Archive for the 'games' Category

3D motion and other control

Monday, August 28th, 2006

Novintfalcon.jpg

Here comes a little post in between – I haven’t yet found the time to upload the rest of the games convention images. However it is now – after the GC is over – clear that there are anyways no big news from the GC: Despite a record of 183 000 visitors the battle over new game consoles is postponed to the Tokyo game show. Probably even without feeling ridiculous Sony showed at the GC just a dummy PS3 under glas and trailers in wmv format. But also Nintendo didn’t show the wii console to the public (but only to showmasters) and found it funny to make riddles about the wii release date, which seems to be Oct. 2. Somehow I missed the joke probably.

Most interesting for us were the game controllers. Both consoles seem to have sensors for measuring rotation and acceleration. See e.g. STMicroelectronics and Analog Devices.(as an intro: wikipedia on MEMS). However the wii seem to need also infrared contact.

Whatsoever another 3D controller which might be even more interesting – especially if the specifications of the game controllers are not openly usable is the Novint Falcon (see image above from wikipedia) – announced on the E3 to be available for under 100$.

Meanwhile the math TU group/jReality group lost patience and bought this nice little gadget.

Games Convention part I – pong.mythos

Saturday, August 26th, 2006

Topong1.jpgTopong3.JPG

From 24.8-27.8.2006 there is the socalled Games Convention (GC) in the City of Leipzig. The games convention is – next to the Tokyo Game Show and the E3 (which got small this year) – the biggest fair for computer games in the world. For this years fair there have been already now more than 150 000 visitors. Part of the GC was the exhibition pong.mythos, which was generously placed right behing the XBox 360s booth. pong.mythos is an exhibition around the game pong, which serves as a central example in the development of computer games. daytars ToPong has an extra stand at the pong.mythos exhibition (see image above) and we hope that all 170 000 visitors or so come to play! :=0.

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emacsblackbox

Friday, August 18th, 2006

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This is a sort of follow-up post to the LaTeX and Metafont post, because it features (among others) the text editor “emacs” which is THE editor for LaTeX.
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NMI 2006 – the conference

Monday, July 31st, 2006

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From July 19 to 21 the annual conference “New Media and Technologies of the IT Society” (“Neue Medien und Technologien der Informationsgesellschaft”) took place under the title “Film, Computer and TV”. (more…)

Simon funkelt

Monday, July 17th, 2006

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This is sort of a follow up post to the post about the interview with Ralph Baer (soon to be put on the net by Andreas Lange) and a hanger for hiding that this post is a real gadget post:-). (more…)

australian centre for the moving image

Monday, July 10th, 2006
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I’m in Melbourne right now and since my luggage (with my jacket) will take another day to arrive I had to find me a gentle and warm place to escape the australian winter. What I found is the acmi. (more…)

Carpet Invaders by Janek Simon

Sunday, July 9th, 2006

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via vvork.com.

Carpet invaders was shown in Bucharest in 2004.

Janek Simon can currently be seen in Berlin in the new gallery called ZAK in Berlin, Linienstr. 141. with his work “Departure / Take off”: –a video where all the church towers of his hometown Krakow are becoming rockets which go off into space, leaving Krakow churchtower-naked.

visual poetry – Ana Maria Uribe and Jim Andrews

Thursday, July 6th, 2006
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Animation “Gym 3” by Ana Maria Uribe 1998

The argentinian artist Ana Maria Uribe (1944-2004) started out in the 1960’s with creating typoemas — static black-on-white visual compositions rendered using a standard typewriter (a Lettera 22 with a the Pica font). She was inspired by e.g. works of Morgenstern and the brazilian concretes (which I do not know). In the eighties she began to include animation into her poetry, which led to her anipoemas. She finally published some of her works also on the internet. I like these works on the net very much but I do not want to comment on them – they speak quite for themselves.

Her website is mirrored at the site of Jim Andrews (her original page has a lot of advertisements since it is hosted by tripod). Jim did also an overview page with more information on her.

Jim Andrews is an artist who also works with visual poetry, explore his site!. My definite favorite is the artistic game arteroids from 2003 – a shockwave game which is a poetic reinterpretation of the Atari arcade game asteroids from 1979.

Ralph H. Baer at Computerspielemuseum

Wednesday, June 28th, 2006

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President George W. Bush presents a National Medal of Technology, Monday, Feb. 13, 2006 to Ralph H. Baer of Manchester, N.H., during ceremonies in the East Room of the White House. Baer was honored for his groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development and commercialization of interactive video games. White House photo by Eric Draper
image public domain via wikipedia

Yesterday night Andreas Lange of the Computerspielemuseum showed a video of a visit of Ralph H. Baer on June 16 in Berlin.
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Project Reality turns 10 today

Friday, June 23rd, 2006
nintendo64.jpg

“Project Reality” was the first preliminary name of a game console that hit the Japan and US market under the name “Nintendo64” on June 23 1996 (which of the names sound more visionary to you?). The working title probably expressed the idea of creating a true graphics working horse (the hardware was developed together with sgi a leading graphics workstation company at that time — who remembers the O2 workstations that were released in the same year?)
(image credit)