A blog post over on Games4Rehab alerted me to this cool hand tracking technique from researchers at MIT. It simply uses a printed lycra glove and a webcam, and can track the 3D position of the hand at under 100ms latency.

I quite liked the light-hearted trailer they put together for the glove too:

This could be very useful for some of the research I’ve been doing lately – plenty of games and applications could be made around this technology. Then again, I guess thats what Microsoft are getting at with Kinect. How good both are in the hands of the public remain to be seen.

For more details on the project, check out the project’s page.

Justin Bieber – you know that little guy that is everywhere online and who apparently sings? Okay, well it just so happens when you slow down the tempo of one of his tracks by 800% and slap a bit of reverb on there, you end up with one hell of an ambient soundscape track. Who’da thought?! Listen to the ambient masterpiece below:

Rather lovely, right? You can listen to the entire track here, and download it here. If you want to hear the original Bieber track, just for comparison’s sake of course, you can hear it here.

If you don’t believe this is actually the Bieber track slowed down, here’s the proof. I took the slowed down version and sped it up again here. When I first posted this sped up version I simply was doing it to prove to someone on Twitter it wasn’t a hoax. Turns out Gizmodo found the link and posted it on their article about the song (see Update 2), and as of the time I’m writing this, the clip has over 32,000 listens and it’s at the top of the Audioboo popular chart (see below). Thank God I changed my display picture to one that didn’t show my ugly mug to those 32k people, eh?

Note: “Echoes Across The Wasteland” was the title given to the track when it was uploaded to the Photon Wave Orchestra bandcamp page, a band name which apparently originated from 4Chan. There had been some confusion as to whether this was a genuine ambient release from this band, hence why I sped up the track to show it was indeed the Bieb-meister.

Damn this looks hot. The first game was fantastic. The second game, whilst it hit a bit of a lull in the middle, was still pretty awesome thanks to the last few chapters. The other good news is that Ken Levine is back on board for this one. Can’t wait to check this out.

I’m very proud of my hometown this evening. Derry/Londonderry has been awarded the status of UK City of Culture for 2013. Congratulations to all involved in the bid – the support for the bid from the people in the city was fantastic, particularly online. I set up a twibbon to show support for the bid (this adds a small symbol to the corner of your Twitter or Facebook display picture), tweeted about it, and it gradually gained over 1,200 supporters. Here’s to the future, and hopefully we can show both the historical and contemporary culture Derry has to offer.

The video above, “Voices”, is a short film produced to support the bid.

I’ve been going through stressful times recently with work and such, but have been finding solace in a few particularly blissful chilled albums. Each of these albums provide a beautiful melodic soundtrack, highly recommended for those who enjoy drifting away.

Eluvium – “Copia”
Listen now: Prelude for Time Feelers, Indoor Swimming at the Space Station

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Rhian Sheehan – “Standing in Silence”
Listen now: Part 3, Part 7/8
Available for a mere £1.95 digitally at Play.com.

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The Tumbled Sea – “Songs by The Tumbled Sea”
Listen now: 97202, A Growing Recognition of the Genius of Birds
This album is available as a free download (provided by the artist)! Check out his Myspace for more, and I recommend his side project Magic Man, who have also provided their great album available for free download.

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Helios – “Caesura”
Listen now: Hope Valley Hill, Mima

If you haven’t seen this before – man, you’re missing out!  This is Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing, and features the following ground-breaking features:

• There is no collision detection with anything other than the ground. Bridges are simply a mirage. You can also drive off the end of the map. Physics? Pah, take that Newton!
• The box and gameplay description of the game advertise that the player must escape from the police. Lucky for you, there are actually no police in the game. The law is a lie. In fact, there is pretty much zero plot to the game whatsoever.
• In the originally released version, enemy trucks had no AI and, as such, never left the starting position. Praise be that a patch was eventually released which gave life to these lumbering beasts. The patch also gave the great privilege of adding sound effects to the game.
• Text on the player’s HUD doesn’t fit properly.
• The game fails to distinguish between the player starting or finishing when crossing the line, so you may receive a “YOU’RE WINNER” message within a second of starting the game. Rewarding feedback leads to high levels of player engagement, right?

Despite all this, the game still sold 20,000 copies. In fairness, from watching the video, it looks pretty damn entertaining.

Check out this rather excellent short animation. Perhaps the best way you’ll spend 5 minutes today.

Crater Face from Skyler Page on Vimeo.

I was first introduced to Carcassonne thanks to it being given away free of charge for a limited time on Xbox 360 to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Xbox Live. After a few plays and having grown accustomed to the rules (well, most of them) the game really began to grow on me, and I’ve since played the original board game. Within the last few days an iPhone version of the game has been released… and its pretty damn good!

Read my full impressions of the iPhone version…

I haven’t been blogging much recently.  This is due to a combination of a megaton workload and the fact that I’m working on re-styling my blog. I’m aiming for this blog to become more simple, more of a Tumblr/Posterous style blog, without all the clutter that you currently see on it. Clean and simple. This will, in my opinion, make it a much nicer environment for posting content, meaning I can post shorter articles without the compelling need to spend hours writing up something (I’ll still do this as well for content that warrants it). I mean, sure, I can post short entries now, but for some reason it feels like it’d be easier and more suitable if the blog was more simplified.

I aim to move the rest of the site (my profile, games portfolio, etc.) to a seperate, more professionally fitting site. These changes will hopefully come into effect within the next month or so.

Update: I’ve done a bit of tidying up with the current WordPress theme. I’ve condensed the categories, tidied up the sidebar and narrowed the theme a little, and I like it – so I’m going to stick with it. The only thing left to do is move the additional portfolio stuff to a new site, which will happen sometime in the near future.

More and more uses of Augmented Reality have been rearing their head as mainstream products recently, thanks to the increase in smart phones. An iPhone (3GS only) app released on the app store yesterday provides an augmented overlay when driving along a road, detecting lanes and nearby vehicles. I wouldn’t say its exactly very useful, hell if you try using this while driving yourself you’ll probably end up dead, but its still a cool example of whats possible with low-cost technology and the app itself only costs a mere £1.79.

It wouldn’t be difficult to turn this into some sort of game (for passengers of course) – maybe some sort of Pokemon collector type game where you have to photograph a certain number of cars of a certain model or colour, or if you want to get controversial, virtually shooting at passing cars and scoring points for it.

I was going to mention some form of Death Race mechanics, but thats probably pushing it…

App: Augmented Driving by Imaginyze