Sport or Sellout? Debate Rages Over Medals for Video Games
For the first time, the Asian Games -- the Olympics equivalent for the world’s most populous continent -- will include computer game competitions alongside swimming and track-and-field. Contestants from Saudi Arabia to Japan will battle for national pride and bragging rights across six titles, including League of Legends and StarCraft II in a huge marketing coup for publishers like Tencent Holdings Ltd.and Activision Blizzard Inc.
Downtown LA’s Massive New Immersive VR Theme Park Might Just Blow Your Mind – Two Bit Circus
Founded in 2012 by Brent Bushnell and Eric Gradman, the company and its flagship "micro-amusement park" exist at the intersection of technology and whimsy. Two Bit Circus is known for a variety of amusements including a giant ball-in-a-maze game that requires people on teeter-totters to operate, a gunner turret simulator, a laser maze and Hexacade, a six-person arcade console. A few years ago, they built an "escape room" at their space in The Brewery's art colony. Unlike similar games, however, the goal wasn't to escape, but to cooperatively pilot a spaceship.
"Eric and I have always loved getting people playing together. We started to see an opportunity for a bigger venue, where you could go and have a reason to come back," Bushnell says.
"Maybe we're playing a third party developer or a student's game," Gradman says. "If it does well — and we're capturing data about how every game in this place performs — then it's going to start spreading to nearby Skidoos."
In the VR cabanas, which you can rent by the hour, you'll be able to karaoke and play more than 20 games, from cow milking simulators to first-person zombie shooters.
Then there are the Story Rooms, the three most immersive games in the park. Space Squad In Space is a 30-minute game where four to six players work together to repair their spaceship or face certain doom. Lost City begins in a mine as two to eight players players figure out how to access the secret temple hidden within. In The Raft, four players defend their raft against an onslaught of demons.
Club 01 serves as a high-tech interactive theater. The room accommodates 96 players, each one sitting at a table equipped with touchscreens. A variety of programs run on the tablets including trivia, puzzles and a wine tasting experience where participants check off what notes they've tasted after each sip.
"We try to take the idea of the game show and make it interactive again," Gradman says. "Everybody who comes here gets to play. Everyone here is playing both with the people at their table and [everyone else in the room]."
Bushnell hopes Two Bit Circus will also serve as a platform for immersive theater and alternative reality game creators, too.
"With immersive theater, there is no Pantages," he says. "Immersive theater is all over the place. It's in restaurants, it's overlaid downtown. We have white space areas, secret rooms, secret closets and secret hallways that can be used as activation spaces."
A CARNIVAL NEEDS CONCESSIONS
When all the monster-fighting and puzzle-solving makes you hungry, you can eat "farm-to-circus" fare like baked corn dogs, truffle fries and ice cream sandwiches. There's also a full bar where drinks often involve fire, dry ice and liquid nitrogen. At a second, smaller bar, a robot named Gearmo beeps and boops while shaking up signature cocktails.
See the full story here: http://www.laist.com/2018/08/22/downtowns_massive_new_immersive_vr_theme_park_might_just_blow_your_mind.php
Why This Reviewer Hails Mastodon as a Refuge From Twitter
According to Nystedt’s review, “the system is designed to encourage thoughtful posting — not selfish or gratuitous posts … [and] it’s even simple to contribute descriptions of images you’re posting for the visually impaired, something Twitter doesn’t bother turning on by default.” The only thing Mastodon misses, he added, is his Twitter friends: “even though there’s a tool to help you find your Twitter friends on Mastodon, there aren’t too many so far.”
“More than anything,” he said, “the change in social networks has given me a new lease on digital life. After years of feeling anxious and unhappy checking my tweets and keeping up my personal brand, it’s like I’ve moved to a new town where nobody knows me, but everyone is looking to make new friends. Isn’t that why we all signed up for this stuff in the first place?”
See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/why-this-reviewer-hails-mastodon-as-a-refuge-from-twitter/
Virtual reality tool designed at USC corrects errors in brain scan data
After researchers collect MRI data from study participants, the processing stage begins. During automatic processing, one step, called segmentation, separates the brain into labeled regions to facilitate close examination of various structures. But the automation isn’t perfect, and researchers must manually correct errors before moving forward with analysis.
The time-consuming work requires a trained hand, so most labs hire undergraduate research assistants to correct segmentation errors. But with the vast amount of data being collected, studies still tend to hit a bottleneck during the processing stage....
With this in mind, Duncan, Toga and Assistant Professor Tyler Ard launched an experimental trial to test the efficacy of VR in brain segmentation.
The experiment tested 30 participants, all new to brain segmentation, on two tasks: using a MacBook to perform a minor error correction in the classic data cleanup program FreeSurfer, and completing the same task in VBS, armed with the HTC Vive headset and two controllers.
