Mobitrends

Tried this setup : Vuzix HMD + Xbox 360 + PGR4… looks cool but aftera few mins I had to give it up - those Head Mounted Devices really aren’t up to the expectation… low resolution, small and bad viewing angle and the ergonomics is a joke…

That’s an extreme approach to immersive gaming - my wife’s never gonna allow this in our living room …. This concept is called the “Cocoon” and although I really do not expect this to happen ever, I’d love to have my personal 360º personal Imax dome ;). YEt I think the concept is only halfway - gaming is not just about visual immersion, it’s also about physical interaction and sensitive feedback. I also wonder if they can create 3D images there…

Source CNN.com

Nice show in Porte de Versailles today, really end-user focused but still a good opportunity to dive in the overall excitation and fun around x-mas upcoming titles. Can’t wait to try the new Raving Rabbits game! A lot of FPS and MMORPG - I was especially impressed with the latest Lords of the Ring online extension : “Mines of Moria” which looked awesome. GOA had a huuuge empty stand… weird and no Vivendi/Blizzard there, probably too small a show for them to show up.

like a Tiki’pad but retailing today, pretty funky! Aimed at left-hand casual typing, pretty easy and funky !

Thanks @yazzgoth for showing me this piece of geek art

If you’re a virtual world fan, you can’t have missed the latest Microsoft announcement regarding the Xbox 360 Dashboard upgrade featuring 3D avatars and an online social world… Here’s a sneak peek video to get an idea of how it’s gonna be:

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:af0e0dcd-5cff-43a2-bd32-4841fe6a89d1&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=shared" target="_new" title="Avatars in the new Xbox experience">Video: Avatars in the new Xbox experience</a>

Just read this article from PO Carles and it’s really fun to see how so many people are heading in the same direction with different approaches.
Camtrax is using a webcam to detect objects in your hands and have you interact with the game through their motion.
Pros : only requires a webcam
Cons: You need to be far enough from the webcam (i.e. my Macbook webcam only sees the head not the upper body as i’m staying too close), it requires colored stuff to detect and track, it’s not really motion capture i.e. that won’t give you enough data to recreate a proper avatar motion.

Kapor has come up with a highly special webcam that can measure depth - I had a demo of this at CES 2008 and it really works great. Still you got to be staying a a distance from the cam but the motion capture is pretty good as it almost can see the body parts in 3D. Yet that requires a special hardware and an unnatural gaming position.

At VR-WEAR we are focusing on emotions and body language to give a soul to your avatar and as cajuntechie on Seesmic said “let people see a user through their avatar”. By using a simple webcam we analyze live the facial expression of the user, mouth, eyes, eyebrows and extract qualitative information about its attitude and map them on the avatars face. Webcam is cool for the facial language, but not for the rest of the body though. For that part we have some cool ideas but I won’t disclose them before 2009.

Re: VRW - SL Viewer mod - 0.99 beta 1 public release

Just read this note from Hank Williams where he reports the creation of a fund called nycseed and dedicated to seeding New-Yor tech entrepreneurs.

NYCSeed is literally for two guys in a garage. The requirements are two techies that live in New York City, and a compelling idea. The terms are fairly simple: a convertible note for $200,000 that ultimately gives them around 10% of the company. The note converts to equity when the next round closes.

I really find this idea brilliant, as some proof of concept phase *are* costly - that is when you’re going on hardware or highly technical grounds that require some heavy investments to be able to show decent prototype. Hope old Europe can come up with something similar some time soon, I’ve seen so many brilliant ideas wasted by entrepreneurs-to-be that got drawn away from their project due to bad seed practices ranging from business angles taking 50% of stake for 50k€ to VCs not really shaped to manage this kind of mini-deals.
I’m really looking forward to see their first deals and I hope they can demonstrate that seed funding makes sense (I guess it makes even more sense if you can keep on investing in the following rounds somehow…).

Games are so much nicer on a 360 then on my home Wii … welcome back 360!

Since the latest Mac event, where Jobs talked big about iPhone being the next-gen portable gaming platform, I decided it was time to give it a try. I had only been testing the semi-pro apps and hobbyists games, I wanted to give a shoot at those blockbuster high-budget/high-expectations games. I chose Spore as it certainly reached a climax in the last couple weeks at my RSS buzz-o-meter.
Spore is edited by EA, and I had high expectations on the quality of the game itself. Well, I’ve been most disappointed for quite a lot of reasons, although the game itself is “cute”, you drive your little monster through changing mazes to eat other monster’s DNA and evolve, the realization is really poor:

• The accelerometer is not precise enough to play - especially on a vibrating environment such as the underground. Every change of seating position will require a re-calibration of the “zero” position - really painful…
• The intro movie scene is just being played by the quicktime movie player - pressing the screen during the intro shows the control - that’s so cheap and lame !
• While playing if you ever hit the home key (c’mon guys it’s under the thumb - of course you’re going to hit it), the game exits and your progression is lost … same when you get a phone call… that’s really a pain
• The gamme is really totally linear, and although I’ve reached level 19 it feels like I’m still wandering in the same environments… and I really have no clue why I’m moving my monster : there is not scenario there

As a conclusion I’d say that it’s amateur work - the game looks like a student project and it’s totally not worth the 9€ 8.99€ EA asks for it - should they have not invested so much in marketing over the “SPORE” brand, that game would have had no more than a 1/5 star rating… I was really expecting more for iPhone high-end games hope we get to see some better stuff soon.

Release day again for the RC2 of our head motion analysis mod for the Second Life viewer. We reached RC2 which brings a lot more reliability to motion detection to RC1 mostly by introducing a camera calibration process. By waiting a few secs, the camera will analyze the environment around you and “erase” all the unnecessary stuff that might trick the shape recognition system thus reducing unwanted motions that might have occurred to you on previous versions when used in “noisy” environment.
Also this version adds an update checker, to let you know when we reach RC3!
You can grab RC2 on the download page. We also added to the seesmic user thread a getsatisfaction feedback module for those not feeling at ease with showing their face to the camera.