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In order to study our inner motivations for punishing one another, researchers used a series of games that allowed players to cheat. Each version of the game differed slightly in the amount of money that players could steal from each other. What they found wasn’t unpredictable by any means but inter
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No, this is not a video from Deus Ex—though it certainly looks and sounds like one to me. Scientists from the US, UK, and Israel have developed a minimally invasive procedure to implant a chip that restores vision to people suffering from macular degeneration. ‘Bio-Retina incorporates various nano-
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Big things come in small packages, they say. And as it turns out, toymaker littleBits won’t be so little for much longer. They’ve just secured $3.65 million in funding and will soon be ramping up production. The toys are as easy to assemble as Legos—but as sophisticated as you would expect from the
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Research earlier this year from the Advanced Virtuality Lab at the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel demonstrated that it is possible to control a virtual or robotic avatar with only your mind. While EEG human-computer interaction—like Emotiv—as well as eye-tracking and neural implants have been in
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NASA has just released a new game for the Xbox 360 that lets you simulate a landing on the Martian surface—the same landing that the Mars Rover ‘Curiosity’ will be making early next month. It may seem strange to hear that NASA is in the videogame business, but it’s not all that surprising. In fact,
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As if it weren’t clear by now, we love talking about gender and race issues in videogames. Recently, people like Anita Sarkeesian have shown us that the greater gaming community is simultaneously willing and unwilling to discuss these issues seriously. In addition to all the sideline commentary, th
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If you’re looking for a fun project to put together, check out this programmable music game that will test your ear. Spikenzie Labs’ latest kit, the Music Game, is a great beginning soldering project that’s also fun (and addicting) to play. Solder up the components, then challenge yourself to press
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The CERN lab in Geneva, Switzerland, has been alight the past few weeks with news of the Higgs boson, which has captivated and confused millions of people around the world. Little attention has been given to the artistic side of this scientific discovery, though. In order to comb through all the dat
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You probably already associate colors, letters, and numbers more than you realize. When you were a child, you learned that A is a red apple and C is a yellow cat. If you were weird when you were a child, like me, you might have imagined backstories and personalities for your alphanumeric friends. Th
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Humor is poorly understood—and frequently misunderstood. Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor for The New Yorker, posted an article yesterday that touched upon play and humor. And that episode of Seinfeld. Whether we find a comic funny or not, he says, is determined by the degree and nuance with which th
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Motion-sensing gloves—like the ones from Minority Report—may have finally found a practical use at this year’s Imagine Cup, Microsoft’s annual student competition. The first prize went to a group of Ukrainian students who have been engineering a new kind of glove that interprets and verbalizes sign
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This new music video for electronic duo MNDR is an interesting concept—it’s about you. The interactive video serves to reimagine music in the same vein as our own Soundplay features over at Pitchfork. Rather than using a game, though, the directors at Fourclops have crafted the narrative of the vide