games & graphics

Tracking What You Look At

Feb 19, 2017 | , , , ,

“Eye tracking sensors provide two main benefits,” says Oscar Werner, vice president of the eye tracking company Tobii Tech. “First, it makes a device aware of what the user is interested in at any given point in time. And second, it provides an additional way to interact with content, without taking anything else away. That means it increases the communication bandwidth between the user and the device.”

There’s a chance that soon eye tracking will be a standard feature of a new generation of smartphones, laptops and desktop monitors setting the stage for a huge reevaluation of the way we communicate with devices—or how they communicate with us.

Source: Unlocking the potential of eye tracking technology | TechCrunch

See also:  Towson University eye-tracking lab

FBI Releases Gamergate Records

Jan 27, 2017 |

Brianna Wu with a poster of some of her video game characters.

The FBI has posted a heavily redacted report of its threat investigations during the Gamergate controversy in 2014 and 2015. The 173-page document (not counting 61 deleted pages) primarily seems to cover harassment of critic Anita Sarkeesian and game developer Brianna Wu, including a shooting threat that caused Sarkeesian to cancel a planned talk at Utah State University. Ultimately, the investigations petered out: the FBI wasn’t able to identify the people behind some of the threats, apparently declined to prosecute others, and appears to have struggled with jurisdictional issues.

Source: The FBI has released its Gamergate investigation records – The Verge

Movies Starring You in a Thousand Plotlines

Jan 25, 2017 | , , ,

Moriarty believes that as computer graphics improve, the faces of actors, or even political figures, could be subtly altered to echo the viewer’s own features, to make them more sympathetic. Lifelike avatars could even replace actors entirely, at which point narratives could branch in nearly infinite directions. Directors would not so much build films around specific plots as conceive of generalized situations that computers would set into motion, depending on how viewers reacted.

“What we are looking at here is a breakdown in what a story even means—in that a story is defined as a particular sequence of causally related events, and there is only one true story, one version of what happened,” Moriarty said. With the development of virtual reality and augmented reality—technology akin to Pokémon Go—there is no reason that a movie need be confined to a theatrical experience. “The line between what is a movie and what is real is going to be difficult to pinpoint,” he added. “The defining art form of the twenty-first century has not been named yet, but it is something like this.”

Source: The Movie with a Thousand Plotlines – The New Yorker

Big Ten Network to Air League of Legends E-Games

Jan 19, 2017 | , ,

In a recognition of the popularity of e-sports on college campuses, most Big Ten universities will field teams in the multiplayer online game League of Legends and compete in a style resembling conference play, in a partnership with the Big Ten Network. Besides streaming competitions on the internet, the Big Ten Network will broadcast select games, including the championship in late March, weekly on its cable network, which is available to more than 60 million households nationally. In the first broadcast, on Jan. 30, teams from the Big Ten’s two newest members, Rutgers and Maryland, will face off, according to a Big Ten Network spokesman.

Source: Big Ten Universities Entering a New Realm: E-Sports – The New York Times

How BitTorrent Became a Zombie Startup

Jan 15, 2017 | ,

Some startups are born lucky. By the chance of their timing, their technology, or the individuals who helm them, they experience Facebook-size success. Others fail quickly. There is luck in this, too — in an immediate, concise conclusion. Far more startups, having raised funding on the merits of an idea and a team, plod along for years or even decades, constantly casting about for the idea or customer or partnership that will transform them. Their investors are patient, and then exhausted, and then checked out, and then impatient. Their executives change, and then change again. The founders leave, or they hang on in hopes the company they conceived will somehow eventually prove itself. They are zombie startups.

Source: The Inside Story of BitTorrent’s Bizarre Collapse

Why AI Poker Is Very Hard

Jan 13, 2017 | , ,

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“In a complete information game you can solve a subtree of the game tree,” says Professor Tuomas Sandholm, who built the Libratus system with PhD student Noam Brown. AI trying to win a game of chess or Go can work through how a sequence of moves will play out. “With incomplete-information games, it’s not like that at all. You can’t know what cards the other player has been dealt,” he explains. “That means you don’t know exactly what subgame you’re in. Also, you don’t know which cards chance will produce next from the deck.”

