What is this diddly?

Tamara Levy, a recent graduate at University of Pennsylvania, completed her senior project a few weeks ago. Flex, in short, is a virtual game using a full bodied controller.

Hole in the Wall

Flex is modeled after “Hole in the Wall“. If you are not familiar with “Hole in the Wall”, it’s a TV game show where a wall with a funny shaped hole approaches the contestant, and the contestant has to shape their body to fit through that hole.

Motion-What?

Flex, the game, uses a virtual wall and a virtual contestant. However, the person playing the game is actually hooked up to a complex motion capture system, which maps the person’s moves to the computer. It’s the same kind of technology they use in movies to model the movements of 3D characters using human actors.

More than just an experiment

Sounds like fun, but is it really fun? Yes, and this is mainly because in the end Flex did not end up as a half-baked idea in a drawer, it became a fully fleshed game. There are no holes – only in the walls! The game menu gives several options. In Continuous mode you can play the game as long as you want; it doesn’t matter if you crash against a wall one or 30 times, but it does keep score. Survivor mode gives you only three lives, the fourth time you crash is Game Over. There is also an added feature for both game modes with a bonus wall: instead of having a hole in the wall, you get a solid wall with one green square, and if you are able to hit the green square you get extra points. Plus, you can kick around the fallen blocks to vent out your frustration. And yes, all the scores are saved and can be viewed.

Videos!

Head over to Tammy’s blogposts to look at videos from the project.

The Future

To actually make this game marketable, it needs to get rid of the expensive motion capture system and implement a controller that is easy to use and simple to set up at home. There are two parts to accomplishing this.

On the software side, there needs to be a reduced marker set for the player. That is, instead of having 32, or even 16, reflector points, the logic needs to be there to detect the position of a player using 10 or less markers. Obviously, the less markers a person has to put on, the easier it is to set up for the person at home, but it is also easier to end up with ambiguous positions for the player. Think about putting a marker on your wrist, and another on your shoulder – without changing the position of these two, your elbow could be both up or down.

On the hardware side, a regular person cannot afford to set up 16 expensive cameras around the ceiling of their room (and it’s also impractical). The original inspiration for this project was to use Johnny Lee’s project of using a few Wii-motes and some inexpensive LED lights as reflectors to track head position. Taken further, one could use this technology to track the entire body position, thus resulting in a full body controller. This solution is not only cheap to build and easy to set up at home, it is actually quite viable.

Where can I find out more about this?

Project blog is here: http://tlevy-seniordesign.blogspot.com

Awesome band, just watch the videos. Creativity at its maximum.

Link to all videos straight from the source: http://www.okgo.net/media/videos/

Here It Goes Again

OK Go – Here It Goes Again from OK Go on Vimeo.

WTF?

OK Go – WTF? from OK Go on Vimeo.

This Too Shall Pass, Rube Goldberg machine version

Like a netbook, but more practical, litl is dubbed a webbook. It’s an interesting concept that might have been all the rave had it been developed by a certain fruity company (but unfortunately, products like these don’t get the attention they deserve).

It boasts an intuitive interface with a remote control for, well, remote controlling; a custom built Web OS that does away with the browser, and a monitor that flips over with a “178 degree viewing cone” to make a stand-up easel, for easy viewing anywhere, as well as connectivity between other litls and the TV.

Oh and it does have a keyboard. Plus they guarantee the hardware for 2 years.

“This is why PC operating systems don’t work on TVs and vice versa. Nobody spent time integrating both experiences because they didn’t have to. But along came the web. Suddenly, we want a web experience on the TV and the same experience on a computer. … litl is the first device built with an operating system designed with a continuous experience between lean-forward and lean-back mode.”

In short, litl is simple.

http://litl.com/

Note that this is just an overview of the features listed on the site, I have yet to try the actual product, but have become quite curious. (It is a little on the expensive side though.)

Rewards

After (too) much perusing the internets, from professional to casual bloggers and research, one influencer that has stood out is rewards. People don’t just play games for FUN. Yes, fun is an element, but it’s usually not the main reason why people continue to play a game and derive enjoyment from it. Think about a game, any game, and it probably has a reward of some sort or another: win/lose, points, status.

Rewards is a very broad word, since a lot of elements can constitute a reward while also falling into other categories of game elements: points are a reward, but so is a collector’s item, which also a collectable, or reaching a new level is a reward, but this also falls into the levels element. For now, let’s stick to the overall idea of getting something in return for an achievement.

Gameification of Everything

Let’s revisit Jesse Schell’s DICE 2010 presentation, The Gameification of Everything (previous post), as the concept of rewards as motivators is a main topic. Schell talks about the psychological tricks the new online social and casual games are using to entice people to pay up. One of the main factors is that games are breaking through to reality; they don’t just exist in their virtual binary bubble.
The examples he brings up are the surprisingly and massively successful Zynga games, the likes of Farmville, MafiaWars. The rewards in these games are slightly more tangible (slightly being the key word). If you get points, level up, etc, in these games, you are literally beating your friends, not just a computer. You gain bragging rights, and that in itself is a reward.

