My brief history of robots

Have a look at this with the notes pages on slideshare – that has the relevant information.

Mission to Mars

Mars 500 is a Russian experiment due to start in the final quarter of this year, to simulate conditions on a trip to the red planet.  Basically they’ve locked 6 scientists together in a tube for 520 days.  The logic is that it will 250 days to get there, 240 to get back and they’ll spend 30 days on the planet itself.

The volunteers (that’s right volunteers) will have no contact with the outside world except email to mission control, which operates with a 20 minute delay.  They have no shower, instead they will have a sauna-like cupboard here they can scrape dirt off with a napkin.  All food is based on what’s available on the International Space Station – so pretty limited on the diet stakes.

Then during the 30 day landing simulation the cosmonauts (terranauts if they’re not leaving Earth?) will be subjected to antiorthostatic hypokinesia- the practice of sleeping with one’s head lower than the body by about 6 to 8 degrees – to simulate weightlessness.

When I started reading about this, I was partly excited, as ever, about more research into space travel; and partly I was furious that they haven’t put web cams in this thing.  This is the harshest reality show never made.  6 super-intelligent, hungry, sleep deprived, stinking people locked in a metal tube -bring it on!

Consider what happened during the Marsolet Experiment, a 110 day simulation: Dr Lapierre a female Canadian volunteer got assaulted (one of the other cosmonauts forced a french kiss on her)  and two of the Russian cosmonauts had a fight so violent that blood was splattered on the walls of the simulation capsule. 

Come to think of it, it’s also a good set up for a low-budget horror film.

Radio Batman

Spurred on by a visit to see The Dark Knight (yes Heath Ledger’s excellent, yes it’s a bit too long, yes, it’s still pretty damn good), I went web-searching for a memory from my youth: a serial of Batman radio plays broadcast on Radio 1 in 5 minute installments.

The plays I remember were a dramatisation of Batman: Knightfall produced by Dirk Maggs in 1994.  Turns out Maggs is a bit of a radio legend.  He produced the original series of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as well as Spider-Man and Superman serials.

I couldn’t find Knightfall anywhere online, although it is available for sale on CD.  However, I did find Batman: The Lazarus Syndrome a ’docu-drama’ that Maggs produced in 1989 for Radio 4 to celebrate the 50th aniversary of the Dark Knight.  It’s got a great cast, including Michael Gough as Alfred, and a structure a bit reminiscent of Citizen Kane.  All in all it’s pretty quirky, and after Chris Nolan’s brooding verisimilitude, it feels verycomic booky -but it’s also great fun, so enjoy.

The Future of Gameshows

At E3 last month Xbox announced plans to reposition Xbox Live as a friendlier, more social gaming platform. No surprise there then, Wii and Playstation have been raking in cash with social play brands like Big Brain Academy and Buzz.

However, buried between the announcements of Singstar and Rock Band knock offs was a genuine innovation in interactive TV. Xbox Live Primetime is a new ‘channel’ devoted to gameshows, and the star of the show is a massively multiplayer version of Endemol’s 1 vs. 100.

For years the idea of interactive quiz shows has been one of those holy grails of multiplatform TV development that has never really been cracked. The red button has never really been fast or reliable enough. InTime Media has potential, but getting people to download a mobile client is a massive barrier to entry. Webcams aren’t high quality enough for general viewers to accept on TV. Call TV was obviously a big con.  In fact the best example of an interactive TV quiz format I’ve seen so far is on We Dig TV – which feels more like an iDVD than anything else.

So congratulations to Endemol for recognising the power of multiplayer gaming and Xbox Live’s 12 million users. That’s a much better market penetration than a lot of cable channels. Now you really can play the gameshow – and stand a chance of winning big prizes – from the comfort of your living room.

Likewise, well done to Microsoft. The idea of a large scale interactive network, scheduled like a TV station (part of the plan for Primetime) will have TV execs, gameshow developers and format scouts the world over salivating.  Especially if there’s a chance of monetising it (hateful phrase).  As multiplayer gaming obviously suits elmination formats best, I expect there’s an international sales team dusting off The Weakest Link, 15 to 1 and Deal or No Deal as I type this.

But it’s exciting.  In TV terms, this is as big a step towards true convergance as we’ve ever had.

Is the iPhone the new Gizmondo?

I’ve been thinking about buying an iPhone (yes, I’m late to the party, but then again I’ve only just started blogging which is sooo 2005) and looking at its specifications it brought to mind another smart handheld device – the Gizmondo.