On average, participants finished the correction 68 seconds faster using VBS compared with FreeSurfer, a highly significant time savings considering the task rarely took more than three minutes to complete.
See the full story here; https://news.usc.edu/147222/virtual-reality-tool-designed-at-usc-corrects-errors-in-brain-scan-data/
Using VR to Help Students Understand Cultural Differences
A virtual reality project at North Carolina State University is giving engineering students a safe space to explore the cultural assumptions that color global communication.
Category: Teaching and Learning
Institution: North Carolina State University
Project: GlobalVR: Teaching Cultural Competencies Through Virtual Reality
Project lead: Ilin Misaras, assistant director, Global Training Initiative
In an era ripe with mistrust and fear, it's easy to set empathy aside. But what if we could step into the eyeballs of another person to get his or her point of view from the inside? Could that lead to greater understanding? That's the idea for a project at North Carolina State University that uses virtual reality to help engineering students understand different cultural perspectives.
As part of a two-hour workshop, students pop on a virtual reality headset (most recently, that's the $199 Oculus Go) and attend a virtual meeting that brings together a small group of people from the United States, China, India and Singapore.
What those stop-action vignettes reveal, according to Misaras, are the cultural assumptions present in the communication. The discussion that follows then focuses on what the individual characters were thinking.
"It's a safe space. They're all fake characters, so you're not offending anyone," explained Misaras. GTI found that it was helpful for students because they were forced to "take a step back and say, 'OK, maybe there's something cultural going on here.
See the full story here: https://campustechnology.com/articles/2018/08/21/using-vr-to-help-students-understand-cultural-differences.aspx
Making the case for UX/UI design
Designers man drawing website ux app development. User experience concept.
This process has been scaled to the point that each of us is unknowingly subjected to dozens or even hundreds of A/B tests every day.
Prototyping rarely needs full-blown technology or connectivity. If you're spending more than a day or two generating a round of prototypes you're likely overcomplicating things.
Similarly, when testing your prototypes, you need not create a formal focus group setting with one-way mirrors and video facilities. Simply go to where your end users are, grab someone and ask for their feedback.
Once you get your "prototyping legs," invite in the bosses who will ultimately decide whether a budget's available to spend on design. We can talk until we are blue in the face about the benefits of design and how it will ultimately save money, but nothing makes the case better than a real live end user, staring at a prototype of a key business application and expressing utter confusion and frustration with how they'd interact with such a tool. Combine this sentiment with an experience in your company's recent past where system adoption faltered and training costs skyrocketed, and you'll quickly build a strong case for spending on design that even the boss will sign off on.
See the full story here: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/making-the-case-for-design/
Social media’s future is live-event AR
Yet the real power of AR can be unlocked by thinking in terms of spaces like restaurants, stores, and arenas, and experiences that involve everyone in that space. Not only do these spaces lend themselves nicely to AR, they actively invite people to document and share their experiences. Fields that have begun to harness this potential for creative and social engagement include live sports, concerts, and social gaming gatherings.
Sporting events
Only recently did professional sports begin integrating augmented reality to increase fan engagement. The PGA Tour introduced an AR app earlier this year in that enables fans to experience the action from home, with the hole easily superimposed onto any flat surface. Another pioneering example is IoT/AR company Xperiel, who is partnering with pro sports teams like the Sacramento Kings, New York Jets, and Los Angeles Dodgers to turn stadiums into AR “digital ecosystems.” My app, Virtex Arena operates in a similar space, offering multiplayer AR games that appear on field during downtimes at sporting events. Although thousands of fans compete at once, everyone sees the action from his or her own perspective, as though the virtual characters were actually in the middle of the stadium.
Concerts
Gaming meetups
Rather than supplementing an existing event, apps like Pokémon Go can create experiences that are fun and immersive enough to stand on their own, transforming physically empty spaces into virtual happenings.
The Pokémon Go Fest in Chicago drew over 20,000 players,...
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2018/08/21/social-medias-future-is-live-event-ar/
Metal 3D printing startup Velo3D launches its first product
The Sapphire system utilizes a technology the company calls Intelligent Fusion. The system is capable of 3D printing complex metal objects by sintering a bed of powder with a laser, in a process similar to standard resin-based 3D printing systems.
One of the more compelling aspects of the technology is its ability to create geometrically complicated objects without the need for the support structure most require. Rather, the objects, as described by Chief Product Officer Stefan Zschiegner , essentially come out of the out of the powder fully formed.
Among the things that set the company’s new machine apart from some of the competition is a focus on additive manufacturing for production, in addition to prototyping.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/20/after-raising-90-million-metal-3d-printing-startup-velo3d-launches-first-product/