Another main factor is pervasive rewards: points for everything, every minor little thing. You play to get points, and the more points you have, the more you play, until you eventually pay. But it is the points, the reward, that is the motivator behind it all.

of Everything!

Other instances of games seeping into real life are mentioned in this article from swtiched.com about Andy Baio’s talk at SXSW. He talks about a status board developed by the company Panic to track their to-dos in a way that looks like a game to motivate people to (literally) work hard. A reward is achieved when they reach zero, or clear all their issues.

Another example is theNike+ running system, where you can not just see a graph of your runs, you can also compete against other people around the world in a 5K on a certain day, or compete to accumulate the most distance in a period of time, and in the end you get… a reward! A trophy, a medal, a motivator to keep using Nike+ (and keep running, although I’ve had mixed results with using it).

Ribbon Hero

Finally, as case in point, I leave you with Microsoft Office’s Ribbon Hero, also mentioned in the previous article. The premise is that people are motivated by rewards, so you get points for doing stuff in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. Then, as every app/game/concept has to have a social aspect nowadays, you can compete with your friends on Facebook for the highest score.

To me, any Office program already feels like I’m doing work, and not the kind of work I’d like to be doing, and to try and get points for insignificant things like bolding and underlining is not incentive enough. Of course, I haven’t played it yet, so it’s a very preliminary opinion.

Where is the Psychology?

Points, status, clearing a board, winning a medal, are all rewards, and they seem to motivate people to play a game, or pretend they are playing a game when they are really just working/running/learning. But WHY? The evidence is there, but we have yet to uncover the reasons. That we will learn in our next installment.

One of my intellectual weak spots is for psychology, and my recent interest in games has been quickly growing. A quick google search on “psychology of gaming” yielded poor results, mostly relating to addiction. So, I’m on a quest to find useful, factual, enlightening information pertaining to the psychology behind games- anything that helps explain the psychology behind games and gaming.

Some initial research questions, from what will surely turn into an infinite list, just to start us off:

• why do people enjoy games?
• how do they enjoy games?
• why are some games better than others?
• what kinds of games appeal to what kinds of people?
• what factors make a game better than another one?
• why are people willing to spend exorbitant amounts of time mastering seemingly useless things (like plastic guitars)?
• why are people willing to dish out varying amounts of cash for virtual goods?
• why are the buttons on a game controller a certain color?
• what are other good questions for this list?

Influencers of Behavior

The most useful article so far has been Dan Lockton’s, over at Design with Intent, who outlines 11 influencers of behavior that are achieved through design, that is, with purposeful intent. I found it doubly useful since these principles are not game-specific; quite the contrary, Lockton is extrapolating these principles from game design into general design: “My main interest here is to extract the design techniques as very simple design patterns or ‘gambits’ that can be applied in other design situations outside games themselves, where designers would like to influence user behaviour.”

The 11 influencers:

• Challenges and Targets
  - because accomplishing a challenge leads to a thrill
• Unpredictable Reinforcement
  - waiting for that surprise
• Scores
  - feedback, also competition against others and yourself
• Levels
  - make progress
• Rewards
  - positive reinforcement encourages continuing use
• Playfulness
  - more fun
• Storytelling
  - who isn’t engaged by a good story?
• Gaps to Fill
  - standing out is deliberately enticing
• Role-Playing
  - you become a character or a hero
• Collections
  - humans are hoarders
• Make it a meme
  - viral sharing and spreading

Some of these I’ve heard about, but some are new and thus interesting. It is highly encouraged to read the full article here for examples on each of these, and many more resources.

Next, I’ll examine each of these elements as I find more evidence of their relevance and importance.

Robin Burkinshaw, a game design student in the UK, created a fascinating experiment on humans and games. The premise is to follow Alice and Kev, two characters in The Sims 3.

“Kev is mean-spirited, quick to anger, and inappropriate. He also dislikes children, and he’s insane. He’s basically the worst Dad in the world. … His daughter Alice has a kind heart, but suffers from clumsiness and low self-esteem. With those traits, that Dad, and no money, she’s going to have a hard life.”

And, these two characters do not have a house; instead, they live in a ‘park’ with benches. In other words, they are homeless.

“You might think that Alice has the worst life in the world, but she doesn’t believe that’s true. She will turn down the chance to improve her life in order to give others the opportunity to improve theirs. What does it mean when a character you’ve created makes you re-examine your own life through their astonishing selflessness?”

The characters are quite complex at times, acting in surprising ways. I highly recommend reading through the full story, especially looking the images, in which the characters are so expressive it’s frightening.

Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer

This one really made me laugh, and I had to watch it twice to get all the jokes. The trailer is made by BriTANicK, “Two Guys Wasting Their Degrees”, an acting troupe duo that creates short funny videos and promotes them online.

Charlie Brooker’s How to Report the News

The Movie Trailer reminded me of this bit I’d also caught recently, made by Charlie Brooker and BBC Four. Its title is self-explanatory. Just watch it.

Although all the rave right now is around multi-touch, electronics are getting more portable, which means decreasing surface size. But surfaces can offer a lot more than a glossy glassy screen on an iPhone. Several researchers have begun exploring the use of widely available surfaces, such as walls or tables, or even your arms and fingers, to replace static, often awkward, input surfaces.

