- David Recordon Joins US Govt — This afternoon, President Barack Obama will announce a newly created position for David Recordon, who has worked as one of Facebook’s engineering directors since 2009. Recordon will join the White House as the director of information technology. Obama building an A team from Foo Campers.
- MagicLeap/Weta Workshop FPS in AR (YouTube) — fun!
- Theoretical Computer Science Cheat Sheet (PDF) — how to appear smart.
- Carbon3D — Traditional 3D printing requires a number of mechanical steps, repeated over and over again in a layer-by-layer approach. CLIP is a chemical process that carefully balances light and oxygen to eliminate the mechanical steps and the layers. It works by projecting light through an oxygen-permeable window into a reservoir of UV curable resin. The build platform lifts continuously as the object is grown.
"games" entries
Four short links: 20 March 2015
USA Hire, AR Game, CS Cheatsheet, and 3D Printing Cured Resin
Four short links: 6 February 2015
Active Learning, Tongue Sensors, Cybernetic Management, and HTML5 Game Publishing
- Real World Active Learning — the point at which algorithms fail is precisely where there’s an opportunity to insert human judgment to actively improve the algorithm’s performance. An O’Reilly report with CrowdFlower.
- Hearing With Your Tongue (BoingBoing) — The tongue contains thousands of nerves, and the region of the brain that interprets touch sensations from the tongue is capable of decoding complicated information. “What we are trying to do is another form of sensory substitution,” Williams said.
- The Art of Management — cybernetics and management.
- kiwi.js — a mobile & desktop browser based HTML5 game framework. It uses CocoonJS for publishing to the AppStore.
Four short links: 5 December 2014
Gaming Cancer, Touch Interface, Petal Lampshade, and Biology HLL
- Nanodoc — an online game that allows bioengineers and the general public to design new nanoparticle strategies toward the treatment of cancer. (via The Economist)
- Rendering Haptic Volumetric Shapes in Mid-Air Using Ultrasound (PDF) — SIGGRAPH paper on using ultrasound to fool your senses into feeling a 3D shape in the air. (via Slashdot)
- Open Up Lamp — genius lampshade that opens with the heat of the lightbulb, like petals opening. (via Matt Webb)
- Antha — a high-level language for biology, making it easy to rapidly compose reproducible work flows using individually testable and reusable Antha Elements. (via Mike Loukides)
Four short links: 31 October 2014
Reactive Documents, Emulated Games, Web CAD, and Reviewable Code
- Tangle — a JavaScript library for creating reactive documents from Bret Victor. (via Tom Armitage)
- The Internet Arcade — classic arcade games, emulated in the browser.
- Verb — a CAD library for the web […] a JavaScript library for creating and manipulating NURBS surfaces and curves in the browser or node.js.
- Writing Reviewable Code — good advice.
Four short links: 7 October 2014
Chinese Makers, Code Projects, Distributed Data Structures, and Networked Games
- On the Maker Movement in China (Clay Shirky) — Hardware hacking hasn’t become a hot new thing in China because it never stopped being a regular old thing.
- A History of Apache Storm and Lessons Learned (Nathan Marz) — his lessons on building, promoting, releasing, maintaining, governance … all worth reading.
- Tango: Distributed Data Structures Over a Shared Log — provides developers with the abstraction of a replicated, in-memory data structure (such as a map or a tree) backed by a shared log. (via paper summary)
- Making Fast-Paced Multiplayer Networked Games is Hard (Gamasutra) — This may all sound like smoke and mirrors because that is exactly what it is – we are just maintaining the illusion the game is playing out in wall clock time even though updates are arriving from the past.
Four short links: 18 August 2014
Space Trading, Robot Capitalism, Packet Injection, and CAP Theorem
- Oolite — open-source clone of Elite, the classic space trading game from the 80s.
