Author Archive | Jared Newman

Protein Science, Crowdsourced to Gamers

Posted by Jared Newman on August 6, 2010 at 1:16 pm

Just because IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in chess 13 years ago doesn’t mean computers are always better gamers than humans. The scientists at University of Washington in Seattle learned this first-hand, when a program they created for protein folding got its best results from real people.

Science journal Nature has the fascinating story of Foldit, a free downloadable game in which players fold protein for the benefit of science. It was originally a computer program that would run in the background, much like the SETI@home project, but as users watched the program meticulously fold amino acids into more durable three-dimensional shapes, they complained about how slow it was. Foldit was created as a way for people to speed up the process, and it encouraged gamers with high score tables and the ability to form strategy groups.

This week, the University of Washington announced that the best Foldit players indeed excelled over machines. That’s because humans take risks and have long-term vision, neither of which are strong suits for computers. By determining the most efficient way of folding amino acids into more durable three-dimensional shapes, gamers are helping scientists target the inefficient protein arrangements that cause allergies and neurodegenerative diseases.

Obviously, not every instance of crowdsourced science is conducive to gaming, and as Nature points out, there’s a fine line between volunteer work and exploitation, but I like the idea that gaming’s competitive and puzzle-solving qualities can be put to good work. If only Farmville was so productive.

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Kinect is to Microsoft as Multi-Touch is to Apple

Posted by Jared Newman on August 5, 2010 at 1:52 pm

Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan got a lengthy tour of Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360, the upcoming gaming peripheral that detects 3D motion with a camera and captures audio with microphones. His conclusion? This is the future for Microsoft, an idea with boundless possibilities that will spread far beyond gaming.

One project manager said Kinect’s technology could some day allow Star Trek Holodeck-style environments, no joke.

Pondering this, I can’t help but draw parallels to the way Apple has approached multi-touch. After popularizing two-finger scrolling in MacBooks, and gestures like pinch-to-zoom on the iPhone, Apple has steadily expanded the role of multi-touch in all its computer products. First came the multi-touch Magic Mouse, then the iPad, and now the Magic Trackpad. Apple put its faith in flat, pressure-sensitive surfaces, and it’s paying off. Microsoft is investing in the air, and hopes to see a similar expansion.

Motion control and multi-touch are not all that different in spirit. Both input methods are supposed to feel natural, as if there’s no barrier between you and the machine. This is especially true with Apple’s iOS devices, with which you interact simply by touching what you see. On the downside, neither input method solves the problem of physical feedback; anyone who’s tried typing on an iPad without looking at the keys should understand why that’s an issue.

For now, Microsoft and Apple are not having an input war. Multi-touch emerged from personal computing, and remains entrenched in it. Kinect’s origins are entertainment, and the technology will probably work back to the computer as an accessory for multitmedia and communications.

To oversimplify, Microsoft’s trying to kill the game controller and the remote control, and Apple wants to slay the mouse, and maybe the keyboard, but it’s clear that both companies have input revolution on the brain. They complement each other beautifully.

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Kindle Gets a Couple Free Games

Posted by Jared Newman on August 5, 2010 at 9:42 am

The Kindle’s software development kit has been largely forgotten since Amazon announced it in January, because nothing ever came of the supposed iPad counter-measure.

At last, the Kindle Development Kit has yielded two free games: Every Word challenges players to come up with as many words as possible from a scrambled concoction of letters, and Shuffled Row is like a solitary Scrabble, in which letters are replaced whenever the player uses them to create words.

Obviously, this isn’t Doom for Kindle (though I have seen video of Super Mario Bros. running on a Kindle software emulator, riddled with bugs). It’s more of an answer to Barnes & Noble, which stocks the Nook with Chess and Sudoku.

Amazon tells ZDNet that it’s still working with “limited-beta developers” and says to stay tuned for more developments, but over the last seven months I’ve grown apathetic about the whole thing. The Kindle Development Kit was exciting in the run-up to Apple’s iPad debut (remember when we only knew it as “the tablet?”), when it seemed like a desperate attempt to add new uses to an ultimately single-purpose device.

Now, Amazon appears to have embraced the Kindle’s non-iPadness, with an emphasis on a better screen and faster response in the third-generation model instead of a longer feature list. And with the Kindle Wi-Fi’s $139 price tag, comparisons to the iPad just don’t seem all that appropriate anymore.

