Inventing Interactive
Dino Ignacio is the UI lead at Electronic Arts for the Dead Space franchise of games. His work is at an interesting intersection point between fantasy and reality. It has fantastical design elements, and exists in otherworldly environments, but it also needs to be usable, so that players can enjoy the game. Dino took some […]
This past weekend I went to see Sleep No More. The show, which takes place in New York’s “McKittrick Hotel” is an immersive theater experience. The audience, wearing masks, explores a hundred rooms spread over seven floors — you open drawers, examine props, follow actors around, and generally try to figure out what’s going on. […]
One of my favorite pieces at the Cooper Hewitt 2006 National Design Triennial was ”SnowWorld.” It was beautiful, absorbing, and other-worldly. The basic concept and execution are pretty simple… Wearing VR goggles, you fly through a snowy landscape and throw snowballs at woolly mammoths and penguins, while listening to Paul Simon’s “Graceland.” But the purpose […]
I love L.A. And when the game L.A. Noire was recently released I was first in line to get a copy. It’s a fantastic recreation of Los Angeles in the 1940’s. So I’m really happy that Simon Wood, who was the production designer for the game at Team Bondi, was able to talk about what’s […]
A game that self-destructs — both visually and structurally — as you play it. And once it’s done, the executable file no longer works. GlitchHiker was created for Global Game Jam on the theme “Extinction.” People could play the game at the event, but eventually it self-destructed — never playable again. All that remains is […]
Warning: This post may destroy any credibility I may have. But it’s not all bad — I get to post a picture of my dog! What does it mean for animals to interact with digital media? Do our pets care about our phones or computers? Our dog Suki (@suki_the_dog) seems completely oblivious to screen-based media. […]
Ok – so at first “codebending” is going to seem like a pretty weird idea and little more than a fun geeky art hack. But it’s way smarter than “just” that. Illucia is a codebending instrument from Paper Kettle that allows the user (performer?) to connect different software programs together and control their interactions. It’s […]
Nintendo’s 3DS Augmented Reality games look pretty cool. You place AR cards down, and the handheld gives you a magic view. Nothing especially new, but it’s beautifully done and looks quite responsive. The Archery game, shown here, looks great. It makes me want one 😉 (Link via Engadget.)
When the iPad was released last year, there were several titles that had strong echos of earlier days of interactive CD-ROMs. Relaxing on a sofa and exploring a new world was much more enjoyable than sitting at the computer where the sense of wonder and adventure quickly transformed into frustration and an eagerness to relax […]
I’m going reveal my geeky roots… When I was a kid, my friends and I would play Star Trek. Homemade wooden phasers, climbing trees for pretend planets, and creating stories as we went. Not a lot of technology involved — it was just us, goofing around, having fun. I’m not sure I could convince my […]
Check out Chromaroma – a just-launched, cool-looking, London-based, travel game created by Mudlark. Its creator Toby Barnes, in this Guardian article, describes it as “the world’s first 3D space Flash live data mashup thing.” The game takes London travel and enables users to experience it in a wide variety of ways, ranging from ambient play […]
The power of gaming to engage is something I keep running into lately. Specifically: the idea that gaming is an effective way to get people to understand issues, or to motivate them towards specific behaviors. The examples here may be lacking in their visual and interaction design sophistication, but they show the value of, and […]
Take a look at these photographs by Rosemarie Fiore. Each one takes a video game and captures one gameplay as a single exposure. It’s a fascinating way of looking at the overall mood of an interactive experience. Plus, they’re beautiful! The photos are all from 80’s games — played on Atari, Centuri, and Taito platforms. It’s interesting […]
Yesterday I received a Barneys Co-op catalog in the mail — in which all of the photos were shot in 3D. Because they used the red-blue anaglyph method, they also included a pair of glasses. It may be an old-fashioned technology for 3D, but it’s still pretty fun. (You can also see the 3D catalog on […]
I’ve previously written about my first job after college, working in the field of artificial intelligence. AI work had an energy and optimism that was very exciting. But, over time, the field slowed down, faced with complex problems that seemed insurmountable. But over the past ten years, AI been picking up steam again. Researchers are using […]
I’m sure you’ve seen it a million times, but here it is again… Line Rider! Created by BoÅ¡tjan ÄŒadež in 2006, Line Rider was a simple physics toy. Its line-art graphics weren’t anything new. If anything, they were almost nostalgic for old, primitive, black-and-white bitmap paint programs. And its sketchy illustration style had been […]
Immediately after I saw the above video (via Daring Fireball) of Alice for the iPad, I downloaded the app. It looked like a great interactive interpretation of the book. Unfortunately, once I tried it for myself, I was less impressed. While it’s fun, the interactivity is fairly limited — not very different from page to […]
