Technology Podcast 239: Twitter Revolution in Moldova?, Urban Pac-Man, Spies in the Electricity Grid?, Extremist Websites, A Winning Solar Oven, and GoogleLitTrips

April 13, 2009

Some weeks it is very hard to pull out one story from the Technology Podcast to feature front and center on the blog. After all, this week we run a wide tech gamut, featuring everything from writer Evgeny Morozov talking about the so-called "Twitter Revolution" in Moldova to Urban Pac-Man on the streets of Lyon, France. But for my money, the worthiest little story this week is about a solar oven, or "cooker" as the Brits would call it. It's called the Kyoto Box, and it recently took first prize for "green ideas" in a competition run by an organization called Forum for the Future. Solar ovens, which use sunlight to cook food or boil water, are not a new idea. But the Kyoto Box may be a game-changer because...well, they've kept the cost down by making it of cardboard. Yep, cardboard. We have an interview with the Kenya-based inventor of the Kyoto Box, Jon Bohmer. He tells us that he feels widespead use of the Kyoto Box would cut down on the burning of wood and other fossil fuels in resource-deprived parts of the world. Advantages: no carcinogenic wood smoke to be inhaled, or to contribute to global warming. Disadvantage: can cardboard really work as a cooker without catching on fire? Ah....listen in to find out.

There are also a couple of interesting, and potentially scary, security-related items in this week's podcast. We hear about the  growing cyber-threats to America's electricity grid, and also about how extremist groups are using US servers to host their websites.

At the end, we lighten things up a bit. Jerome Burg is a retired teacher living in northern California. For more than 35 years, he taught high school English and tried to avoid chaperoning dances by also teaching technology to the school's journalism students. Then, a few years back, he was at Google headquarters learning about Google Earth, and it hit him: why not use Google Earth's different tools to help "three-dimensionalize" great works of literature? You know, add pictures, notes, geographical details, etc. Yeah, not bad, is it? And that's how Burg came to create GoogleLitTrips was born. The site recently won the 2008 Goldman Sachs Foundation Prize for Excellence in International Education.

Oh, and just because you know you secretly just HAVE to see this...video from Urban Pac-Man in Lyon, France:

Pacman@Lyon - Pacman Urbain
by Glaboin

(Screen grab from Kyoto Energy website)

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Discovery Wide Angle: Sensor Gloves Help Light the Way for the Elderly

April 08, 2009

As Europe's population ages, more and more research, and money, is going toward finding ways to help the elderly feel better, and take care of themselves, for longer. It turns out that light and lighting can play a huge role in the health of older people. It can affect sleep quality, changes of mood and cognitive performance. And so the European Union has given more than two and half million dollars to a project called Ambient Lighting Assistance for an Ageing Population, also known as ALADIN. A group of research universities and companies across Europe are trying to find ways to help older folks' circadian rhythms stay intact. And it revolves around the bio-sensor glove you see here. For this Wide Angle podcast, I speak with Walter Ritter, a research assistant at the University of Applied Sciences Vorarlberg in Austria. He began by explaining how and why light is so important to our health:

It might also help to see a graphic representation of how it works, so here it is.
 (Photo courtesy of Edith Maier. Graphic from ALADIN website)

A Great New Video Game...Seriously

November 14, 2008

I rarely cover video or computer games. If you want that kind of thing, there are, honestly, hundreds of other (read much better) places to get your fix. Honestly, I used to be much more into games, but with a 2 1/2 year old daughter, it's hard to find the time to either build stuff, or destroy it. But, in a week that saw hard-core gamers lining up for the latest expansion pack for MMORPG favorite World of Warcraft, I just wanted to alert folks to, well, something different. Over the past few years, I've been doing bits and pieces on something called serious, or persuasive gaming. These are games that make no bones about coming with a huge side of broccoli. These games try to teach you something by putting you in someone else's shoes. The latest example is a game called Global Conflicts: Latin America.

The best way to begin to tell you about this game is to show you what it isn't. Sorry, you don't get to play a hired gun, you don't get to invade a country in Latin America, and you don't get to leave a trail of utter devastation in your wake. Instead, Global Conflicts let's you be...wait for it...a journalist! (Now you see why I'm really writing about it...).

