Stonehenge was a Circle

Stonehenge was circular? Well, blow me down | Art and design | theguardian.com: "... Stonehenge may have been a complete stone circle after all. People who work at the site noticed something that has passed professional archaeologists by: traces of two vanished stones. Though they had watered the rest of the site throughout the hot summer, their hosepipe was too short to reach an outer section of the enclosed area on Salisbury Plain. As the ground dried up, the Stonehenge staff saw distinctive parch marks that turned out to be tell-tale signs of the lost megaliths. This is a great day for amateur archaeologists. Enthusiastic, untrained eyes have discovered something really significant... For Stonehenge is not the only stone circle raised in Neolithic Britain. The village of Avebury in Wiltshire is surrounded by a vast stone circle as well as a huge circular earthwork. There’s no question the stones at Avebury form a circle. So do those at Stenness, Orkney, at the other end of the British Isles. These “Henge” monuments and others around Britain are so consistently circular that the existence of circles must surely be part of their meaning. The geometric feat of mapping out a circle, presumably using pegs and cord, was no mean achievement for a pre-literate people. Many prehistoric mounds like Silbury Hill near Avebury are also circular. Are all these cosmic circles meant to mirror the shapes of the sun and moon as they look to the naked pre-scientific eye?..."

Mobile Gaming, The One Game Wonder Problem

Mobile’s “One Game Wonder” Problem | TechCrunch: "...My point is that because mobile lacks significant cultural coverage, on-platform community building opportunities and has no use for cross-promotion, it’s much more likely to engender one-game-wonders that can’t go to franchise. Just about their only vector for success is mass attention, and mass attention is forgetful. Lacking the ability on the back end to convert potential fans into true fans even the largest game makers stay barefoot and pregnant. Can it be solved?..." (read more at the link above)

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Mobile Games and the Games Press

Mobile’s “One Game Wonder” Problem | TechCrunch: "....the games press doesn’t give a frack about mobile. I’ve previously talked about how there’s a culture gap and how, despite the explosive success of some titles, the games press is generally not that interested in the space, and neither are its readers. The culture factor really can’t be underestimated for franchising success across most forms of gaming, but in mobile it’s almost entirely absent. Instead the gaming press tends to regard mobile as akin to how the movie press regards television soap operas: Yes they exist, say the journalists, but so what? Business wonks care about sales numbers and metrics, but what journalists care about what games represent, and – bar the occasional Monument Valley or Year Walk – mobile games often lack that dimension. They’re just pastimes with little to say, and the press would rather write about something genuinely commentary-inspiring like Mountain than yet another tech-features-numbers story from...."

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Games as planning tools

Many uses for games -- we are only at the beginning --

How video games have the power to change real lives | Technology | theguardian.com: "... John Isaacs, a lecturer in computing at the University of Abertay, is one of those exploring the possibilities of game engines. In 2011, he developed an urban mapping application for his PhD project. TheSustainable City Visualisation Tool was used to generate a 3D visualisation of the Dundee Waterfront, modeling different approaches to its regeneration. Built using the XNA game design tools created by Microsoft for its Xbox console, S-CITY VT enabled users to apply different proposals and see how they affected noise levels, energy consumption and other factors. Importantly, Isaacs’ tool helped residents to understand how the redevelopment would affect them...." (read more at the links above)


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Pinball Makes a Comeback (video)

Pinball Makes a Comeback: Pinball has received a makeover, complete with high-tech enhancements and a new set of rules.

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Microsoft Research, Cloud Gaming

Microsoft Research invented video game time travel to fix cloud gaming | ExtremeTech: "... DeLorean does four things to improve responsiveness and lower RTT — future input prediction, state space subsampling, misprediction compensation, and bandwidth compression. Combined, these techniques can eliminate up to 250ms of lag, which can keep a cloud-based game playable even on mobile connections. Both Doom 3 and Fable 3 were modified successfully to compensate for network lag using DeLorean. So let’s say you’re playing a first-person shooter on your tablet via a cloud gaming platform running DeLorean. Before you’ve even done anything, the DeLorean-equipped server has spawned three “slave” instances of the game (this can be increased depending on network latency). These copies are used to render possible frames depicting what you might do. One frame might be looking slightly to the left, another to the right, and the third could show the beginning of a muzzle flash as you open fire. These are all fed into the master game, which then immediately sends the correct one when your input reaches the server...." (read more at the link above)


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Haptic Interfaces, Force Illusions, Invisible Force

Researchers have made haptic interfaces that create the sensation of being pushed or pulled by an invisible force.

