Category: games

Future games might not only change our life but our education too

Imagine games where participants can develop projects in real life to address real problems, such as securing a community’s food supply or establishing a sustainable power source, then progress through levels of the game; would not it be a great way of learning?

Jane McGonigal, author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (Penguin Press, 2011) and the former director of Games Research and Development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif. presented at EDUCAUSE 2013 a series of examples of games which can change the future of education [ARTICLE]

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Via EDTECH

Prototyping Device Ecologies: Physical to Digital and Viceversa

Our Studio proposal has been accepted at TEI 2014 – 8th International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction.

This Studio will involve participants creating interactions with physical and digital elements. They will have the opportunity to use a toolkit we developed that combines physical and digital widgets into a unique environment to allow the rapid setup of device ecologies. Therefore, participants will be able to explore how the toolkit support to physical/digital interaction gives people with low, when no, technical skills the possibility to rapidly prototype interactions among heterogeneous devices, thus blurring the boundaries between the physical and the digital world.

See here a couple of example of what participants will be able to do:

Meet a Little Robot that can teach you the basics of hardware programming

Tired of hardware programming lessons and tutorials or dealing with Arduino boards? Well on Kickstarter there’s a new project on a tiny interactive robot, The Little Robot Friend, who can help you learning and teaching the basics of hardware programming and seems actually fun [ARTICLE]

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Via Engadget.com

Interested in Futurism and Science Fiction? You might want to take a look at the Intel’s Tomorrow Project

With Mark Weiser‘s vision already becoming true, there’s currently another vision which might be the next step toward computing paradigms: The Tomorrow Project by Intel.

Take a look at this interview with Brian David Johnson, futurist at Intel: http://bcove.me/vwfae2ra

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Via ASU Magazine

Prepare to turn your iPad in a 3D sensor – One of the coolest project on Kickstarter right now

What if you can just walk around a room an grab data on all the furniture to generate a 3D model? And what if you could be able to play 3D augmented reality games on your iPad? The dream is coming true with this science-fiction like device called Structure Sensor [ARTICLE]

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Via Kickstarter

NeuroRacer: a game for improving multitasking skills in elderly

A very interesting game came out from a study performed by researchers at the University of California: NeuroRacer is not only able to increase multitasking skills in elderly but also has good side effects on memory and attention. After practicing with the game players in their 60s and 80s where able to do better than 20-somethings playing for the first time [ARTICLE]

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Via TheDailyBeast

Valve belivies the future of games is in your living room

Currently, when we go back home and relax on our couch we tend to disconnect from core computing platforms (e.g. PCs with high-end graphics) but at Valve they do not think that fragmentation in terms of computation and graphics for games is really desirable and are going to come out with their own proposal: Steam OS which will turn (almost) every linux box into a console [ARTICLE]

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Via bbc.co.uk