Receipt Racer: But why is it cool?

Receipt Racer [video] was linked all over the Interwebs last month. If you’re reading this post, you’re likely already aware of it.

As a general rule, though I link to gaming tech, I m usually highlighting it for reasons other than the game itself. I am, after all, attempting to develop the ideas of play+tech beyond videogames.

Receipt Racer is essentially a classic driving game. The game software coordinates a projector, control input, and a receipt printer to create a path and obstacles the player steers their vehicle (projected in light) to avoid. The path is dynamically adaptive and not just a predefined course.

So what’s the big deal? I could probably download an emulator and start playing Spy Hunter in 10 minutes or less. Frankly, Spy Hunter, at nearly 30 years old, is much more advanced than Receipt Racer. And, still, Receipt Racer is pretty dang sweet. The author of the original post I read about Receipt Racer (via link below) gushes about it; the post is even titled “pure nerd magic.”

Why is this? I think it has something to do with the tangibility and reality of the play. This game creates a track that is just a bit more real than abstract pixels on a screen. I’ll grant you it s still an abstract 2D track being drawn on a piece of paper. Nevertheless, something essential to the human experience of play connects with this imaginary world brought into the real world. Driving up that receipt paper towards the horizon created by the weight of the paper spilling out of the printer is one notch closer to actually driving a dynamically generated obstacle course at high speed. Hearing the noise of the track being built as it’s noisily printed elicits a visceral response that a totally virtual environment lacks.

I’ve written about this phenomenon before (Technologies of the Imagination: Aliefs and Fantasy Play) and am finding myself more and more captivated by the factors and responses that characterize and distinguish play in the real world from that in a virtual one. Understanding these and their interrelation could yield unique and powerful new play experiences.

(via This is my next)

An old post now with even more comic strippiness

One of my favorite posts on Note the Smile is Play, Comic Strips, and Enhancing Gesture-Based Human Computer Interfaces (it’s more fun to read than its title). In it I talk about the interrelation of gestural human computer interfaces and play. I sketched out a fun project embodying the ideas. That project relied heavily on the visual language of comics.

Since I wrote that post, I’ve read the book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art1 by Scott McCloud. Among many other fascinating points, McCloud makes a compelling case for the appeal and power of the abstractions within comic books (graphic novels, if you prefer). Specifically, he believes that abstract depictions of people — especially faces — in comics cause readers to identify with the story as characters in the story. This sparked an idea to revise the project I previously described.

One of the big challenges of the system I outlined was feeding live video of participants back to themselves augmented with thought balloons and other visual elements of comics. The larger the display grows (bigger is better for this experience) the more offset the video camera capturing the images must be. This introduces perspective angles much different than the desired straight-on mirror effect in the final video (i.e. an undesired parallax effect and an extreme version of the eye contact issues in teleconferencing systems). Reading McCloud led to inspiration: instead of live video mixed with the elements of comics, interpret the whole scene as a comic strip, abstracting people and faces in the video to comic strip depictions. Not only does this solve the perspective issue, it opens up further possibilities to explore how people engage the interface with a range of abstract representations of themselves — from stick figures to near photo-realistic.

Whether I ever build out this project is another matter entirely.

1 A tremendously cool book I can’t say enough good things about. This post on McCloud’s writing was my first introduction to him.

The Zen of Toy Blocks

I’ve written before about toy blocks and the opportunity they afford to embody this idea of playful media I talk about. There’s simply something compelling about this tangible, playful form. Toy blocks seem to distill playful technology down to its essence — so much so that the form naturally attracts reinvention and exploration.

To be accurate, each of the projects I listed in my previous post were generally more of the form of tiles than blocks. Still, the blockiness abides. Project Blox [video] is a new project in the vein of high tech toy blocks developed by students at the University of Texas at Austin. In this case, Blox attempt to be much more blocky than tiley.

Disclaimer: I want to be clear in what I’m about to say that I am not criticizing any of the previous projects or Project Blox so much as using them as reference points as I’m working through the notions of playful media. I’m excited that these sorts of projects exist and am looking forward to working on my own.