- Who Owns the Robots Rules The World (PDF) — interesting finding: As companies substitute machines and computers for human activity, workers need to own part of the capital stock that substitutes for them to benefit from these new “robot” technologies. Workers could own shares of the firm, hold stock options, or be paid in part from the profits. Without ownership stakes, workers will become serfs working on behalf of the robots’ overlords. Governments could tax the wealthy capital owners and redistribute income to workers, but that is not the direction societies are moving in. Workers need to own capital rather than rely on government income redistribution policies. (via Robotenomics)
- Schrodinger’s Cat Video and the Death of Clear-Text (Morgan Marquis-Boire) — report, based on leaked information, about use of network injection appliances targeted unencrypted pages from major providers. Compromising a target becomes as simple as waiting for the user to view unencrypted content on the Internet.
- CAP 12 Years Later: How the Rules Have Changed — a rundown of strategies available to deal with partitions (“outages”) in a distributed system.
Four short links: 12 August 2014
Digital Services Playbook, Brain Computer Interface, In-Game Economics, and Motorcycle Reality
- US Digital Services Playbook — good sense from the US Govt’s latest “try not to cock up more Govt IT projects” brigade.
- Open Brain-Computer Interface — “open” as in “source”, not as in “cut”.
- Blockmarket — visibility into the in-game trading of The Blockheads. (via Dave Frampton)
- Skully (trigger warning: TechCrunch) — a step towards augmented reality for motorcyclists: panoramic visual awareness via in-helmet display.
Health games platforms mature in preparation for mainstream adoption
Business models and sustainability will drive success in the health games space.
SPARX, a behavioral therapy game for youths,
combines a fantasy setting with skills for life.
These efforts have born fruit, and clinical trials have shown the value of many such games. Ben Sawyer, who founded the Games for Health conference more than 10 years ago, is watching all the pieces fall into place for the widespread adoption of games. Business plans, platforms, and the general environment for the acceptance of games (and other health-related apps) are coming together.
Four short links: 8 July 2014
Virtual Economies, Resource UAVs, Smarter Smaller Crowds, and Scaling Business
- Virtual Economies — new book from MIT Press on economics in games. The book will enable developers and designers to create and maintain successful virtual economies, introduce social scientists and policy makers to the power of virtual economies, and provide a useful guide to economic fundamentals for students in other disciplines.
- Resource Industry UAV Conference Presentations — collection of presentations from a recent resources industry conference. Includes UaaS: UAVs as a Service. (via DIY Drones)
- The Wisdom of Smaller, Smarter Crowds — in domains in which some crowd members have demonstrably more skill than others, smart sub-crowds could possibly outperform the whole. The central question this work addresses is whether such smart subsets of a crowd can be identified a priori in a large-scale prediction contest that has substantial skill and luck components. (via David Pennock)
- Larry and Sergey with Vinod (YouTube) — see transcription. I really liked Page’s point about scaling the number of things that companies do, and the constraints on such scaling.
Four short links: 25 March 2014
Super Gamers, Game Developers, Erlang+LLVM, and Git Visualised
- Meet the Super-Taskers (Psychology Today) — As part of the Nissan GT Academy challenge, the top 10 players of the car-racing game Gran Turismo are given the chance to race real automobiles in competition. They’re very good—too good, in fact. A graduate racing a real car in the British GT in 2012 was so fast that he could keep up with the professionals in what was supposed to be an amateur event. In 2013, GT Academy graduates were banned from such races in the UK. Instead, they have to compete against the pros.
- A View of Game Developers From The Future (Ian Bogost) — A new arms race commenced—for virtual attention, which the Patrons converted into financial instrument. While historians agree that ancient works like Civilization and chess still provided inspiration, games primarily became a specialized form of banking. As long as there has been advertising, there has been an attention economy: you advertise where people pay attention—whether it’s on the walls of buildings or above urinals.
- ErLLVM — providing multiple back ends for the High Performance Erlang (HiPE) with the use of the LLVM infastructure. Making the very-lightweight-multithreading Erlang less of a closed world fruitcake deployment can only be good.
- Explain Git with D3 (GitHub) — visualisations of common git operations.