For those of you who don’t remember, or simply missed it, the Gizmondo was a short lived handheld game device released in the wake of the PSP and DS in February 2006. It had built-in GPS, could play MP3s and video, had a comparatively weak camera, and perhaps most impressively had games that you could play by tilting the handset. Instead of an accelerometer, the Gizmondo used its camera to register movement. For a brief period there was a rumour that this no-mark console would have a version of Halo where players controlled the FPS camera by moving the handset – an idea that is now coming to iPhone with a port of Bioshock.

Of course the Gizmondo never took off partly because despite its many features, it was a bit rubbish and mostly because it turned out to be a front for the Swedish mafia – which is one of the great new-media scandals of recent years.

The iPhone, I think it’s safe to say, has taken off, and I’m really interested in game uses for its accelerometer.  Monkeyball is probably the most famous example so far, but there are some other, smaller, but no less cool apps emerging.

Researching yesterday’s post I found mention on American McGee’s blog of a cool slashing game to promote the serial killer drama Dexter.

Over on Knitware they’ve been admiring Carling’s iPint game.

And for the extra geeky there’s always the phonesaber

I’m looking forward to someone building a Wii-esque multiplayer tennis game that I can play with all my iPhoney friends.  When I buy one of course.  In 2010.

Episodic Games

At work I’ve been looking at episodic game narratives.  This is important to me because I work with TV properties, and the idea of making something ‘appointment to play’ means you can tie game episodes to broadcast schedules.  Looking at the model, I’d always thought there was something fundamentally ‘anti-web’ about it – getting people to engage as an event rather than having the option to do what they like on demand.

However, turns out I’m not the only one experimenting with weekly play.  Gametap is a free / subscription based online games portal. You can play for free or sign up for premium games.  They serialize games.

They’re currently running a game called ‘American McGee’s Grimm’ which is an action platformer being released in 6 instalments designed to last for about 30 mins.  American McGee is a bit of a games legend – he worked on Doom and has since had hits with ‘Alice’ a particularly twisted take on Alice in Wonderland and Scrapland – a beautiful robotic noir game. 

Somehow I love the idea of this now – it reminds of Charles Dickens serialising his novels.

 

 

Machinima

Machinima (using games and game engines to make films) has been one of the many next big things in waiting for at least 3 years. 

I certainly remember doing a short documentary VT on the phenomenon in early 2005.  To be honest, in that time not a lot has changed.  The major machinima successes are still Roosterteeth’s Red vs. Blue and Strangerhood.  Other notable machinima achievements include the Dutch company Submarine getting their film My Second Life picked up by HBO earlier this year.

The problem is that game engines still don’t spit out real animation.  Machinima in many ways has more in common with puppeteering than frame by frame animating.  You control figures within a landscape and place cameras around their action, but you’re always working within the confines of the game’s graphics and physics.  It’s hard to give characters a soul when all their movements are governed by algorithms.  It all starts looking a little uniform.

Having said all that Moviestorm is a great tool.  If you’re a young director without big budgets and equipment, you can really experiment with this program, getting camera angles and editing just right.  It might not make for really engaging animated storytelling, but it’s excellent for pre-vis or even just getting experience matching scripts with pictures.  Download some radio plays and have some fun.

If you want to find out more about Machinima in general, check out The Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences.  They have examples of different work, festivals and range of alternative machinima engines.

Meanwhile, enjoy Red vs. Blue’s guide to the internet vs. real life:

SPACE!

It’s NASA’s fiftieth birthday this week.  Can’t let that go by without comment.  NASA put men on the moon.  12 of them*.  Which is still incredible to me.  I know space exploration is expensive, ecologically unsound and potentially dangerous, but C’MON IT’S SPACE! WITH ROCKETS! As you can see, my objectivity goes out of the window.  As well as the moonwalkers, NASA has given us the Hubble telescope, satellites (therefore Google Earth, Sky TV), and this year a new probe on Mars.  All cool stuff.  But it’s the men in rockets that get me.  The vainglorious bravery of it.  The Apollo rockets had 6 million working parts.  Scientists predicted 99.9% of them would work fine.  Leaving just 6000 things to go wrong.  If you’re interested in what affect touching another world had on the Apollo astronauts, check out Andrew Smith’s Moondust.

While I’m praising NASA, others are trying to bury them.  I doubt that it’s any coincidence that Virgin Galactic chose this week to unveil EVE- their new mothership.  For the first time space travel is within reach of private citizens, albeit private citizens with vast personal fortunes.  It’s hugely expensive now, but perhaps within my lifetime the price will go down enough for me to give it a try. 

