It’s no retina scan, but with the new Android OS, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich, all you need is a good look to unlock your data-treasure chest of a phone. The New York Times reports: This comes under the general heading of “biometrics,” a highfalutin way of saying the phone has the ability to recogn
Variety is reporting that the next Batman from Rocksteady, makers of the Arkham series, is going back to the chromatic ’50s. New, highly stylized title is being developed as a prequel that revolves around Batman’s first meeting with the Joker. It’s based on the Silver Age of DC’s comicbooks from th
The ideal scientist is addicted to research. But when time is of the essence, crowdsourcing with games of pattern-finding in a real world context has proved an efficient way to get the world to do research for you. Following suit, Britain’s Wellcome Trust, a global charity for the advancement of bi
It’s been confirmed that Trent Reznor has composed the theme song for Call of Duty: Black Ops II, a game set in the future where the U.S. is in a cold war with China, which will surely heat up, considering fans would probably be disappointed with a game of ceasefire. Whether Reznor was inspired by d
Kill Screen columnist Michelle Young, on her way through Rio De Janero to study the legalization of street art, took a moment in Terra Encantada, another abandon amusment park whose play crossed the line into death. She took the full story to Untapped Cities. By now, you might be used to seeing aban
If you dream of walking across the words of a poem as you read them, building maps of metaphor that you play in your head, see how New York poet Jon Cotner willled this into realtiy with the work of a Japanese master of the haiku. We’re Floating is a new interactive walk designed by artist and poet
Because not everyone can fulfill their childhood dream of being left completely alone in an empty city with a really fast, agile car, we have people like Ken Block—the man behind the wheel of this rally car who shut down entire streets of San Francisco for what looks like the loneliest, best joyride
Wired‘s senior editor, Adam Rogers, loves postapocalyptic science fiction—not for the allure of eschatology, but because he thinks these stories are imminent. As he says in the video, we need “not stories set 20 years in the future, but to quote Max Headroom, 20 minutes in the future.” What used to
The iconic pixel camo—or the Universal Camouflage Pattern—of our war-torn 2000s is on its way out. As told by Daniel Engber at Slate, the great digital experiment by the U.S. Army is a long story of high-fashion and high-hypothesis. If it never made sense to you either, don’t worry—the theory behind
New York City’s Governors’ Island has become a slate for designing the park that revolutionizes the collective concept of playgrounds and parks. For many decades the design psychology has been one of paranoia and protection, as we explored in Yannick Lejacq’s history and future of New York City play
The best real-time-strategy players are like orchestra conducters—they lead multivalent campaigns for what can be hours without pause. But what happens when you change their best-loved instrument for conducting with a supposedly user-friendly arrangement? Reactions amount to a resounding “meh.” Enga
In a rare instance of a company wielding the power of the ending, Blizzard suggests Diablo III players maybe get up and go outside while they take some time to figure out how to get you to keep playing. But games are especially hard to quit, if it’s indeed a game we enjoy. So how do we take it when
Looks like biology is still our ideal model for technology, as these builders take a step back to try and replicate the complexity of the world instead of simplify it. From Wired: The research, published today in the Journal of Neuroengineering by researchers from the University of Arizona, could he
Franciose Gamma, Soul w/ Contour Barcelona-based Franciose Gamma’s synthetic treatment of human form is more like Rodin than what some call, vaguely, contemporary net-art. Subsumed by currents both transcendent and excrutiating, the figures combusted offscreen for the first time in his recent galler
For nearly twenty years, French cosmetics empire L’Oreal has apparently been using a game to recruit the employee who can shoot their brand into the next dimension. Perhaps to no one’s surprise, the game called Brandstorm (bold added for clarity, pizzazz) is great at naming winners, applicants who c
What’s unique to the audience of the videogame medium is that there’s a medium within the medium: the hand. Games revolutionize how we interact, and tools revolutionize the world. Or this is how Freeman Dyson, treasured (and lambasted) 88-year-old physicist and mathematician at Princeton (who’s been
Biochemistry is one field where the gamification trend is actually amazing its community and allowing real-world discovery. Scientists and players have used these games to discover how human cells work at their core structure, and how we might build our own to better fight disease like cancer and HI
The social network for kids once described as an “Orwellian dystopia” for vigilantly monitoring the language used between its users, Club Penguin is extending its children’s online-safety crusade by donating millions worth of space in TV, print, and web slots to third-party child safety campaigns, a
Game publishers are exercising new, cruel methods to get you to keep playing their games. Not only a nefarious metaphor for money, “energy” perverts the exchange economy that was once an unspoken agreement between games and their designers. The balance is tilting upward. Over at Hookshot Inc., Simon
video WIth the help of their Indiegogo campaign, the documentarians of From Bedrooms to Billions promise to tell the untold story of the Britsh videogames industry, and ultimately help to bridge a gap between traditional broadcast and videogames. “It’s a story that really hasn’t been told,” Caulfie
Frank Partnoy, author of Wait: The Art and Science of Delay used be an investment banker—a career whose pillars of spontaneity, risk, and unchecked ambition loom over the so called failures of hesitation, procrastination, and delay. Then he stopped to write the inverse. With semantics and science, P
Common to gamers and early internet users, the favorite pastime fantasy of totally faking your identity online actually used to be illegal in Rhode Island. But that changed last month, according to Ars Technica. Rhode Island state law makers voted this month to repeal an obscure 1989 law that forbid
Because it does seem a little redundant to workout on machines indoors, more and more playgrounds for adults—which is just a more exiciting way to say outdoor gym—are appearing across the country, according to The New York Times. It remains uncertain from the pictures whether the adults have engaged
video Before Unicode became the vernacular of 2000s internet subculture, 1995’s Text Fighter for Apple II used CGI text to animate a story and make a seemingly sound fighting game. (Warning: Turn volume down to survive infinitesimally compressed, ear-splitting 8-bit soundtrack.) [via Text Mode]
Spin reduces record reviews to tweet-length, and Johann Hari at GQ wants us to revaluate what critics mean to us—and how much they mean to us. When something new and startling comes along, it often baffles us, and we are tempted to drop it, pained, for easier cultural lifting. A great critic can he
