SPENT is an online serious game that is a result of a collaboration between the ad agency McKinney and Urban Ministries of Durham, N.C. The game was launched this month to help increase community awareness about the needs of people who have been negatively impacted by the on-going economic crisis - people who have lost jobs, the under-employed, and the homeless.
The factoids provided in the game are based on data (see link below). One goal for presenting this information is to help players sift through the myths they might be carrying around in their heads about poverty and the realties that many people face every day.
The game offers players the opportunity to take on different roles, make tough decisions, and see the results of these decisions.
The July issue of IEEE Spectrum is full of articles for techies and the tech-curious. Although the cover article, The Chrystal That Will Change Everything" is intriguing, the article that caught my eyewasBuilding the Lego Universe Online, by David Kushner. Photo: Holly Lindem; LEGO Sculpture: Nathan Sawaya, in Building the Lego Universe Online, David Kushner, IEEE Spectrum, July 2010
"...unlike traditional Lego play, the online version will offer unprecedented opportunities for players to share and interact. The sprawling Lego fantasyland will be able to support more than half a million "brick heads" from around the world. Each player will start by assembling a personal Lego miniature figure to serve as his or her avatar. Players can then venture into the live Lego Universe, where forces of chaos and destruction—monsters such as the Darklings—threaten to destroy the Land of Imagination." -David Kushner
SCREENSHOT: LEGO Universe Nathan Sawaya, the artist behind the creation in the above picture of a boy and a laptop, is known for his life-size LEGO sculptures, is one of just nine LEGO Certified Professionals.
The LEGO Universe website has media resource section that includes game screenshots, videos of game-play, pictures of concept art, wallpaper downloads, and information for the press.
I've been so busy writing reports* that this almost passed me by!
I found out about 6rounds because they use Twitter as a promotional platform. I happened to notice that this company was following me and clicked on the link.
6rounds started out as an outgrowth of a speed dating website, and the application was initially designed for people to use while waiting for speed dating sessions. According to the 6rounds website FAQ's, "6rounds is a live meeting point, offering users a variety of experiences that they enjoy together using a combination of webcams, real-time games, social activities and media engagements."
Since I'm a happily married middle-aged woman, I'm not sure 6rounds is up my alley. I think social singles, college students, and others who don't mind flashing their faces through a webcam would like it.
If I had time, I might like to play around with GixOO, the opensource API that underpins 6rounds. GixOO has the potential for developers to develop games and activities. The application allows the users to track each other as they move their mice, and also enables people to see the same things as their friends as they interact online.
6rounds looks like it might provide possibilities for collaborative projects in education, but I won't be sure until I give it a try.
So what is 6rounds?
FOR THE TECH-CURIOUS
The following information was quoted from the Openomics blog from Sun Microsystem's ISV Engineering:
"6rounds is the first product built on the GixOO live social platform, initially developped on the LAMP stack. As a member of the Sun Startup Essentials program, GixOO connected with Sun's ISV Engineering team to test the scalability of their platform on SAMP --the Solaris-based AMP stack, available in an integrated and optimized package from Sun, the Sun Glassfish Web Stack f.k.a. CoolStack. At the time, we ran the benchmark on a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 server --featuring the 64-way CoolThreads processor UltraSPARC T2-- running Solaris 10 and CoolStack 1.3. GixOO loved the DTrace kernel instrumentation of Solaris 10 --DTrace gives unique insights into how the application performs, live on a production system-- and the Containers technology a.k.a. Zones --this light-weigth virtualization layer of Solaris allows multiple applications to run in isolation from each other on the same physical hardware--, and quickly adopted them for their internal use.
"At GixOO, we use Sun SPARC-based server, powered by Solaris 10 for our R&D environment. The system gives us the required flexibility and components isolation that we need. Thanks to SPARC's great SMP abilities, we achieve high performance for many development environments running on one single 1U server.
Solaris Zones are very comfortable and simple to configure, and allow the full utilization of the great power hidden in this small machine, which makes Solaris 10 an excellent choice for system administrators. We are using Sun MySQL Server which gives our application high speed data storage solution, and in the future we might migrate to the MySQL Cluster solution to get even faster results."
Dmitry Shestak, CTO, GixOO"
Somewhat Related
2/26/10: Oracle bought Sun in 2009. Here were the latest results when I did a search to get more information:
Not Really Related
*For those new to this blog, I'm a school psychologist who returned to her day job full time a year and 1/2 ago, when the economy was taking a nosedive. Before that, I was working part-time and taking computer and technology classes, initially to learn how to create interactive multimedia applications and games.
Since some of the kids and teens I work with have a range of abilities and disabilities, including autism, I developed an interest in accessibility. How can universal design principles be applied to games and emerging interactive technologies? I'm also fascinated by interactive displays and surfaces of all sizes, especially ubiquitous systems that support cognition, collaboration and communication.
One of my pet projects:
My vision? A collaborative multimedia, multi-modal interactive time-line might help us to understand complex, interrelated factors and events more effectively. It would provide an opportunity for the inquisitive to view things from a broad perspective, and also explore things in rich detail. Ideally, the time-line would support multi-touch, multi-user interaction on larger displays and interactive whiteboards, and allow for people who are remotely located to participate in the process.
Now that one of my schools will be getting a multi-touch SMARTTable, I'd like to experiment with time-line concepts and interactions on a table surface. I'd also like to figure out how this can work seamlessly with the existing SMARTBoard that is in the classroom. Of course, this would have to take place during after work hours!
I never had a chance to explore Darkstar, and I'm sad to share the news that Oracle squashed it before I had a chance to explore it. The Darkstar project was on my long list of "future" topics for this blog.
What is Project Darkstar?
"Project Darkstar is a software platform that simplifies the development of horizontally scalable servers for online games, virtual worlds, and social networking applications. Its revolutionary design will eliminate serious problems like zone overloading, data corruption, and inefficient server utilization, while enabling new dimensions of play such as evolvable virtual worlds and very large scale battlefields."
Why am I disappointed? Darkstar interested me because it could be a good tool for creating collaborative multi-player educational games that students could play at school and at home. It was up my alley, given my background as a school psychologist and fairly recent coursework (VR for education & training, online learning & communication tools, game design/development, AI for games, information visualization/communication, HCI, etc.). It was designed to help people like me "avoid the complexities of multi-threaded and distributed systems programming".
Information from the Project Darkstar website: 2/2/10: Today is a difficult day for all of us associated with Project Darkstar. Regretfully, we must inform our community members that Sun Labs engineering effort is no longer being applied to Darkstar development. You will hear from the individual engineers about what this means for them, but the organized lab project will not be moving forward... (More on the Darkstar Community Forums) Jim Waldo
Here are links to examples how Darkstar has been used to develop 3D multi-user applications, from the Darkstar application list page:
"Sorpresas Mágicas is an online educational video game developed by Proyecto Metáforas at the Universidad de Chile. Sorpresas Mágicas is a turn based game, each team (composed by 12 players) have to make a bet tryiing to guess what is inside a box.What is inside a box depends on the the properties of the box (color, width, height and length). So the users have to use statistics to discover the surprise inside the box.
Twice in a year we are running in Chile a national tournament, the last was on October 23, with more than 5000 childrens playing this game. You could get more information about our game onSorpresas Mágicas, if you want a credential to access the game feel free to ask one to the email at the bottom.
Visit us at Proyecto Metaforas.For more information, please contact (Lead Programmer) at manuel [at] metaforas cl"
'The Monkey Wrench platform delivers unprecedented levels of real-time interactivity for casual gamers as well as persistent in-game and in-world avatars, badges and achievements, and a robust virtual goods management system.'
