In a project aimed at exploring the evolving face of communication, networking, and shared tasks, DARPA is marking the 40th anniversary of the Internet with a team-building challenge hoping to inspire organization and coordination of groups throughout the continental United States.

Nintendo DSi’s upcoming title, Ghostwire, uses the embedded microphone and camera to augment reality.

Internet Eyes is an online service that opens up access to closed-circuit cameras to the public, awarding cash prizes up to £1,000 each month to the users who catch the most crooks.

Playstation3 game Uncharted 2: Among Thieves will feature Twitter integration.

A partnership between Google and Monopoly will turn the whole globe into an interactive game.

At PSFK Conference NYC, Celestine Arnold gave an eye-opening talk on the “Ghost in the Machine: Digital Multiculture.” Celestine discussed the role of race and culture in video games – and the gaming industry’s failure to address (and successfully market towards) it. While minorities make up a disproportionately large percentage of the gaming community, most games cater to an assumed mainstream (white, male) player….

‘Assassins Creed 2’ is the highly anticipated sequel to ‘Assassins Creed’ due to be released by Ubisoft later on this year. Games developers at Ubisoft, keen to be at the forefront of their field, have employed the use of Augmented Reality (AR) in a teaser trailer, viewable here. We’ve discussed AR before, a category of visual design/gaming that cleverly combines elements of real-world and computer-generated graphics to display a scene or scenario in real time with incredible accuracy. The teaser website employs the use of Magic-Symbol technology, designed in-house by the Ubisoft team, inspired by existing Magic-Symbol software. Magic-symbol is [...]

The “Oh No Banjo” exhibit has to be one of the cooler bits we’ve seen from the Game Developers Conference currently underway. The showcase featured the work of students who participated in the “Alternative Controllers Seminar” at Rochester Institute of Technology last semester. They created this modified play instrument by taking a guitar game-controller and building a true to form banjo around it. They even wrote custom software and musical arrangements to go with it (making it even more “Banjo Hero” ready). Another final project from the seminar was the “deformable surface controller”, which gives game players the ability to [...]

We’re looking forward to having Celestine Arnold, creative strategy consultant, join us at our upcoming PSFK Conference NYC 2009. Celestine will be speaking on the changing face of race in gaming, virtual worlds and social networks.
First, who are you and what do you do?
My name is Celestine Arnold and I’m a creative strategy consultant to brands and agencies. I generally work in the gaming, social media and digital spheres, but have worked across all types of industries. I find it is nice to mix it up a bit.
In one paragraph, can you explain what themes and ideas you hope to [...]

While search engines have come a long way at effectively locating what we’re looking for, they generally lack the intuition and subjectivity of a human mind.  For instance, a computer should have no problem finding scores of pictures of women, but distinguishing which ones are beautiful is a whole other thing.
In an attempt to give computers an aesthetic sensibility, Luis von Ahn, a professor at Carnegie Mellon has developed a technique for ‘teaching’ computers to be more like humans. Based on the same principles as a Captcha, those distored words you are asked to type that ward off spammers (a [...]

Core77 points us to this video from Kyle Downes, a recent graduate from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. put together this animated 3D piece as part of his motion graphics portfolio. The piece covers the history of videogame consoles from 1972 when Ralph Baer invented the Odyssey to the launch of the current generation of consoles and beyond.

Kyle Downes Blog

If you walk into any Internet bar in China, you are sure to see a large number of the screens filled with scenes from the extremely popular MMORPG World of Warcraft (WoW).  The game has attracted over 1 million peak concurrent users in China and makes up more than 90 percent of the earnings for The9, the game’s China licensee.
Given the games popularity, an entrepreneur has opened a WoW-themed restaurant in Beijing to cater to its considerable number of fans.  The entrance is a re-creation of the opening animation from the game, walls are covered with WoW images and replica [...]

As GPS enabled devices continue to evolve, we expect the trend of online applications that engage us in unique ways with our actual physical environments to continue developing increasingly novel uses for our lives.  One of the obvious ways is through play.  We’ve previously written about Parallel Kingdom, a location based game where users’ real world wanderings correspond to in-game movements. More recently we came upon Turf Bombing, a game that forms players into loosely associated “gangs” through shared zip codes, and whoseultimate goal is to control the most territory. Participants complete these tasks by exploring different neighborhoods, cities and even countries [...]