I’m happy to see the Kindle get a couple games, and I hope we see more apps soon, like the once-promised Zagat dining guide. But getting apps out there no longer seems as urgent as it did when the Kindle Development Kit debuted.

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NBA Jam for Xbox 360 and PS3 Includes a Dilemma

Posted by Jared Newman on August 4, 2010 at 3:22 pm

When I tried NBA Jam at E3, it seemed like a faithful remake of Midway’s classic two-on-two arcade basketball game from the mid 1990s, but the Wii’s limited processing power makes online play unlikely when the game arrives in October.

The announcement of NBA Jam for Xbox 360 and PS3, with their elegant systems for multiplayer, seems like great news, except it comes with a couple of serious catches.

First, the only way you can get NBA Jam for Xbox 360 or PS3 is with a free download when you purchase NBA Elite 11, EA’s more traditional basketball game.  That’s not such a bad deal, because you’d get two games for the price of one, but with that offer comes another gotcha: The downloadable version of NBA Jam is not the full game. Only the Wii version has the “Remix Tour” mode and “boss battles” against basketball legends such as Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. These features reportedly add another 20 hours to the game.

EA has put gamers in an tough position, where they’re deciding not just what console they’d rather play on, but which features are more important. While I agree with EA Creative Director Trey Smith playing NBA Jam against someone in the same room is part of the classic experience, playing against someone across the country is part of modern gaming.

I’m guessing this bizarre feature split was the only way EA could get NBA Jam on all three consoles, after announcing it as a Wii exclusive in January. For Nintendo, it’s a guarantee that not all buyers will jump ship to the version with multiplayer, but for gamers, it’s a lose-lose.

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Microsoft Mystery Product Could Be Anything (or Nothing)

Posted by Jared Newman on August 4, 2010 at 9:29 am

Okay Microsoft, I’ll bite.

The company’s doing a striptease of some unidentified hardware product, revealing a rendered image piece-by-piece through its Microsoft Hardware Twitter feed. The first image didn’t show much, but cobble it together with the second one (courtesy of JR Raphael at PCWorld), and you start to get a better picture — of something.

Continue Reading →

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Gaming is Blackberry Torch's Missing Piece

Posted by Jared Newman on August 3, 2010 at 3:21 pm

Blackberry’s incoherent approach to video games never seemed like a problem before, but with Blackberry Torch and the new consumer focus of Blackberry 6, Research in Motion could soon find itself behind in the one area it overlooked.

The new trend in mobile gaming, and games in general, is social glue — the idea that a random smattering of games in an app store is no longer enough. People want to be involved in their games on another level, whether it’s the persistent beckoning of Farmville or the overarching achievement system of Xbox Live.

That glue is starting to ooze into mobile gaming. Apple sees the importance and is building Game Center, a layer of achievements, friends lists, matchmaking and leaderboards that developers can append to their games. When Microsoft launches Windows Phone 7 later this year, games will fall under the banner of Xbox Live, presumably with the same social features as its console counterpart. Google’s plans are a little murkier, but some kind of social gaming service is expected, and I’d be surprised if Android wasn’t involved.

Video games are not a trivial part of the smartphone experience. The number of smartphone owners who played games at least once a month increased 60 percent from February 2009 to February 2010, according to comScore. Games are the second-largest category in Blackberry App World, behind themes, and Compete says 54 percent of Blackberry owners have at least one game on their devices. Admittedly, that pales in comparison to iPhone owners, 51 percent of whom have five or more games installed, but maybe Apple’s extensive games catalog is one reason so many Blackberry owners are looking to jump ship.

Gaming will become a more important part of owning a smartphone, and social glue will be the factor that draws people to a platform and keeps them coming back. With Blackberry Torch and Blackberry 6 OS, RIM was so busy playing catch-up on key features, such as the browser and universal search, that it failed to see what the other major smartphone makers are working on next.

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Lala's Lost, But is it Missed?

Posted by Jared Newman on August 3, 2010 at 9:00 am

Over at CNet, Greg Sandoval’s inside sources say Apple’s setting low expectations for cloud music, and hasn’t yet acquired licenses to stream songs from its own servers.

In other words, the assumption that Apple acquired Lala to build its own streaming music service won’t pan out anytime soon. The Lala crew may actually be working on some sort of streaming video service instead, Sandoval’s sources say. Apple acquired Lala in December 2009, and shut it down in late May.