Incomplete information games have thus far proved much harder to solve. CMU’s AI focuses on information sets, a grouping of possible states that take into account the known and unknown variables. It’s a massive mathematical undertaking. “The game has 10 to the power of 160 information sets, and 10 to the power of 165 nodes in the game tree,” says Sandholm. That means there are more possible permutations in a hand of poker than atoms in our universe. “And even if you had another whole universe for each atom in our universe and counted all the atoms in those universes, it would be more than that.”

Source: This AI will battle poker pros for $200,000 in prizes – The Verge  

See also:  

2 Google Home Bots Trying to Dialog

Jan 6, 2017 | , ,

Two Google Home devices are deep in conversation. And thousands are watching the robots attempt to mimic human interaction. The bots’ ongoing chat, which has ranged from the meaning of life, religion, love, ninjas and Chuck Norris, is streaming on Twitch. The video has had nearly 780,000 views as of Friday afternoon since it started streaming a few days ago.The bots have been aptly named Vladimir and Estragon, perfect for their endless chatter reminiscent of the two perpetually waiting characters in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. 

Source: 2 Google Homes sound like they are drunk flirting, and the internet can’t get enough

Bot Gender

Jan 2, 2017 | , , , ,

By creating interactions that encourage consumers to understand the objects that serve them as women, technologists abet the prejudice by which women are considered objects. They may overlook this hazard in part because these workers are, for the most part, men. The field of artificial intelligence has been accused of still lower gender diversity than the tech sector generally. Although women held fifty-seven per cent of all professional jobs last year, they held only a quarter of computing jobs; Latina and black women held just one and three per cent of those jobs, respectively. Fei-Fei Li, a professor of computer science at Stanford who helped pioneer computer vision, has recently advocated for greater diversity among A.I. workers, including gender diversity, citing the biases that have plagued machine-learning algorithms.

Source: The Bot Politic – The New Yorker

Virtual Reality Cafes

Dec 28, 2016 | , , ,


Every now and then it’s fun to take a break from fighting real-life bloodsucking mutants and spend an hour slaughtering some virtual zombies. Luckily, there is now a convenient way for you to escape this waking life for the world of the undead. Two brick-and-mortar locations for virtual reality gaming have opened in New York City this winter, giving New Yorkers the opportunity to experience the cutting edge of VR and thus the cutting edge of the zombie apocalypse.

Source: Step Into A Van Gogh Masterpiece Or Just Kill Some Zombies At These Virtual Reality Cafes: Gothamist

Lovin’ the New iPhone 7 camera

Sep 9, 2016 | , , ,

 

We are splintering what was the “camera” and its functionality—lens, sensors, and processing—into distinct parts, but, instead of lenses and shutters, software and algorithms are becoming the driving force. And this is not just happening on smartphone cameras. You can expect the software to define and enhance what lenses, sensors, and processing units in other settings can do. Dash cams, security cams, adventure cams, driving cams—these are just early examples of devices that have specific applications, cameras that could become much more powerful in the future. In the coming era of augmented and virtual reality, these new cameras will also create content to be consumed within V.R. headsets like Oculus and Magic Leap.

Source: With the iPhone 7, Apple Changed the Camera Industry Forever – The New Yorker

It’s all about the ‘surroundie’

Sep 5, 2016 | , ,

 

“Surroundie” – a term coined by CCS Insight analyst Ben Wood – refers to a selfie taken with a 360 degree camera. Wood, the chief of research at CCS, believes that the time is now for this form of content to take off.

Source: Forget the selfie, it’s all about the virtual reality ‘surroundie’ now for millennials

 

Man Talk @ Baltimore Comic-Con

Aug 22, 2016 |

Looking back now as a social scientist interested in linguistic anthropology, I can see the convention experience, and the discourse surrounding it, in a completely different light. Linguist Robin Lakoff developed what she called the Politeness Principle. In her analysis of women’s gendered conversation, she noted that females, in their interactions, had to adhere to rules that men didn’t. Most notably, this principle speaks to the fact that women must do three things: “Don’t impose, give the receiver options, and make the receiver feel good.”

Source: Con-Men: Understanding the Gendered Language of the Comic Book Convention | The Geek Anthropologist
See also: Baltimore Comic-Con,  “Language and Woman’s Place”