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As part of research we are doing in GRAND we decided we need a lot more experience designing games. Garry and Patrick ran our 1st Game Design Game (Workshop) on Saturday. (The link takes you to pictures Vadim Bulitko took – thanks Vadim.)

Patrick and Garry developed a meta-game (a game about games) where each team had to pick a card or two from each of three piles (who, when/where, and why). The cards then formed the constraints within which we had to design a game. Later we had to pick two more cards which constrained what sort of game it would be and how we were to present it.

The team I was on picked Who=Non-human, Where=Is Poor, and Uses a Microphone. We came up with a game that was so good that we are now busy patenting it. Above all we had fun making costumes and props.

Today we got a demonstration of a neat project called PaSSAGE (Player-Specific Stories via Automatically Generated Events). The PaSSAGE team have built tools into Dragon Age that model the player and change the story as a result.

From Mark I found out about the Ningen Gakki, a musical toy that you hold onto which then turns parts of your body into instrument surfaces. Drum on your friend’s face, slap him some music! Somehow I feel there is a real research application here.

Mo pointed me to an announcement that SnapDragonAR has been officially released. This comes from work at the future cinema lab at York University. SnapDragonAR is a simple way to get augmented reality – you have a deck of cars with glyphs on them that the computer can recognize and replace with media clips (video shorts or images.) The glyphs can be put on things or you can just use the cards. The sofware then takes the video from a webcam and replaces the glyphs with the media objects you want and projects the resulting “augmented” video onto the screen (or projector.) It is neat and works with any current Mac.

Garry send me a link to a very cool project which has developed a visual programming language for the Arduino called Modkit. Watch the screencast to get the idea.

I’ve seen a number of visual programming environments and this one reminds me of the old programming environment for Lego Mindstorms. What is new is that it runs off the web the way Design By Numbers does.

Whether it actually makes programming the Arduino easier or, as is often the case with visual programming, turns out to be slower and still as complicated, remains to be seen. It has a nice code view so you can switch to writing code if you get irritated with clicking around for stuff.

Could we build a visual programming language like this for text analysis?

Folks in the Interactives Lab introduced me to Troika Ranch a dance team that performs with multimedia. You can see examples of what they do on their YouTube channel or on Net Television. They have created a real-time media tool called Isadora:

Isadora is the award-winning, graphic programming environment for Macintosh and Windows that provides interactive control over digital media, with special emphasis on the real-time manipulation of digital video.

Because every performance or installation is unique, Isadora was designed not to be a “plug and play” program, but instead to offer building blocks that can be linked together in nearly unlimited ways, allowing you to follow your artistic impulse.

There is a lot of excitement about the Microsoft Kinect and the potential for adapting their vision technology. Wayne sent me a link to this Music Motion Noise blog entry on Kinect Hacking and Art Round Table: Why it Matters, What You Need to Know.

Time to get one.

Thanks to Colette I came across a pointed xtranormal animation titled, So you Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities. The animation is of a dialogue between a student who wants a letter of reference to graduate school and a burnt out prof. The students is idealistic and insists on going for a PhD in order to be a college professor. The professor is trying to dissuade her. The dialogue seems well written, though the automatic voices sometimes miss the timing needed to get the barbs.

Garry Wong has finished my first Arduinome. This is a monome built with Arduinos with some customizations. Garry, Calen Henry, Patrick Von Hauff, and Huiwen Ji developed a version of the Arduinome for research into interactivity. They designed a case that can enclose the Arduinome and prototyped some interactive uses for it including a game. Now they are refining the case so it can be ordered from Ponoko by others who don’t have access to a shop. Now we have to come up with ideas for the experiments using the Arduinome.

One of the people short-listed for the Man Booker prize is Tom McCarthy who, among other things created the International Necronautical Society. This “semi-ficticious organization” reminds me of OULIPO. They are “in our house” and recruiting. They have a lovely Joint Statement on Inauthenticity. A necronaut according to the Urban Dictionary is an “Annoying hacker and general asshole in Counter-Strike and other online games.” Or it could be someone who navigates death.

They have a Twitter feed, twitter.com/necronauts