1. Apps (especially games) targeting a specific device could be coming to an end soon. Google’s announcement of Chrome being able to run native code in a sandbox (caution: really dry technical presentation) is a game-changer. Bye-bye OS-specific applications that you buy on (ugh) physical media. Hello things that you open in a browser, which have full web connectivity and presence, and which will run on any platform supporting it. Yes, I’m well aware of the less-than-illustrious history of thin-client network computing. What I think makes this different is that Google have already got the platform in the hands of tens (if not hundreds) of millions of customers. For free. All they need to do to enable it is flip a switch. Oh, and they’re about to release an operating system based on this technology.
2. Games are about to get big. By this, I don’t mean that people will buy more copies of games, nor that mainstream game devices will become more popular (though both are a given in the short term). No, I mean that more people are about to start making games. There are a couple of things that are bringing this about. The first is the massive ubiquity of platforms that can play games, and the second is the emergence of content-creation tools that don’t require computer-science or art degrees to use. Unity3D, which coincidentally was announced as an early launch platform for creating content which runs under Google’s Native Code system, is just such a platform, but there are many more with similar aims, such as MIT’s Scratch.
3. Which brings me to: the next big software revolution will be in the creation of interpreted content. What I mean by interpreted content is content that the user does not have to create in painstaking detail. Instead, the user sets guidelines and parameters for what they want, and the software interprets the user’s intention and generates content. Procedural content has gotten us most of the way there, and there are some fantastic (though limited) examples such as Spore’s creature creator, the MakeHuman project, and LaDiDa available right now. However, the next wave will seamlessly intermediate between clumsy, inexact humans and the rigorous demands of content creation. I’d really like it if the interface to such software sounded like Jarvis from the Iron Man movies.
4. Driving is an under-utilised platform for gaming, and could make roads much, much safer. Think networked vehicles with sensors that score your driving according to how safe and green it is, with high-score tables, local and national leagues, full social media connectivity, etc. Quite why the full extent of car manufacturers’ use of game mechanics so far is a tree that lights up green in one eco-friendly Honda remains an utter mystery to me.
5. Talking of people that don’t get it… copyright reform has got to happen now. When everyone can make content, and content can go everywhere, people will be remixing and creating on a scale that utterly dwarfs the current Big Content industries. We need to ensure a strong creative commons and a legal framework that enables people to draw from the rich tapestry of our collective culture without fear of prosecution.

So that took a lot longer than expected, mostly due it turning into a stream of consciousness that I had to edit down from about 11 different ideas that suddenly occurred to me. More on points 2 and 3 coming soon.

As a constituent whose career and majority of personal communications are conducted across the internet, I’m very worried that the Government is planning to rush the Digital Economy Bill into law without a full Parliamentary debate.

The Bill contains measures that favour the protection of commercial interests at the expense of an individual citizen’s rights — specifically measures that allow copyright holders to issue requests to limit or even terminate the internet connections of private individuals based only on the belief of the copyright holder that the individual has infringed their copyright. In effect, this creates a situation outside the bounds of a fair and just society where a person can be punished by the withdrawal of a service that the UN is proposing be considered a basic human right.

In the digital age it’s only fair that copyright holders have greater recourse when their rights are infringed — but the measures in the Bill are a step too far. Millions of UK citizens depend on the internet for the ability to conduct their daily lives, their jobs, and for access to essential services. Restricting or withdrawing access to internet services is a disproportionate response, especially without the safeguard of a fair legal process.

Whereas a rights holder can impose penalties on an individual without the burden of proof and with almost no impediment of cost, the only recourse for an individual so restricted is through the courts — a massive, and clearly asymmetrical burden. The EU has adopted the position that any punitive measures affecting internet access by member states “must respect the fundamental rights and freedoms of citizens”. In particular, it the EU requires that citizens are entitled to a “fair and impartial procedure” before any measures can be taken to limit their internet access.

Industry experts, internet service providers (like Talk Talk and BT) and huge internet companies like Google and Yahoo are all opposing the bill — yet the Government seems intent on forcing it through without a real debate.

As a constituent I am writing to you today to ask you to do all you can to ensure the Government doesn’t just rush the bill through and deny us our democratic right to scrutiny and debate. As a life-long labour supporter whose career would be ended without internet access, I see no way that I can continute to vote Labour if the Bill passes unaltered.

Yours faithfully,

Sebastian Potter

What’s that you say? A 3-D ray-tracer? Yes indeed, as promised in the second part of this series of development diaries, I’ve now finished work on an update that turns this:

("A", "I+[A+O]-->>[--L]I[++L]-[AO]++AO")
("I", "FS[>>&&L][>>^^L]FS")
("S", "SFS")
("L", "['{+f-ff-f+|+f-ff-f}]")
("O", "[&&&C`>W>>>>W>>>>W>>>>W>>>>W]")
("C", "FF")
("W", "[`^F][{&&&&-f+f|-f+f}]")

Into this:

Rendering of an olive bush from pyplants povray renderer

Unfortunately it’s now 2am, so the write-up will have to wait for the weekend. Do feel free to grab the code and have a poke around. You’ll obviously need povray, pygame, and pycairo installed, but everything else should work with python’s included batteries.

This video presentation from Siggraph 2007 has been popping up all over the internets the last couple of days, and the implications are truly astonishing. Algorithmically this is a remarkably simple technique, and easily implemented in real-time. It should be pretty straight-forward to write an implementation in ActionScript 3 (for Flash 9) or in IronPython (for Silverlight) and have this apply to images in webpages with a minimum of effort.

More exciting than simply just resizing images is that the weighting and treatment that can be applied manually to specific regions of an image. It’s easy to imagine a myriad of gaming opportunities that arise if you can hide data selectively in images across the web through this technique.

Dr. Shamir’s other research work is pretty interesting as well, covering as he does:

• Mesh Partitioning
• Skeleton Based Representations
• Multi-Resolution Models
• Object Feature-Space Analysis
• Digital Typography
• Visual Succinct Representation of Information

Players in a persistent virtual world inhabit two states — two parallel lives.

When not active in the world, players take on the role of NPCs, their bodies under the control of basic AI routines that go about daily life in any of the towns and villages that scatter the world. The fulfil the roles of members of a community — undertaking production, vending, civic duties that players would for the most part find unsatisfying.

When a player becomes active in the world their character undergoes a transformation from their mundane life into an agent for change in the world. It’s the player’s choice what form this agency takes — they could choose to fulfil their role in a society actively undertaking tasks that the game’s AI would otherwise perform — or they can act out an alternative role beyond the boundaries of normal life and follow the course of hero’s journey that the game allows for.