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Posts Tagged ‘VIDEO GAMES’

Here's where you can learn to blow stuff up, scale 150-foot trees, make toys and catch lightning--all for college credit

Over the years, PopSci has pulled together annual lists of the coolest, funnest college labs, the places where we would like to have spent our youth tinkering, exploring, and learning. Here, we've collected the ultimate list of all the great labs we've ever covered.

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Launch the gallery for our full illustrated list of the coolest college labs in the country.

The researchers, based at the University of Washington in Seattle, are incorporating the best Foldit players' strategies into their own algorithms. Forget distributed computing -- this is distributed thinking.

In what might be a video-game first, gamers will see their work translated into actual protein structures designed in the lab, according to the University of Washington. Last year, a Texas player who goes by the name "BootsMcGraw" was the first Foldit player to have his new protein design synthesized in the lab. Though it didn't work, the researchers plan to try again and are optimistic about the possibilities, according to a press release from UW.

The program stems from Rosetta@home, which works like SETI@home in that it uses a network of idle home computers to crunch data. Biologists were using Rosetta to figure out how proteins develop their final three-dimensional shapes. They know which amino acid chains make up proteins, but the way they're structured is not well understood, and that knowledge has huge potential, because proteins act as gatekeepers in the body.

Rosetta@home included a screensaver that showed users what the computer was doing. Sometimes the computer would get stuck on a tricky folding problem, but gamers thought it looked easy. "People started writing in saying, 'I can see where it would fit better this way'," says David Baker, a biochemist at UW in Seattle who developed Foldit, in Nature News.

Baker's team figured they would let them try it out, and the result was Foldit, wherein players can compete, collaborate, develop strategies, gather points and move to different levels.

It turns out that humans' highly evolved spatial manipulation talents were a boon for this type of problem-solving. Even a small protein can have hundreds of amino acids, meaning thousands of connections are possible -- and that means plenty of work for a computer. But humans can often see the solution intuitively, Nature News reports.

Even NASA has turned to video games to make science more appealing, but as Ars Technica points out, this might be the first time gamers have helped solve an actual scientific question.

The paper's author list acknowledges more than 57,000 Foldit players, which may be unprecedented on a scientific publication, UW News says. Hey, it's got to be more satisfying than racking up ADAM.

[ Nature News,
Ars Technica, University of Washington

An experimental new video game controller just revealed at this week’s SIGGRAPH conference includes a pair of thermoelectric panels on each side of a controller. Those surfaces heat or cool rapidly in reflection of what’s happening in the game, offering players a new sensory connection to what’s happening on the screen.

The controller temperature doesn’t swing wildly – less than 10 degrees in either direction in just five seconds – but apparently a small sensation is all that’s needed to add a rich layer of sensory experience to a virtual reality environment. No word on whether any major console makers are eyeballing such technology, but the idea is pretty cool. After all, remember how thrilling it was when our gaming peripherals started vibrating?

[Technology Review]

A meteor strikes, damaging solar arrays and life support systems, and as you watch the billowing dust cloud move ominously toward your lunar camp, you have to restore critical systems and oxygen flow. Starting July 6, a new NASA video game will let you save the day, in 3-D.

NASA is releasing a multi-player game called Moonbase Alpha, wherein players assume the role of a moon exploration team member living in a lunar settlement.

Gamers will have to get used to running with a moon-bounce loping gait while wearing a bulky moon suit -- atypical for first-person video game missions. You can play alone or with a team.

The game includes VOIP chat, text chat, and pretty cool 3-D graphics. It's only supposed to take about 20 minutes.

NASA's Learning Technologies division built the game to prove the space agency can make cool video games that will inspire kids. Ultimately, the game could be used in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education programs.

And if Congress decides to end NASA's moon-return program, this might be the only way to have a lunar adventure.

OK, mayor, 40 percent of your water supply is leaking out ... what do you do?

The company unveiled its "serious game" this week at the IMPACT 2010 conference in Las Vegas, as a training tool for city leaders and planners. The free game would require players to guide their city through sector-specific missions focused on energy, water, banking, and retail.

One mission involves the water usage increasing at twice the population growth. The city is also losing as much as 40 percent of its water supply through leaky infrastructure, and energy costs are rising. Players would need to put a water management system in place that draws on "accurate real-time data" to make their decisions.

IBM pointed to expert predictions that the world's urban populations will double by 2050, with an estimated one million people moving into cities each week. Today's cities already consume 75 percent of the world's energy, emit more than 80 percent of greenhouse gases, and lose as much as 20 percent of their precious water because of infrastructure leaks.

Simulations are already used as tools for real-world planning among financial analysts and the U.S. military. But games such as CityOne could represent a stepping stone to the far more ambitious projects such as Europe's proposed Living Earth Simulator, which would incorporate reams of real-time data about the world.

Either way, we're just waiting for the Hollywood story where the young genius with knack for urban planning suddenly realizes that he's been "playing" not just a game, but real life all along.

Does this herald a future where commanders get real-time intel from their warfighters' helmets?

Video gamers and warfighters alike will appreciate this stunning first-person-shooter view of a Dutch marine boarding team taking back a German merchant ship from Somali pirates. It's not hard to imagine many more soldiers of the future equipped with cameras so that commanders can have multiple on-the-ground views of rapid response operations carried out in real-time.

The marines were tasked with liberating 15 crewmen aboard the German merchant ship Taipan, which had been hijacked by 10 Somali pirates. The crew locked themselves securely within a safe room and called for assistance, according to a reader translation provided by the blog SNAFU.

Action kicks off fast and furious as the marines fast-rope down from their helicopter under covering fire and begin securing the ravaged ship.

This goes beyond the surface parallels between the real-life footage and a first-person shooter such as Modern Warfare 2, or even the blurring of military training and video games meant to boost warfighter abilities. That's because this ain't no game for the Dutch marines or the Somali pirates -- rather, the military-style lifecasting footage gives commanders new situational awareness in either real-time or for post-mission briefings.

In any case, we're certainly tickled to see how first-person-shooter camera angles have much more use than simply giving young moviegoers a thrill in a certain Kick-Ass scene.

[SNAFU via Ares Defense Blog]

Dell explains how all this works in fairly rich detail in the video below, but to summarize, Unlimited Detail sheds the usual polygon construction of virtual worlds in favor of a kind of point-cloud construction. Imagine the 3-D equivalent of pixels (like “little 3-D atoms” as Dell says), making up the entire virtual world from little points of color, much as the real world is constructed of tiny building blocks.

This kind of construction isn’t completely new, but it is limited by the fact that each point requires a little bit of processing power. Rendering huge 3-D worlds like the ones in modern video games would require trillions of points, and rendering that many points per frame is impossible by modern computing standards; the real time demands of games make the idea completely unfeasible.

Dell’s software, he claims, gets away with this by acting as a search engine rather than a graphics engine. Build a world out of points, and Unlimited Detail’s software searches, in real time, for only the points in the cloud needed to render a view from a certain perspective. Detailed algorithms search through point-cloud data to find the right “atoms” to build only the scene you need at that moment, which equates roughly to one point for every pixel on the screen. Suddenly, you don’t need to process billions or trillions of points anymore; the underlying points go unprocessed and only the visible ones are rendered.

At least, so says Bruce Dell. Very few people have seen the software in action (he's still collecting his IP protections), and according to Wired companies like Nvidia are skeptical that his concept will work. You can hear it from Dell below and decide for yourself, but if he can deliver on what he promises in this video, gaming will never be the same.

[Wired Gadget Lab]