WHen I saw the title of the talk How your brain tells you where you are by Neil Burgess I thought ‘hey, I wonder how this applies to video games?’. It turns out they use game engines with 3D virtual environments to test how humans figure out where they are. It’s cool how GPS-enabled mobiles work so similarly to the brain’s location system.
I’ve been looking into and thinking about 3D printing a lot recently and want to record some of the information I’ve come across. Let’s start off with this excellent TED talk on 3D printing that was filmed in November.
Last week it was announced that a 83-year old woman received a new jaw thanks to 3D printing in the world of biotechnology. Here’s the basics:
The University of Hasselt (Belgium) announced today that Belgian and Dutch scientists have successfully replacing a lower jaw with a 3D printed model for a 83 year-old woman. According to the researchers, It is the first custom-made implant in the world to replace an entire lower jaw.
The lower jaw of the elderly woman was badly infected and needed to be removed. Considering the age of the patient, a “classical” microsurgical reconstructive surgery takes too long time and can be risky. Therefore a tailor-made implant is the best choice.
Normally it takes a few days to produce a custom implant, but with 3D printing technology it takes only a few hours.
Sounds great doesn’t it? Hang on there, we can’t get our hopes up yet.
Over at Technology Review they had a little public debate about whether or not the future of 3D printing will be similar to the hype and subsequent failure to live up to said hype that virtual reality had. Both sides of the debate are worth reading in their entirety.
The anti-3D printing piece had some good points, particularly when it comes to how the machines actually work:
Let’s start with the mechanism. Most 3-D printers lay down thin layers of extruded plastic. That’s great for creating cheap plastic toys with a limited spatial resolution. But printing your Mii or customizing an iPhone case isn’t the same thing as firing ceramics in a kiln or smelting metal or mixing lime with sand at high temperatures to produce glass—unless you’d like everything that’s currently made from those substances to be replaced with plastic, and there are countless environmental, health, and durability reasons you don’t.
Fine, but we can also print human organs and it looks like we maybe able to do more in the near future (like actually be able to use them). Here’s a TED talk on that very issue:
I feel that the fellow that wrote the TR piece is missing (amongst other things like the fact that 3D printers are real already) the bigger picture of the state of 3D printing and essentially ignores the history of manufacturing. 3D printing is just as much manufacturing and industrial issue as it is a digital one. This is where the rebuttal in Technology Review comes in:
It’s also important not to confuse 3-D printing & desktop-class fabrication. These aren’t the same thing. There is more to desktop manufacturing than 3-D printers. A well-appointed contemporary maker workshop has working CNC mills, lathes, and laser cutters. A well-appointed design studio has the tools to make and finish prototypes that look very nice indeed. Aside from the 3-D printer, none of these tools are terribly science-fictional; they’re well-established technologies that happen to be getting cheaper from year to year.
Something interesting happens when the cost of tooling-up falls. There comes a point where your production runs are small enough that the economies of scale that justify container ships from China stop working. There comes a point where making new things isn’t a capital investment but simply a marginal one. Fab shops are already popping up, just like print shops did.
So what can we make of all of this?
3D printing is pretty awesome and the more we do to develop this technology the better off we’ll arguably be as we can potentially build organs and phones from scratch. This technology is still years away from being anything close to the replicators in Star Trek.
It’s worth following this technology has it develops as the ramifications of 3D printing can be huge: from being able to build our own board game pieces to entirely destabilizing our current production methods. There’ll be no need to employ people in some factories if we can build half of our products in our own homes. In a way, 3D printing is almost Marxist because it’s literally giving the power of production to the people.
One of the main draws of playing board games is the interaction with other people in the same room as you. The game itself is as important as where you are playing it (and equally who you are playing it with), but what happens when tablets like the iPad can provide a similar experience to a board game?
In class one day we had some people play on a physical board game and had others play on an iPad (all local) and the results were interesting. The people playing on the iPad found the game to be not nearly as engaging as the people who played on the physical board.
I think there are a couple reasons for this:
Learning a table top game can be a hurdle, let’s be honest, it’s the least fun part of playing a board game. Learning with a board in front of the players may make the process easier as everything is there and presented to them. On the other hand, digital version of board games tell the player how to play they tend to focus on one mechanic at a time and usually not in context of the entire play space.
Turns
Waiting for your turn is boring for the average player regardless of the platform. However, when you play on a board you can see the person think and act, and you can think about your strategy as the other players take the turn. On the iPad this is not the case, you have to pass-and-play; meaning you can’t see what the other person is doing until you get to your turn.
The connection to the game when played on a table remain, but in when playing on the iPad the connection is severed.
Pace and shared experiences
Playing on the iPad was notable faster when players got the hang of it, but this in itself is not inherently a good thing. The fact that the board game takes longer means players have a chance to talk about the game itself as it’s unraveling. You can motion to and identify things collectively on the board because you can all see it at the same time.
Because there is the common touch point for all the players it seems that the players then share more information and analysis with one another. Perhaps the physical manifestation of the board itself encourages the players to acknowledge the board and the state of the game. On the iPad when it’s not your turn all you see is sleek aluminium being held in your opponent’s hand.
Tactile interaction
I still think that there is an argument to be made for tactile experiences in themselves and I wonder if the very act of manipulating real world objects brings the players closer to the game in ways a digital version cannot. This may be the weakest and most tangental concern that I have.
The game in question? Ticket to Ride (iPad app link,Amazon link
So how do we translate existing board games to the tablet era? Well there are many options and ways to do this (to be covered in a different post), and as an industry we’re only starting to explore what works and what fails. This issue can only get more interesting!
On a related note, Dominic Crapuchettes provides his insights into the evolving world of board games and technology and a TEDx talk:
Mark your calendars folks Board Game Jam is returning February 2012!
Apparently, yes it does, depending on how you look at it. TV executive Lauren Zalaznick takes a look at the most viewed TV shows in American history and makes some startling discoveries!
This TED talk is really crazy insofar that speaker Lee Cronin explains how we can create inorganic matter that we can manipulate like Lego than we can let it evolve on its own.
He brushes off philosophy at the end of his talk then tries to define life in a very simplistic way. If anything, this a great chance for some really cool philosophy to explore what is life and why does it exist. By creating life ourselves was does that mean to us?
Is there an ethical responsibility to care for any life we create in a lab? If yes then what’s is god’s responsibility to us and if not, how do we hold people to account if their evolved life causes harm?
New Games on the App Store