Burt Rutan is the man who made commercial space travel a possibility.  He’s a genius.  SpaceShipOne is a beautiful, elegant machine, and I can’t wait to see SpaceShipTwo.  The thing that gets me is that he beats himself up for not thinking of the design sooner: ‘If only I came up with this in the 70s, we’d be on Mars by now.’

For any Space geeks out there without £100k to spare, check out Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope.  It’s Google Earth for space – stitching together images from Hubble and other telescopes so you can explore the cosmos from your own desk. 

SpaceShipOne

* 11 out of 12 of the men who walked on the moon were scouts in their youth.  Maybe Baden-Powell was on to something.

TV on the web / web on TV

Interesting times in online video.  According to NMA, 28% of Europeans regularly watch online video, which makes this now the most popular online activity.  With that in mind, here are some thoughts and notes on that theme:

iPlayer and Roly Keating:

iPlayer is obviously a big part of the VOD revolution in the UK andthe BBC is looking into ever-more ways of exploiting its back catalogue of video content online.  Last week Roly ‘channels will only disappear if we let them’ Keating was appointed Director of Archive with responsibility for all catch up and archive content on iPlayer.  I initially thought that he was being promoted into obscurity, but actually this is an important role. 

The beeb is gradually moving video content to the very centre of its web strategy.  The written content and applications currently on bbc.co.uk will gradually be phased out in favour of archive VOD as they aim for a kind of video encyclopedia.

As iPlayer starts making its way back onto TVs through cable (already popular on Virgin) and soon through iPlayer branded freeview boxes, this really is another step towards the obsolescence of traditional channels.  Presumably anything iPlayer can do, its commercial cousin Kangaroo (soon to be called SeeSaw) can do too.  So all content from all major UK channels will be to a lesser or greater degree, on demand.

Social Viewing:

Another player putting online video on TV is Xbox.  Xbox Live party allows you to hook up online with up to 8 of you friends and watch content together at the same time with chat and VOIP functions.  This article at Knitware Blog talks about this in terms of watching netflix movies, but later this year Microsoft will launch bespoke Xbox TV content, with some big names.  OK, big names if you’re a geek.  James Gunn, the screenwriter behind the Dawn of the Dead remake among other things, has been recruiting other writers and directors to make a series of horror shorts for download or streaming exclusively on Xbox.  Here’s the trailer for his short Humanzee.

ISPs and the future of peercasting:

Filesharing is under attack in the UK.  The BPI is working with 6 major ISPs to stop users illegally sharing music files.  One of the measures considered (after a stiffly worded letter, admonishing file sharers) is to reduce offenders’ internet speeds.  I’m not going to comment on illegal music sharing, but I do wonder what effect this will have on other peer to peer filesharing activities.  More specifically Joost and Babelgum.  Both of these services use file sharing to provide high speed, high  quality video on demand.  Will the ISPs be able to tell what kind of filesharing is going on?  I doubt it, after having my connection slowed while using a piece of database software that shared files from my computer with other users.

Wet Code

This article, asking if DNA will ever replace silicon chips, appeared in The Guardian yesterday.  Their conclusion? No – which sucks, from my point of view.  I’ve been working on/off on a sci-fi screenplay based around DNA computing for a couple of months (blogging is my new displacement activity). 

The Guardian only scratches the surface of the brave new world of DNA or ‘wet’ coding.  The question of whether genes can replace silicon is a symptom of the fact that biology and computing are converging at a surprising rate.  Code is the key.  Computers work in binary, 1s and 0s.  DNA works in codes built of four letters, GATC.  (Remember the film Gattaca ?  Turns out that’s a clever title.)  If we can learn and harness that code we can reprogram DNA, which is at once brilliant and absolutely terrifying.

One man leading the way in genetic coding is Craig Venter.  You may not know the name now, but I’m pretty sure everyone on the planet will in 20 years or less.  He’s going to be richer than Bill Gates.  His company is currently working on a synthetic life-form that will feed on CO2 and excrete fuel.  His response to a man who asked if he was playing God?

‘My dear sir, I’m not playing.’

The mighty TED will explain all this better than me.  Forgive me if I fall back to TED several times in my posts.  I urge everyone to go and have look around their video archive.  It’s more informative and inspirational than anything on TV.  Except David Attenborough (all hail).

Juan Enriquez knows about the future of code:

Craig Venter is already digitising DNA:

and Alan Russell wants to regenerate our bodies: