And his favourite topic - emotion in games. The animation on the dog based upon your actions looks wonderful - will be interesting to see how much of that is canned/procedural and if it really can respond in such a dynamic meaningful way (or if he just has a sad dog/happy dog animation and thats about it).

Love this. Keepon is a project by Hideki Kozima , part of the “Beatbots” project “to develop technologies and methodologies for human-robot interaction that incorporate the rhythmic properties of human interactive behavior.”

In addition to being extremely adorable, Keepon does tackle the more serious subject of how to create machines that aren’t creepy as shit to interact with (uncanny valley and all that). Hopefully this will go some way to help realise the sarcastic bear from A.I. or the Lou Reed face ripping robot.

Oh and check out this other video. Great stuff!

Aiming on taking a bit of time off to work up a bunch of ideas (haven’t had any time for personal projects since starting freelance - been saving for a house and exchanged on Friday). So, I’m now trying to work out what I’m gonna make these sketches/experiments in (as an aside I HATE the term experiments, so reminds me of cheesy flash crap from 7 years ago).

So, whats the best environment to make these in? My main criteria are that I want to be able to create mostly 3D, reasonably heavy simulation/system stuff - using assets created in Maya, some involving physics - developed in a useful language so I can open source whatever I make and hopefully people can make some use of it. Publishing for the web would be beneficial (rather than compiling for multiple OS’s and it seems that a lot of people are a bit anti downloadables anyway).

Shortlist would be (any other suggestions welcome)

Flash - Very accessible in a browser due to high distribution of plugin. Papervision a great step forward but still limited in terms of displaying full scenes/characters. Improved speed with AS3 but still not that quick. Early steps for physics support (in Away3D anyway).

Virtools - Nice speed, well featured, Havok Physics, 3D acceleration, can publish to browser but insanely expensive.

(M)OGRE - Free, very fast, very well featured, Shaders, Physics support, but requires downloading (limited browser plugin available).

Unity - Great speed, support for Mono (so can create content in C#), great features (shader support, PhysX, nice scene graph etc). Mac only development. Publish to browser. Disadvantage is its not free (but £125 isnt too much eh?)

Java/Processing - Great accessibility as everyone has Java, OpenGL support (only through web-start?). Decent speed. Not sure if there are any engines providing scene-graph, model import, physics etc?

Shockwave 3D - Would rather stick pins in the eyes of a puppy

So is that the state of rich media content on the web? Any other significant alternatives? ( don’t say Silverlight).

I’m a bit delayed in posting this (just got back from a week at Sonar - more on that later) but the installation that I was doing for AllOfUs for the Natural History Museum is now up and ready to be played with.

Under Sea Ice is an interactive installation that forms part of the latest touring exhibition “Ice Station Antartica“. I’ll add a proper project page going into more detail soon but if you fancy learning more about penguin sick and giant grabs, its now open and involves lots of fishes, whales, torches, game engines, flocking simulations, penguins, bubbles, divers and a submarine. No rush though, its on until April 2008 and should be touring for at least 5 years after that.

A charming little game, Crayon Physics is part of Petri Purho’s series of experimental rapid prototypes, inspired by the Experimental Gameplay Project.

The success criteria for each level is simple - get the ball to the star (very Armadillo run). The mechanic is very much like the MIT developed (and Microsoft absorbed) Physics Illustrator, allowing you to draw to create physical elements (limited to boxes in this case) in order to bridge gaps or nudge the ball towards the star. Given that its just a simple prototype its a great success and would not be at all out of place on the DS (particularly with its slightly Yoshi’s Island-esque crayon aesthetic).

Another inspiring TED talk - this time Sir Ken Robinson discussing the ways in which our current (mainstream) education system lets children down and stifles their creative development. Great quote from Picasso: “All children are born artists, the is trick is to remain an artist as we grow up”. Ken advised the government’s advistory committee on creative and cultural education. A must see if not for just for his wit.

Nice recent talk on Anand’s physical desktop interface. Not much has changed since the previous demo from a year ago but the quality is a bit better. Great demo - hope this gets picked up (suprised nothing has happened to it yet, tbh).