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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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Because augmented reality glasses should probably be for those who actually need them, researches continue developing more economical solutions for suffers of debilitating strokes and spinal-cord injuries, Engadget reports. These glasses track eye movement with $35 worth of parts. The tracker works
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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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As early as 1992, games were mapping human faces onto screens. Mortal Kombat was one of these games, and its first actor was Daniel Pesina. Verge has the story of how one game design student ran into Pesina accidentally as he was teaching martial arts. The gracious game actor agreed whole-heartedly
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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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A feature in yesterday’s NY Times charts the tale of an amateur baller who found his way to Brooklyn from Florida via Portland, seeking “the city’s mythical ownership of pickup basketball.” Intent on discovering the “city’s truths” in basketball, Isaac Eger found out how to take a hit, dance around
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In his review of the pseudo-subversive Spec Ops: The Line for Grantland, famed game writer Tom Bissell lists 13 potential reasons why we play a genre of games whose volume of violence surpasses that of most mediums up to this point. From passages to personal stories to jotted notes, the review is as
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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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We gathered the sounds of our favorite monsters in Diablo III and had sound designers Joseph Lawrence, Michael Johnson, and Kris Giampa explain the unusual ingredients in each of them to us. Read the full feature by Yannick LeJacq for more. The festering maggots in the Witch Doctor’s “Grasp of the
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Beyond videogames, simulacrum, shady politics, and even the best watch-dog journalism, independent filmmaker Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer) wants us to realize drones as the synecdoche of present civilization. In a recent interview with the senior editor of New Inquiry, Rivera waxes polemic about how th
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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