We’ve written about Lala quite a few times, because it took such a unique approach to digital music. In addition to selling MP3s, Lala sold streaming tracks for 10 cents each, and let you listen to any song once for free. It could also scan your entire downloaded music library and store a cloud version to be accessed anywhere. For Apple to offer any of those services, it needs more licensing from the music industry, and Apple reportedly hasn’t negotiated for that yet.

But as I look at the digital music landscape now, I don’t think Lala is really necessary. All-you-can-eat music services have emerged from Rhapsody, MOG and now Rdio, all of them offering mobile and desktop access for $10 per month, with the ability to download songs locally. That’s a lot more convenient than building a streaming library of individual tracks, and could be more economical for music junkies. If you just want to hear a song once for free, you can accomplish that with music search tools from Google and Bing.

As for the digital locker concept, how essential is it? Music doesn’t take up a lot of room, and storage capacity on mobile devices is only increasing. I’d rather see Apple focus on streaming video, because movies and TV shows are much more unwieldy to store and transfer. Although I was sad to see Lala go, I’m not desperate for it to come back.

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How Nintendo's Dealing With 3DS Eye Strain

Posted by Jared Newman on August 2, 2010 at 4:46 pm

If 3D gaming is going to take off, it’ll have to find a way to reduce eye strain during lengthy play sessions. For one Nintendo 3DS game designer, that means being mindful of the way 3D effects are applied.

Masahiro Sakurai is a veteran game designer who is now working on Kid Icarus — the first proper sequel to the NES classic — for Nintendo 3DS. When asked by CVG whether he’s felt any eye strain with the handheld, Sakurai said the issue is most pronounced when there are a lot of objects flying towards the user.

Sakurai’s solution? Focus more on movement away from the user. That’s it. Sakurai didn’t elaborate further or give any examples of how this would affect the game.

I’m not completely satisfied by the explanation. When I tried the Nintendo 3DS at E3, my most profound 3D moment happened when a dinosaur nearly popped out of the screen during a scream of rage. To hear that such moments must be used sparingly is disheartening.

But at least the explanation shows that Nintendo developers are trying to address eye strain at all. Nintendo was already burned once by the issue; the infamous Virtual Boy would actually pause and remind players to take breaks. Those who didn’t heed the advice got headaches.

Nintendo’s other eye strain solution is built into the 3DS hardware: Players can reduce or switch off the 3D effect entirely with a slider on the side of the device. Again, it’s no cure-all, but at least it will allow people to keep playing without interruption.

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Forget Hulu Plus, PlayOn Works on iPad (Sort Of)

Posted by Jared Newman on August 2, 2010 at 8:52 am

While Harry was writing a short post about PlayOn’s iPhone web app, I immediately started trying to run the streaming video service on the iPad as well. I’m happy to say that with a bit of trickery, I’m now able to watch videos from Hulu, CBS.com and more from the iPad, without paying for Hulu Plus.

To do this, you’ll need a Windows PC, the latest version of PlayOn (you can try it free for 14 days, and the paid version is much cheaper than Hulu Plus), and Atomic Web Browser, an alternative iPad browser that costs $1. You’ll also want a bit of patience, because PlayOn doesn’t officially support the iPad right now and the workaround isn’t flawless.

The trick is simple: In Atomic Web, go to “Settings,” then hit “Identify Browser As,” then select “Mobile Safari – iPhone.” This fools PlayOn’s mobile website into thinking you’re visiting from an iPhone, so it won’t redirect you back to the PlayOn homepage.

Now, run PlayOn on your computer, then visit m.playon.tv on the iPad. Press the button to connect with your PC, and you’re in. Just look at all that content!

Fair warning on some glitches: Each menu page may take a couple seconds to load, and you might stare at a black screen momentarily before videos start playing. Don’t start tapping buttons wildly, just wait it out. Also, my computer slowed down considerably and my router dropped its connection after using PlayOn’s mobile site, but I haven’t experimented enough to say whether those are one-time bugs, critical flaws or total coincidence.

I’m now seriously considering a lifetime PlayOn license (as an aside, I’m thrilled that PlayOn now offers a flat-rate alternative to its yearly subscription plan). PlayOn only works over a home network with a PC in tow, so iPhone support doesn’t really interest me, because I won’t watch video at home on such a small screen. But with iPad support, I can watch Hulu in bed, or subscribe to MLB.tv without also having to buy the $15 iPad app. Until PlayOn adds iPad support officially, or Apple approves PlayOn’s native apps, this workaround is going to be great.

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