Elements to Find a City to Live in

Instead of adding up 300 datapoints about places, and coming up with a list of ‘most livable’ cities, Chris Heathcote gives two elements that he thinks reveal a lot about a city, plus a few niceties: Is there good street food? Are there gates on the public transport? I would add the number of dogs per citizen as a clear negative factor. In thriving cities, people are too socialy active and can’t afford time on taking care of slave pets. Besides, I think living in a single city is not enough for creative people. I believe in commuting between two well-connected thriving cities.

Pervasive Games: Juegos Sin Límite

En Pervasive Games: juegos sin límite, José Ramón Vega describe el mundo de los Pervasive Games. Escribe “Hasta el momento este tipo de juegos se ha estudiado más desde el punto de vista universitario y ponceptual, pero existe ya una masa crítica de desarrolladores que han realizado durante los tres últimos años pruebas de concepto, prototipos e incluso experiencias comerciales.

Solutions to Present Complex Information on a Small Screen

Mobile interface designers have a challenging job. They deal with increases in speed and information density, when they are stuck with the same little screen and resolution they had two or three years ago? In Zooming in on Legibility Mark Frauenfelder mentions 2 current solutions:

• Summary thumbnails: It is a mobile browser that renders pages as thumbnails, but keeps the text large enough to read. It achieves this by displaying readable text fragments
• Collapse-to-zoom: allows users to use their stylus to draw lines across areas on a thumbnail display of a Web page to either zoom into desired content or collapse unwanted content.

Casual Games are the Only Lucrative Mobile Games

David Collier also reports from GDC 2005 in Global Mobile Games: New Business Models, Hit Games, and Mobile People from Around the Planet. According to him, for a mobile games must be “desperately simple” to sell to its full potential because they stand out to people who would never, under normal circumstances, think of playing a videogame. However, mobile games have yet to find their real application, and most games for the platform are just ports of established console or handheld ideas; they aren’t really based on the intrinsic character of the mobile platform. There are complains that carriers do not give developers more freedom to push the envelope, to develop less “safe” games. He concludes with a deadlock situation game development is (need more advanced hardware, but users see little reasons to upgrade):

Only the most casual of games will sell widely enough to make money; only the lowest common denominator of games, technologically, will sell widely enough to get money . Until the baseline of hardware is more advanced, few games will really take advantage of the platform; yet users see little reason to upgrade to more advanced hardware, since in the end it’s just a telephone.

Maturing Mobile Game Scene

Justin Hall reports on the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) and the maturation of the mobile-phone gaming scene. He writes “Mobile games had a stronger presence than ever at the Game Developer’s Conference, but hopefully, innovation will continue in spite of this legitimacy.” and calculate the degree of opportunity by the “Long-haired game developers to blue button-down shirts” ratio.

There were demonstration of second-generation location-based games, including BotFighters 2 and UnderCover 2 — both of which promised urban Europeans the chance to play against real people arrayed in cities and on computers tracking objects and people across locations. He finishes with optimism and hopes for mobile game developers:

Diverse business models and mobile phone games incorporated with buddy lists and location-based technologies — there’s plenty of room for innovation in the mobile industry. Developing methods for mobile marketing, and establishing a benchmark for basic multiplayer are both positive signs from this year’s conference.

The mobile phone as a medium for games still has technology limits to push — 3D graphics, audio processing. Hopefully the markets and mindsets will evolve as fast as the handset technology, giving game developers a broader platform for innovation.

Pervasive Game Development Today

My article Pervasive Game Development Today has been published in Mobile Game Developer:

Fabien Girardin from EPFL provides an overview of the pervasive gaming world, introducing positioning techniques and gives examples from the development of CatchBob!, a multi-user locative mobile game.

Map-based Visualization of NNTP Newsgroups (bis)

More on Map-based Visualization of NNTP Newsgroups:

Tangible Benefits from Having Locative Media in my Daily Life?

In honey I geotagged the kids, Douglas Rushkoff talks about cartography becoming a read/write medium and mentions a couple of ongoing projects in the locative media world. He mentions the reluctance of the mobile phone industry to offer location lookups. Most importantly he finishes his article by questioning the usability and usefulness to the user of locative applications:

Although to a wireless enthusiast like me, the possibility of locative media feels positively revolutionary, there are still too few tangible benefits to be gained from having locative media in the daily lives of most people.

GPSter:Locative

People at GPSter have locative projects based on Place Lab including Where-Fi and locod. Too bad they do not show real outcomes of these projects. Talk about their usage.

ETHGame

ETHGame is a knowledge pervasive game that could have been developed for the ETHZ 150th anniversary.