Tag Archives: science

Another day, another amazing use for Kinect which has almost nothing to do with games. According to a report in New Scientist, Microsoft’s motion control tech is being used at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development, to help identify early signs of autism in young children. Five Kinects places around the room feed into one processing unit, which keeps track of a room full of kiddies and looks for those showing behaviour which deviates from the average activity level of the room. Wow. It is okay to be frightened.

Thanks, Eurogamer.

Rsearchers have noted a correlation between playing violent action games and being a smart cookie.

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You didn’t think we’d let you get out of here for the weekend without another shorts post did you? What do you take us for? Some sort of benign entity with your best interest at heart? We scoff at you.

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Gamers have once more come through for science, helping to spot what may be two previously unidentified planets outside the solar system.

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Thanks to spatial reasoning skills and a competitive gaming program called Foldit, gamers have helped scientists produce an online model of a retrovirus protein which could help design a new AIDS drug.

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It’s Good Friday. It’s especially good if you got the day off to celebrate Jesus and bunnies and stuff. Here’s some shorts to make it even more of a good Friday.

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Canada’s National Post newspaper has reported the findings of a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The Post carried the headline “Videogames make you eat more”, further on in the article it added that watching TV and working at a computer have the same effect.

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Microsoft researchers have figured out a way to potentially reduce lag and improve accuracy in Kinect’s sensor.

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PlayStation Network’s Folding@Home service is undoubtedly cool, but a little browser-based puzzle game called EteRNA just blew it out – of – the – water. Not only is it an actual game instead of an application which bricks your console for upwards of an hour, it also offers you the genuine opportunity to make an important scientific breakthrough and change the world.

This shit is bananas.

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Matt Richtel, a blogger for The New York Times, recently took part in a University of California study which took an MRI of his brain while he played a racing videogame to determine his brain’s ability to multitask.

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Speaking here, Lionhead chief Peter Molyneux has said that whilst experimenting with Dimitri’s AI – a project that now sounds unlikely to ever be released – his team made a discovery that will see a brand new game, already six months in the making, ending up on the cover of Nature and Science.

“Since Black & White, we’ve been thinking a lot about AI,” he said. “Lionhead was founded with that thought of AI in mind. In terms of the core or the theory of the AI, we’ve moved from Black & White onto a project called Dimitri, which I’ve been tantalising you about for a long time. And that team kept on researching. Dimitri was always an experimental thing, which is why I never showed it.

“And then it moved from that experiment to a moment in time that happened six months ago when a discovery was made, and this discovery has been so exciting that it has lead to Lionhead focusing on it and sculpting a game around that. I think that discovery is so significant. This discovery has lead us to start a game and that game will be on the front cover of Nature magazines and Science magazines.”

That’s your lot, however, as it appears Peter’s finally be reined in on the “motor-mouth” front by Microsoft.

“I’m saying absolutely nothing. I’ve been sat down in a room by the head of PR [of Microsoft Games] and been told to not talk about it,” he said.

By Mike Bowden

A scientist asked to come up with a “dangerous idea” has hypothesised that the reason alien species haven’t managed to reach earth is because they’re all doing what we’re doing: wasting our lives achieving nothing.

“Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up,” said Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, in the annual The Best American Nonrequired Reading book. “They just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it themselves, just as we are doing today.”

Read it all here. It’s awesome.

“When they finally achieve Contact, it will not be a meeting of novel-readers and game-players. It will be a meeting of dead-serious super-parents who congratulate each other on surviving not just the Bomb, but the Xbox. They will toast each other not in a soft-porn Holodeck, but in a sacred nursery.”

Spot of WoW, anyone?