But seriously, you play an investigative reporter who is trying to uncover some deep, dark secrets. As you work to get the story straight, you get a very clear sense of just how difficult life can be for people. I lived in El Salvador for a time, and the themes explored in the game really hit home. You can play a demo online here. And, although you're armed with a pad and paper instead of a gun, you do get to meet some heavies as the game unfolds (see screenshot!).

By the way, this isn't the first game in the Global Conlficts series. The original game tackled nothing less than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yesterday, I spoke with one of the games' creators, Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen. I asked Simon what a video game can bring to the table in helping people understand a given conflict situation. He said:

"The way the games are designed, they very much let you see things from different perspectives, engaging people more deeply, and really using and facing up to what's going on. Instead of just being told what's going on, or hearing about it, with the game you have to act on it. Should I ask this or that? Should I talk to this or that person? Should I quote this or that? So you become an active participant much more than in other media forms. And that's what we want to do -- to get people closer to the conflict."

I, as the cynical journalist, also had to ask Simon the tough question -- how does it possibly compete with all those first-person shooters? He just laughed and said, "very badly." But then, he reminded me that serious games are still a relatively new genre. Both audiences (and publishers), he said, are now beginning to see the value in expanding the idea of what a game can be.

Global Conflicts: Latin America is available in most European countries already, and will go on sale in the United States soon. Next up, says Simon, is a game that looks at the plight of child soldiers in Uganda. Serious, indeed.

Immerse Yourself...in Hell

September 29, 2008

I've written before about the power of video and computer games to persuade and educate. At their best, these kinds of persuasive games are not only fun and challenging to play, but they actually put you in the shoes of someone else, and give you a sense of what life is like for, say, a child searching for water in refugee camp in Darfur. Well, the British Red Cross has possibly just gone one step better. As part of the organization's month-long effort to draw attention to the plight of civilains in conflict zones, it's launched an Alternative Reality Game (ARG) called Traces of Hope.

ARGs mix storytelling, game play and detective work, and in doing so, take the idea of persuasive gaming to a whole new level. In Traces of Hope, you register to play, and then are immediately contacted by Joseph, a fictional 16 year old from northern Uganda. He needs you to help him find his mother, from whom he has been separated. Joseph has been displaced (like some two million real people) by the two-decades long conflict there. The real stuff is as nasty as it gets, folks -- civil war, kidnappings, and the use of children as soldiers and sex slaves.

After being contacted by Joseph, you get completely immersed in the game. You have to track down information scattered across various websites. You may also be asked to send emails and make phone calls in an effort to help Joseph find his mother.

The game is meant not only to highlight the Red Cross' family-tracing service, but to also give players the feel of being a teenager, scared and alone in the midst of war.

ARGs have mostly been used around commercial ventures -- think of the online mysteries created surrounding the film Cloverfield. This is the first instance I've heard of a charity trying it.

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Beyond the Xbox, Wii and PlayStation

August 28, 2008

Despite my best efforts, I realize that I am becoming an old fogy. And, as an old fogy, I want to comment on what those meddling kids are up to these days. Actually, I want to pass along information on a great example of a project designed to get kids interacting with technology. And by interacting, I don't mean playing video games. I mean making games. At left are some of the budding young game developers behind Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City.

The game puts you in the shoes of Vivica Waters, a young girl from New Orleans who is forced to leave the city after Hurricane Katrina hits (the game has been released to coincide with the third anniversary of the storm -- August 29, 2005). Vivica moves to New York City. The game is essentially a dream that Vivica is having. She's been separated from her mother in the wake of the hurricane. She must find her mother, and, along the way, rescue trapped and injured survivors.

The release of the game is made even more timely and relevant as Gustav bears down on the Gulf, and New Orleans residents ready themselves yet again.

Tempest in Crescent City an excellent example of persuasive gaming -- games that are designed to be fun and challenging to play, while at the same time putting anyone who plays it in someone else's shoes. In other words, gulp, a game that's educational,that has a purpose.

The young people behind Tempest in Crescent City are part of something called Global Kids, a New York based nonprofit dedicated to educating urban youth about civic engagement and international affairs.

The first I came across the group was when I attended a showcase in New York City a few years back. The kids had just developed a game called Ayiti: The Cost of Life, which is meant to educate kids about the obstacles young people around the world face in getting an education. Ayiti's been played more than a million times by kids around the world, according to Global Kids.

