Tag Archives: Gaming & Virtual Worlds

Apple Investigating Wearable Computers

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The rumor mill has churned out an interesting bit of information. A report from Research and Markets states that Apple and Sony are hard at work developing video screen goggles. Details are sparse, but if these devices can recognize and interact with the environment they’re in, it’s a concrete sign we’re headed for a giant leap into augmented reality computing. (the origin of the above image is unconfirmed)

From the RIM report:

“Today’s personal viewers provide video only with limited visibility of the environment. Sony and Apple are developing the next generation personal viewer, the navigation/video sunglasses. These products will offer navigation features in full see-through mode as well as video viewing with a clip-on to block the background. We expect that clip-ons will be available to provide both see-periphery views of the environment, as well as full blocking of the environment to enable video immersion when desired. This new versatile product generation will further accelerate acceptance and sales of personal viewers,” the report explains.

[Distorted Loop via Electric Pig]

10 Careers For the Not-So-Distant Future

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Daily Galaxy has an interesting round up of hot careers for the future. Not too boring, and not too far fetched. All of the occupations jibe with trends we’ve been watching come down the line. 2012 is the year these jobs are predicted for, which is approaching fast. Give your boss notice now, and start brushing up on simulation engineering, robotics and space hospitality.

MSNBC’s 10 Careers for the future list:

•Organic food producers, retailers
•Computational biologists
•Parallel programmers
•Data technologists
•Simulation engineers
•Boomer companions, caretakers
•Genetic counseling
•Brain analysts
•Space tour guide
•Robot builders, tenders

[MSNBC via Daily Galaxy]

Urban Gaming

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Lately, we’ve seen a lot of great projects utilizing high powered projectors. Many of these, such as TXTual Healing, involve an element of social commentary. It’s refreshing however to see a project that panders to plain old simple fun – who hasn’t wanted to play video games on the biggest screen possible?

There is not a lot of information on the campaign, but Xbox has set up a myspace page for what they’re calling “Urban Xbox 360 Gaming,” where, along with the below video, they are requesting people submit photos of the various locations where they are playing video games.

Using Physical Objects As Passwords

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Using a stapler to open Photoshop? A Notebook as your email password? A project from the Tangible Interfaces class at MIT gave birth to a weird but potentially useful idea – using physical objects as activators of computer processes. This unusual concept software is called Amphibian, and uses the very specific weight of everyday objects to trigger computer processes. Weighing the objects on a small scale connected to a computer will match the weight with the digital process, and make it happen.

From the Tangible Interfaces web site:

Amphibian allows users to easily imprint digital functions onto common everyday physical objects. Amphibian is a low cost, low infrastructure system that enables users to choose their own physical objects and imprint onto them almost any standard interface functions that take place on a GUI desktop. The goal of Amphibian is to create a system that the common user can implement and operate so that we may learn more about the digital-physical object relationships people will form.

[via Kevin Kelly]