everything is on a pretty map friendly grid), and the biggest issue in my mind is heading. Yeah, but once you are confident that you are walking in the correct direction, that problem is pretty much solved, in my mind.

I think, rather than using the go-to starbucks example on a city street, and framing the problem in relation to traditional or phone-based gps navigation, these kind of systems could be best shown off in corporate parks (or other complex indoor spaces). I think that’s how this stuff might better represent the *problems* they are attempting to solve. I definitely cringe when they show a picture of some poor schmuck with a paper map, and assume that he are such an idiot that he can’t follow normal human-generated directions along a grid.

I know that this is just a technical demo or whatever, but I think it’s important for these kind of things to think about what the actual problems are that are trying to be solved here. The situation they’ve covered seems like punting on what ultimately should be the most relevant or important part: why does this exist?

A bit harder to poke fun at

This marker based AR app from the USPS has me in a bit of bind, as typically I like to have a bit of fun with these style AR experiences. But I mean, it’s hard not to see the sheer practicality of this tool, however much a simple ruler or a quick eyeball measurement might suffice.

via Games Alfresco

Addendum

Sorry, can’t resist making some visual juxtapositions here.

Screens from wikitude:

Aram Bartholl's WoW project

Reality Augmented, a novel concept

Two interesting posts from Julian Bleecker, both dealing with the idea of Augmented Reality, have been on the top of my mind and wanted to catalog them here. “AR” is something that I’m (for better or worse) now confronted with on a daily basis, I find his thoughts comforting, and an intelligible starting point for ideas that I’m trying to articulate.

The first is a pretty simple survey of Aram Bartholl’s work concerning Augmented Reality:

Aram’s project, in my mind, playfully pokes at the vision of a near future world of such things augmenting our daily, pedestrian realities. I’m a bit skeptical when it comes to the levels of alteration to quotidian life by glasses that tell you compass bearings or map sites of interest. All that kind of stuff that would turn spatial experiences into some kind of database inquiry seem very much different from what I enjoy about the world when it is mixed with humans

I like how Julian talkes about AR as a series of database inquires because I think it nicely highlights the idea that this is a fundamentally technologically oriented system we’re dealing with here. For all the promise of AR data overlays making-stuff-easier, or somehow alerting us to always on access to our environment, this promise in many ways takes us farther away from understanding our environment on a human level. This kind of system is essentially simulating the real world, rather than really connecting you to it in any sort of non-trivial way.

In the comments, Adam Greenfield notes how bringing up certain realistic concerns about this particular vision of the future (which seems to be circa 1987, or 1995 in julian’s timeline) is entirely unreasonable for certain types. He writes,

This is what happens when technological literacy is allowed to reside solely in the class of people who benefit from the widespread adoption of technology, and why I believe we should work to extend such literacy as far outward into the far larger pool of “(l)users” as is practicable.

Agreed. Being somewhat contrarian in nature, I do enjoy being on the outside looking in towards this particular vision of the future, and making snarky comments (or reading them and nodding my head, at least). But there does seems to be a bit of a disarming dependance upon “the system” here, and a kind of a for-us-or-against-us mentality.

So after this kind of high level discourse, I loved the next bit about the Machine Project forest, and in particular the Birdsong Identification Tour, where puppeteers guided birds around a fake forest spouting songs generated from an iPod Touch strapped to their backs.

Further to augmented reality and its discontents, I wonder if this sort of augmented experience might not suffice in many situations. Human-to-human interaction of some sort, high-fi, low-tech, or material that makes rough use of digital interfaces and technologies without fetishizing the technology and its inevitable hiccups.

Herein maybe lies the sweet spot. Using just a bit of digital help to augment or otherwise enhance some kind of real or fabricated situation, where the emphasis is still based on real environments and human to human interactions.

Update: immediately after I write this: http://www.mobilizy.com/wikitude.php comes percolating up through the twitterverse.

The Past 2 Months

have been very busy. lots of really exciting things are happening.

Last night I ate some delicious sausages. Please. go here now if you live in LA.

A less exciting thing is the new map pack for mirror’s edge, which I was really hoping wouldn’t just be weird geometric world stuff. While it looks pretty great, it fails again at just focusing the experience on what is so great about the basic premise of the game. I guess what I wanted was less of a map pack and more of an entirely new game, though.

you’re welcome for the insight.

First screens

Posting here some first screen caps of a music-based rpg of sorts that I’ve been working on in my spare time the past few months. Looking to start a small test-run with some close friends the next 2 weeks or so, then try and open it up a little more. let me know if you’d be interested in trying it out.

Music Player Test 2

Music Player Test