Tempest in Crescent City is the second game developed by Global Kids, who worked in conjunction with an online gaming outfit called Game Pill, and with funding from Microsoft and AMD. I leave with you this great little video which takes you behind the scenes in the making of the game:

"We Are Miners...Online Miners."

August 26, 2008

World of Warcraft and other Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) sure do look exciting (see screen grab of Battle Ready Cat Thingy with Large Sword and Big Fangs at right). And WoW is exciting. I should know, as I've wasted a fair amount of my life parked in front of a computer, fighting off the Horde, etc.

But here's the thing. MMORPGs usually make you pay your dues. You have to spend a lot, and I mean *A LOT* of time building up skills, powers, armies, wealth, etc. Unless, of course, you're willing to pay someone to do all the repetitive, boring tasks needed to create a killer character. In that case, well, you need to find a gold farmer, someone who literally will do all the grunt work for you (or set up a 'bot to do it)...for a price. And yes, there are "sweatshops" which are run to combine all of the virtual gold and valuables accrued by groups of these farmers.

And according to a new study just released by Richard Heeks of the Development Informatics Group at the University of Manchester in England, there are hundreds of thousands of these virtual farmers at work all over the world, mostly in developing countries. And, according to Heeks, the business is growing rapidly. He estimates the global market in gold farming is about half a billion dollars.

Let me just remind you -- those are real dollars, not virtual ones.

All this despite the fact that such buying and selling of virtual goods and services is against the terms of agreement many a player agrees to when they delve into a MMORPG, and that there have been quite a few attempted crackdowns on the practice worldwide.

Rest assured that as more and more of the world gets broadband, there will be more and more poor farmers who will seek to get paid to sit at Internet-connected computers and go for the in-game gold. Heeks estimates that China (where maybe 80 percent of the gold farmers are based) has about 400,000 people employed in gold farming. The average wage? Maybe around 150 dollars a month.

And you thought your IT job sucked...

Ah, and the headline, yes. It's a riff on a tune called "Mining for Gold" by Canadian singer/songwriter James Gordon, covered to fine effect by the Cowboy Junkies.

"On the line, boys."

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AudiOdyssey: MIT Helps Visually Impaired Get Game

June 04, 2008

I'm partial to new and different kinds of video and computer gaming, so I really love to pass along stories like this one.

AudiOdyssey is a game designed for the Nintendo Wii system was developed in Flash to run on Windows PCs (see comment correcting me below). If your PC has Bluetooth, and you happen to have a Nintendo Wii controller, or Wiimote as it's called, then you can play the game that way.

The game is the brainchild of a group of seven students at the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab. The idea behind AudiOdyssey is to create a video game that visually impaired people could play with their sighted friends. 

Needless to say, the focus of AudiOdyssey is on audio. The game, which can be downloaded for free here, simulates a deejay trying to lay down tracks, build a catchy tune, and get people dancing. The player swings the Nintendo Wii remote to set the rhythm, and add tracks.

Get people dancing, though, and they might bump your turntable, and screw up your scratches!

The Wii controller was key to the game's development. The Wiimote has opened up gaming to what are called in the business "non-traditional gamers," women and older folks. That got Gambit student Eitan Glinert thinking, who was still left behind? “People with disabilities had been left behind. I began to speculate, how could you bring these people into the fold and have them be able to play these games?” Glinert says.

He started looking into it, and discovered that there were some 200 titles already available for the visually impaired.  But then Gilbert noticed something about those titles:

As a sighted player, I was unable to play any of these.The games had been so specifically adapted for sound and tactile play that they gave the visually impaired too much of an advantage, making it impractical for them to play with sighted friends. There were games for sighted people, games for blind people, and never the twain shall meet. I thought, maybe I could build a game that could be played by both, equally well.

Glinert and others have been working on the game since last year. It's still a prototype. Think about how difficult this is -- to try to create a challenging, engaging game that works equally well on both audio and visual levels. Tough. Pong, it isn't, let me tell you.

Oh, and if you're without a Wiimote, don't worry. The game can also be played via the keyboard.

Are you ready for the experience? Catch a video of some game play!

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