Is there a way to harness the popularity of multiplayer online gamers to save energy in the real world ?  Professor Byron Reeves, a media expert at Stanford University, thinks there is.  The scenario that Reeves imagines is that a player would get in-game feedback from a smart meter which tracks energy usage throughout the player’s house in order to reward the player online.  For example, if you turn off a light in an unused room, your house’s smart meter recognizes this and your online player is rewarded accordingly.
The trick is making sure that the game designers find a fun [...]

The Stanford University Center for Computer Research, who have given us the wonderful and very future forward Stanford Laptop Orchestra have organized another unusual tech-musical group called the MoPhO, or Mobile Phone Orchestra. Members of the group create “meta-instruments” out of mobile phones using the unique hardware built into mobile devices (keypads, accelerometers touchscreens and microphones) as the interface to control music. Though almost unclassifiable, MoPhO’s compositions are versatile, existing in a haunting and beautiful stylistic mix of ambient, noise and chiptune. We’ve seen many great examples of music making on phones before, but perhaps never in such a refined, [...]