Patting Animals Across Internet?!

Mixed Reality Lab has made a new toy I'd love to get my hands on. It's a device that allows you to interact with an animal over the internet. A dummy chicken on the users end mimakes the actions of a chicken, captured by webcam. The dummy has sensors in it and the real chicken wears a haptic jacket, so when you touch the dummy the chicken feels it.

For animals will this open up a new way of visiting the zoo?

How could this be used in games? Wearing full scale haptic suits and fighting a dummy in hand to hand combat? Now I would LOVE to try that!

Impressed w/ Microsoft

I'm impressed with Microsoft for many reasons. The latest being their attempt to find websites that take advantage of vulnerabilities in Windows computers. Similar to what the Honeynet Project are involved with.

Warhammer Online

The Games Workshop fantasy world of Warhammer is going to be turned into an MMORPG by Mythic. Definately one I will have to try out if they have an open beta, or atleast subscribe to for a few months. I'm not a big fan of MMORPGs because they are too time consuming, however I'm already getting into Mordheim (similar to Warhammer), so it'd be cool. I definately don't think it will convert Warhammer fans though, there's just something more about collecting real pieces, instead of just owning imaginary software armies.

Google, the Next Microsoft?

Apparantly Google is drawing attention to its unstoppable growing. It seems to be the consumer of all information, taking everything and whatever it can get to create the biggest database in the world.

Google (NOT) Hacked?

Google hacked? That's what people thought lol. It's amazing, a website goes down and it looks like another website has hijacked the domain name because of how browsers search for websites =). Wish I'd had the chance to try google.com myself in the hours of the take over.

Quake 4

Graphics aren't really a 'wow' thing anymore, but this screenshot of Quake 4 is impressive. I love how they've got shadows casting onto themselves. If you look at the right-most marine, his upper arm casts a shadow on his lower arm and on his face.

Google Desktop Search Improved!

Google Desktop Search (GDS) has improved heaps since I last looked at it. It now works with Firefox history, as well as supporting a plugin framework for other file formats.

GDS is going back on my computer, I don't care if its a privacy issue for Sophie (my computer), its going on.

Games Down Under Blog

I'm now a contributor to the Games Down Under Blog.

GDCTV

GDCTV is providing net-tv coverage of the 2005 Game Developer's Conference.

Pretty cool since I couldn't really get to Washington to see it =P.

WE HAVE G5

RAGE finally got the brand new G5 delivered. The work for RAGE paid off so much, and Apple were so impressed they sent us a G5 worth (I'm told) approximately AU$10,000.

It has the fastest NVidia graphics card in it. It was amazing to see the speed of our demos quadriple, and this is without taking advantage of the dual processors! So it's going to be awesome once we have multithreaded demos.

Google Implement My Idea

Ever since I came to a uni that charges me for Internet access at a per kilobyte rate, I've been wanting to get the time to implement a program that compresses content on an offsite server, so that my overheads are reduced.

Well it looks like Google listened in on my dreams. They've released the Google Web Accelerator, that compresses websites on the Google side. I'm yet to try it out, but will post an update when I found out how well it works.

The best part about this is, Google are supporting Internet Explorer AND Firefox this time!!!

http://webaccelerator.google.com/

3d Mobile Phone Games

Months ago when I was looking at 3D games on phones, it was impossible to ignore how soon it would be that 3D games would start appearing on mobiles. Seeing screenshots of Quake III running on mobile phone graphics hardware made me excited, but I was even more excited to hear an Australian/Korean game company to be finishing their 3D game soon.

FUNBurger are developing a game called InfiltratorX. Okay, so putting the X in the name is a bit old by now, to the point where things with X in it seem uncool. But regardless of that, the screenshots look impressive considering they are off a phone. It's a real priviledge to see a technology go from 2D to 3D, especially since 2D was left behind long ago on other gaming platforms.

Games Down Under Blog

Games Down Under Blog

The Games Down Under blog is intented as a temporary communication & data gathering engine for Australian and New Zealand games researchers and other people interested in games.

Sounds like a cool blog, I'm going to keep my eyes on it. The research project I'm working on is featured under the Latest News section, =).

Australia's Game Development

Evelyn Richardson, Executive Director of the Game Developers Association of Australia, made some inspiring claims about Australia's place in the game industry, stating...

The risks associated with development and publishing on the next-generation platforms are top of mind for publishers on these platforms. Australian developers can help to mitigate these risks in the 3 main areas of quality, cost, and time to market.

Quality: Australian developers are recognized in the U.S. as being able to produce games as good as any U.S. developer.

Cost: Australian developers deliver more "bang for the buck," which translates to a cost that is 60-70% of what would have to be paid in the U.S.

Time to Market: A product that misses its release date has huge financial repercussions for the publisher. Australian developers are experienced and have mature project management mechanisms in place, which have helped to make Australian developers the most reliable in the world.

Makes me feel confident about game development oppurtunities in Australia, =).

Insane Download Speed

I don't get it. I use dialup and yet I am right now downloading a file at 20-40 kilobytes a second. The speed of the downloading is slowly fluctuating between the two, at times reaching even as high as 70 kilobytes/s.

Its a 6 megabyte word document, is it because its text so the modems can compress it so easily? Because I literally just downloaded a 6 meg document in a couple minutes!!!

Star Wars TV series?

According to BBC George Lucas is planning to start another TV series to fill the gaps in the Star Wars universe. Being in Australia I haven't seen the Clone Wars TV Series, but do fans really want a TV Series? I'm not sure I want one - I just want to remember the movies.

"To be very honest with you, I never ever thought of anything that happened beyond episode six," he said.

"It's the Darth Vader story. It starts with him being a young boy and it ends with him dying. I never ever really considered ever taking that particular story further."

It was disappointing to hear George Lucas say that, however he has a point. I wouldn't be able to connect with later movies if there was no Darth Vader.

Xbox Not Good Enough?

Apparantly the XBox division of microsoft was in the red this last financial year. Is it possible that Sony's Playstation is too strong for Microsoft to take control of the console market?

I don't think so, despite Microsofts bad attempts at operating systems, every other avenue they take they usually do a good job at. I guess a console is like another operating system, but I think they'll make a come back.

Although I guess that depends whether analyst, Michael Pachter, is correct in saying the next generation of entertainment growth won't occur till the Playstation 3 is out.