Skinput

By measuring body acoustics (ultralow frequency sounds resulting from touching different points on the skin), researchers Chris Harrison, Dan Morris and Desney Tan have developed Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface. Basically, a complicated looking armband with lots of wires detects these vibrations, then a pico-projector projects an interface of buttons onto your arms. You tap the buttons directly on your skin to initiate an action, thus interacting with the interface. Or you can map certain parts of your hand and fingers to gameplay actions in a Tetris game, allowing you to play Tetris in the palm of your hand.

To imagine that this could become a commercially available product in a few years is not so far-fetched. Go to http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/skinput/ for more detailed information on this project. (Images and video from Chris Harrison’s site)

Muscle-Computer Interfaces

Muscle-Computer Interfaces allow you to “interact with a computer using hand and finger based input without holding physical input devices.” By using EMG technology “to decode muscle signals from the surface of the skin” from electrodes and wires connected to the outer surface of your arm. This detects gestures from hands and fingers, which are then mapped to actions on a computer.

Thus, they have completely done away with the notion of a [graphical] interface, and with that the need for a separate input surface is also gone. The video demo shows a person playing Guitar Hero by “strumming” and “fretting” in the air. See their site for more information.

Sixth Sense

The pioneers at MIT Media Lab have re-defined portable computing with SixthSense: A Wearable, Gestural Interface to Augment Our World. By hanging a small box around your neck (like a long necklace), any surface becomes a multi-touch gestural surface. In short, this box contains a projector, a mirror, and a camera, and is connected to a computer in your pocket, along with some caps that look like thimbles for your fingers. With this combination, gestures from finger movements (like pinching, rotating, grabbing) and hand movements (swiping, pushing, pulling) are mapped to actions on the interface, at best in an intuitive manner. So for example, grabbing the corners of an image with the index and thumb of both hands and pushing both hands together will shrink the image.

So far, it sounds like an iSomething with multi-touch. However, with Sixth Sense these gestures are in the air, and the surface can be any wall, table, torso, hand, etc. Or no surface. If you position both hands to form a square frame, it captures a photograph. It also interacts with objects, scanning the cover of a book to give you more information, or dynamically updates the weather map in a newspaper. You can watch movies or play on iTouch-like racing game on a piece of paper (and for those skeptics who thought paper would become obsolete…). Pinch a paragraph off of a textbook, then pinch it back onto your projected paper surface, then pinch it back to your desktop!

Check out this amazing project here: http://www.media.mit.edu/research/highlights/sixthsense-wearable-gestural-interface-augment-our-world and here: http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/.

The Challenge Awaits

It is exciting to think of all the challenges we face that come along with these ideas; not just the technological challenges of hardware/software, but the design challenges as well. When anything can be a surface, it becomes quite difficult to predict how a user will interact with the given interface. The usual paradigm of menu-button-navigation-input-etc might need to be completely reinvented for this new medium. Equally exciting will be the applications of this technology – the inventors have only conjured up a minimally small number of possible uses. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

“Imagination is the only limit of what you can think with this kind of technology merging with real life” says Pranav Mistry in his TED presentation. As evidenced by these three awe-inspiring ideas, and the myriads more in development, this is not fiction anymore.

As I was staring at the enormous shelf of endless cereal options at Target, presented with the ever-difficult decision of choosing just one cereal, I couldn’t help but notice something odd about the cereal boxes. Then I realized they had gone retro!.

General Mills redesigned some of their cereal packages to look like 50’s and 60’s cereal boxes, so that the Honey Nut Cheerios’ honey bee was not all decked out in 3D highlights and the Lucky Charms leprechaun looked as if he came out of a storybook. Also making an appearance was a mysterious Moose in the regular Cheerios’ (with a notably absent heart as well), and the disappearance of Wendell, replaced by a smiling piece of mini-toast for Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Alas, the Trix rabbit was as silly as ever.

Of course I bought some Lucky Charms and ate all the marshmallows.

It’s also a little ironic that some of these cereals were introduced much later than the time period on the package (Honey Nut Cheerios in 1979 and Cinnamon Toast Crunch in 1984). As a curious fact, Cheerios is the oldest, born in 1941, with Trix following in 1954 and then Lucky Charms in 1964. Just check Wikipedia for more yummy treasures.

Obviously a marketing move from General Mills, one has to wonder why they would target such a limited audience for such a short time, assuming most people aren’t design geeks. Of course, the Dieline (the greatest package design blog) has this covered, and Brandweek has some background behind the re-design.

A really quirky commercial that made me laugh, which makes me wish there were more commercials that were this witty and had this much thought behind them.

Kirsten is a Canadian Cow who beat out cows from all over the world for the chance to move to sunny California and become a Happy California Cow. In the site you can view all the TV spots detailing Kirsten’s journey from snowy Saskatchewan to sunny California, and her trouble adjusting as a foreigner, including the insurmountable language barrier. The site also features an English to Canadian translator, in case you don’t understand, eh.

And the last video is not on YouTube, but worth checking out on the full site:
http://www.realcaliforniamilk.com/kirsten