May 3, 2011
May 2, 2011
Convergence culture just around the corner...
As we read in Henry Jenkin's book, convergence culture involves shifting the way content consumers interact with content producers. We see the effects of convergence culture all of the time, nowadays. For instance, Jennie described in her report how Justin Bieber's stardom began as a video on YouTube. His clip caught people's attention, and eventually brought him across a table from Usher. This chain of events was not possible in the world of old media, and exemplifies how culture is changing. Jenkins also referred to blogs and their impact on the changing landscape of media. One of my good friends follows a gamer's blog called Kotaku. As an electrical engineering student, he is working on a senior design project with a couple of other group members. I was chatting with him recently and I found out that his group's project was featured on the Kotaku site. It's a short article, so I've gone ahead and included it here:
After congratulating my buddy, I asked him a few questions about the article. It turns out he has no clue how Kotaku got wind of their project. He thinks it may have been through the YouTube videos his group uploaded of their demos. The writer cites this page, but it's not clear what their sources are either.
Furthermore, the article has quotes from their group, but my friend isn't sure who they spoke to. He suspects it was one of his group members, but he's been too busy to seek it out.
I think this exposes some of the pros and cons of convergence culture. Information can travel quickly, and unprecedented interactions can take place. For example, one person comments, "Very impressive especially if it really is just a usb camera, my first call would be to Sony..." Another Kotaku reader points out that "[t]hey had motion tracking with just a usb camera and software, effectively killing the main selling point of Kinect" and he suggests "if they had business smarts, they should be shopping this software around to different companies." On the flip side, there's a reliability issue (as Jenkins mentions is his discussion of collective intelligence). My friend, who was one of the two programmers for this project, has no idea where Kotaku obtained their information. This calls into question the validity of Kotaku's other blog posts, and blog posts in general. How do we maintain reliability within convergence culture?
Here’s How You Handle Looking and Turning in a Motion-Control FPS
Owen Good — Head- and eye-tracking will be the next big breakthrough in motion-controlled gaming. Forza Motorsport 4 will deliver it via Kinect. But for first-person shooters, we're still stuck controlling our look with our arms, an act as unnatural as it is inconvenient. Some University of Texas students have whipped up a solution for that.
This concept placed third at UT's electrical and computer engineering senior design competition. Using a webcam, some custom software for the head-tracking, and a motorized pico-projector, you get this - a video gaming perspective that changes as you change yours.
The design team (two software engineers, one power systems engineer) demonstrated their creation with a flight sim and a military FPS. "In the FPS, your head was the in-game player's head. When you look right, the in-game player looks right, and the projector pan/tilts to where you're looking," they write. "It's almost like you're in the game!"
That sounds fantastic, but I'm not so sure about this part: "In the flight sim, you used your head as essentially a joystick to control pitch and roll angles." While intriguing, and certainly a proof of concept, that seems to me to be the inverse of the current head-look problem in motion control shooters.
"Ideally, we would have more money (we are students, after all) to get more powerful motors, a dome-like projection screen, and the best possible pico projector for the best resolution," they say. I think some developer or console manufacturer should get in touch with these guys. After they build that, maybe they'll discover something about delivering this on a consumer scale.
After congratulating my buddy, I asked him a few questions about the article. It turns out he has no clue how Kotaku got wind of their project. He thinks it may have been through the YouTube videos his group uploaded of their demos. The writer cites this page, but it's not clear what their sources are either.
Furthermore, the article has quotes from their group, but my friend isn't sure who they spoke to. He suspects it was one of his group members, but he's been too busy to seek it out.
I think this exposes some of the pros and cons of convergence culture. Information can travel quickly, and unprecedented interactions can take place. For example, one person comments, "Very impressive especially if it really is just a usb camera, my first call would be to Sony..." Another Kotaku reader points out that "[t]hey had motion tracking with just a usb camera and software, effectively killing the main selling point of Kinect" and he suggests "if they had business smarts, they should be shopping this software around to different companies." On the flip side, there's a reliability issue (as Jenkins mentions is his discussion of collective intelligence). My friend, who was one of the two programmers for this project, has no idea where Kotaku obtained their information. This calls into question the validity of Kotaku's other blog posts, and blog posts in general. How do we maintain reliability within convergence culture?
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