“Platformization” is what I’ll call the general trend of mashing up high tech plus toy blocks. That is, the underlying, unspoken design goal is to add technology to a cube or tile in a way that fits in that physical form and then allow development of applications using those processors, sensors, and user interface elements. In and of itself, this is a fine thing. It’s cool, geek out stuff. From my vantage point concerned with playfulness, however, this approach tends to yield small, box shaped computers more than turbocharged toy blocks.

A block has a flat side? That could be a display screen. A block has an orientation? Add accelerometers. Blocks are often very close to one another? Short-range wireless communication is a natural. But do these additions support and enhance the natural modes of play that blocks embody? In general, as it is, I don’t think so. Where there is a screen, a player is unlikely to hide it and thus unlikely to stack or build with the screenified blocks. Where the abstraction of an application (like a maze or spelling game) is the highest order playful interaction, the blocks become a vessel for that application and not actually part of play. Anything that ties the block to a particular use model will naturally limit its other interactions. In the case of Project Blox, for instance, there’s a single display screen. This naturally lends itself to 2D applications with the screen face up. Will a player imagine such a block as a space capsule and move it through 3D space (with whoosing sounds, of course) as it lands on an alien landscape that is peculiarly blocky? Perhaps not.

I find myself thinking on this topic of toy blocks quite a bit. I’m moving far away from the question of “What can we add to toy blocks?” and am landing on “What is the essential playfulness of blocks and how do we extend and enhance it?” That is, first understand what playing with blocks is all about before adding anything to it that interrupts that mode of interaction. I’m not suggesting we scrap the idea of adding tech to toy blocks. Quite the contrary. That said, I think the key is in choosing user interface elements very carefully to respect the magic of playing with blocks — the creative, imaginative, tactile, educational, and even social goodness. Of course, I’m still working out what this means. Perhaps in contrast to whiz-bang displays, it may mean very low-fi user interface elements connected to very hi-fi smarts. I hope time will tell.

(Project Blox via Engadget)

Running off to join the circus...

For all 8 of my readers, I have some news. It’s taken a few years, many dead ends, and lots of searching… eh, I’ll just cut right to the chase. I’ve been offered the opportunity to pursue a Ph.D. at Poly/NYU (Polytechnic Institute at New York University), and the whole gig is paid for! My last day at work will come at the very end of June; in August I move to New York City.

Poly is the second oldest private technology university in the nation. My program will be computer science, but the plan is to do something quite unique with it. It appears I’ll be able to pull in elements of ITP at the Tisch School of the Arts. And most importantly, I have a tremendously cool adviser in Katherine Isbister who is also the director of the new Center of Innovation for Technology and Entertainment.

As Yogi Berra said, it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. I can explain my intentions, but only time will tell what comes. Graduate studies are, for me, running off to the circus for a while so I can pursue and develop the topics of this site full time. That is, I intend for my work to be focused on play technologies and rooted in affective computing and HCI. When done, I don’t plan to teach or find some research job. All this is preparation for some crazy entrepreneurial thing to come later. Who knows. Maybe I’ll just get to change the world by helping us all to play together. Or, at minimum, I’ll get to fail in spectacular fashion (not necessarily a bad thing either).

This is a huge deal, and it’s going to be a big adventure. I’m really excited to go but also not eager to leave. Let’s hope I can keep up with all the other people who are way smarter than me. Wish me luck. This blog is where I’ll talk about the cool projects, ideas, and people I get to work with.

Play, Creativity, and Adults Are Big Stupid Heads

Tim Brown on creativity and play [TED video]

Tim Brown is the CEO of IDEO, the global design firm. In his TED talk, he speaks about play as an enabler of creativity and the different modes of play that can be involved in creativity. He highlights play exploration, construction play, and role play specifically.

Perhaps the most important topic Tim discusses is that of his opening: adults’ tendency to self-edit and act (or rather not act) out of fear of judgment. How many creative solutions to our world’s problems are left unexplored for fear of looking foolish?

Play has an amazing ability to break down these sorts of barriers. For example, in normal daily life, we naturally maintain and respect personal space. However, as soon as we engage in sports (play) we immediately puncture those boundaries of personal space — often without a single thought of it. Similarly, play can free us to be creative despite learned social norms to the contrary. It’s for this reason that I’m particularly drawn to the challenges and opportunities of adults at play. Of course, it’s my conjecture that playful technologies are the path to get us there.