Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: October 19, 2010
From the Nukotoys website: Nukotoys creates virtual worlds and interconnected toys(TM) magically linking virtual and real world adventure. Founded in San Francisco in 2009 for today’s digitally sophisticated kids and their engaged parents, Nukotoys strives to be America’s next great toy company. It’s a mixture of MMORPG with card scanning and other activities. Our beautiful [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: September 18, 2010
One of the problems with the “check-in at the store to get a free X” incentive model is that mobile phone services are notoriously susceptible to fake check-ins. The heart of the problem is that inside the store the phone’s GPS system generally won’t work and network triangulation is rarely accurate enough. As a result, [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: August 13, 2010
This is a fun idea: turn your drive into a Star Wars death star attack. The X-wing targeting computer lets you know when you’re ready to destroy your target (or rather, when you’ve reached your destination): Unfortunately the Android app doesn’t seem to be out yet, but I’m going to keep looking. <ob ject width=”400″ [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: June 8, 2010
Flook is a location-based service with a fairly small userbase (apparently 50,000), but what’s interesting is that the service seems to be gaining a much stronger female than male following. According to the article on Flook in TechCrunch it’s around a 70/30 split. The idea behind Flook seems quite simple, and not far away from [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: June 1, 2010
Another piece of augmented reality fun: space invaders (of a kind) played out throw an Android device camera pointed at a picture of the earth. That’s right: you have to save the planet. As with so many of these the gameplay looks somewhat simplistic and I get the feeling we’re really only looking at a [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: May 21, 2010
The game of One-Behindmanship appealed to me: One-Behindmanship is a game of stealth manners that turns good etiquette into a competitive pursuit. The objective is simple: be the last of a group through a doorway, without anybody realising what you are doing. There is no fulfilment quite like having your fellows turn to you from [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: May 21, 2010
FarmVille is leaking out into the real world with the launch of Farm Cash rewards for buying Green Giant vegetable produce. It’s an interesting link-up: buying vegetables in the real world can help you to build your virtual farm. My first impression was: what an amazing concept. Real-world farm produce tied to virtual-world farm produce. [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: May 13, 2010
There’s the pervasive gaming version of Pac-Man, called Pac-Manhattan: Pac-Manhattan is a large-scale urban game that utilizes the New York City grid to recreate the 1980′s video game sensation Pac-Man. This analog version of Pac-man is being developed in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications graduate program, in order to explore what happens when games are removed from [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: May 12, 2010
Discussing online privacy is all the rage at the moment, largely driven by Facebook’s Open Graph and instant personalisation double-whammy, and exacerbated by security leaks in launch partners. Straightforward security bugs aside, it’s hard to disagree with some of Mark Zuckerberg’s ideas that sharing personal info online is becoming more, not less, acceptable to the [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: May 10, 2010
Some fun examples of digital games leaking into the real world: Gigaputt Gigaputt for the iPhone “transforms your neighborhood into an exciting 3-hole mini-golf course, complete with popping manholes, treacherous fire hydrants, and giant coins.” Metaio “Natural Feature Tracking” Augmented reality with a cameraphone, without the geometric pattern to focus on that most other examples [...]