Japanese Researchers Demonstrate “Force Illusions” | MIT Technology Review: "What if the compass app in your phone didn’t just visually point north but actually seemed to pull your hand in that direction? Two Japanese researchers will present tiny handheld devices that generate this kind of illusion at next month’s annual SIGGRAPH technology conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. The “force display” devices, called Traxion and Buru-Navi3, exploit the fact that a vibrating object is perceived as either pulling or pushing when held. The effect could be applied in navigation and gaming applications, and it suggests possibilities in mobile and wearable technology as well...." (read more at link above)


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Famou.us, JavaScript, HTML5, Beta Videos

Famo.us Private Beta Presentations

http://famo.us/

Famo.us raises $25M to double down on its innovative JavaScript framework | VentureBeat | Deals | by Mark Sullivan: "The promise of HTML5 was to bring smooth dynamic graphics and new rich content features to all browsers and devices. But that promise has gone largely unmet, and, on mobile devices, we are still living very much in a native app world. Now, a San Francisco-based company called Famo.us has gone all-in with JavaScript — a lightweight, dynamic, browser programming language — to push the performance of HTML websites to levels that HTML5 proponents have so far only hoped for. The company’s founders, Steve Newcomb and Mark Lu, have built a JavaScript-based development framework that lets app and site developers create beautiful 3D imagery and gaming-like visuals inside the browser..."


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Amazon a Major Player in Games

Here's why Amazon has become a major player in games (interview) | GamesBeat | Games | by Dean Takahashi: "... When we launched Fire TV, the most exciting thing we thought about holistically is that there’s this huge gap between the casual mobile game and the triple-A huge budgets. That’s interesting on a couple of levels. One, we think gamers and customers would be interested in great crafted experiences that are more economical. We, as creators in our studios, are interested in working with smaller teams. You don’t need 1,000 people working on something. You can iterate quickly and things like that. The gaming industry is at that point of reflection. There’s a huge space there. There’s a lot of opportunity. We’re definitely serious. That’s where we’re going...."

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Spellgun, Storm Casters, Cracking Chinese mobile-game market

Spellgun to help Western-made Storm Casters crack Chinese mobile-game market | GamesBeat | Games | by Dean Takahashi: "... Spellgun is a joint effort between Concept Art House, an outsourcing firm that makes art for mobile games, and Talkweb, a publicly traded Chinese company that runs a huge distance-learning business. The companies plan to make it much easier for Western game companies to enter China, one of the most important markets in the future of gaming. Spellgun has published Storm Casters on iOS, and Talkweb will port it to Android later...."

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Mobile messaging platform Tango, Mobile Games, Game Dev Investment Fund

Game developers who publish their games with Tango could reach Tango’s 200 million members through native ads, chat notifications, Tango Channels, as well as being listed as a feature game--

“We think developers can benefit from Tango’s one-of-a-kind game distribution model.” “First, we give developers access to our highly engaged member base: 70 percent of whom play mobile games. Secondly, we give them access to platform tools that allow them to increase vitality and retention on their games. On top of that, we will be putting our marketing muscle behind off-platform user acquisition." -- Tango CEO and Founder Uri Raz

Mobile messaging platform Tango hires game publishing leader and creates $25M game investment fund | GamesBeat | Games | by Dean Takahashi: "Tango, the mobile messaging network with 200 million users, wants everyone to know it is serious about publishing mobile games on its platform. Today, it is announcing it has hired mobile game veteran Jim Ying as vice president of games publishing and it is setting up a $25 million fund to invest in game developers around the world. The moves show that Tango is serious about pursuing games as a strategy to differentiate itself from larger mobile messaging networks like Facebook’s WhatsApp, and it is following in the footsteps of fast-growing Asian mobile messaging networks like Kakao Talk, Line, and WeChat...." (read more at link above)


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World Cup moments, 8-bit art

BBC News - World Cup moments re-created in 8-bit art: "Brazilian digital artist Matheus Toscano has been re-creating football moments in the classic "8-bit" style - inspired by the games consoles of yesteryear. And, like those classic gaming machines, what the images lack in realism they more than make up for in character. For the World Cup, Toscano, who makes the images on his tablet, faithfully re-created the most significant moments - biting and all. Toscano has been creating the images since 2012, but the World Cup has brought him a wave of new fans. "With no ambitions, I created a Twitter account and a blog to share my work, and the reactions were quite positive," he told the BBC. "It is a hobby that I do in my free time. I did not expect to be such a success." His hobby could extend further if his hopes of raising money to create a retro-style football game are met...." (read more at link above)


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