PINO - My robot friend

My robot friend,
originally uploaded by mimmi.

Since we finished the first version of the design document yesterday I treated myself with opening the PINO Robot package! Now he sleeps, but we played for quite a while. He is one years old at the moment, in a delicate phase of personality development.

After a three-phaze development PINO develops a personality which is either friendly, shy or naugty. He can be in several moods, syblolised by the color of his eyes: very happy, happy, normal, lonely, or unhappy. More about shipped features here:
Info on FireBox
http://www.firebox.com/?dir=firebox&action=product&pid=429

What more (and this is the reason for us having them in the office) there is an open source pino robot programming initiative Open Pino Platform (GNU GPL. We don't have the research variety of it though.
http://www.symbio.jst.go.jp/PINO/

Open PINO Platform is the project to accelerate the research and development of humanoid robots by providing the technical information of PINO open to the public. Everyone can use PINO as a base of the research and development, in other words, to foster PINO to be more sophisticated humanoid robot. We hope PINO to play the similar role as LINUX, for humanoid robot development. Please join us to foster PINO!

PINO the Humanoid Robot - Reasons for Designing the Humanoid Robot” by the makers of PINO
http://www.symbio.jst.go.jp/~tmatsui/pinodesign.htm

Radio Link

Radio_Link_IMG_0611,
originally uploaded by mimmi.

This is what the radio link looks like!

Magic Radio Link

Finally i have broadband. These sentences are sent to their destination via a white squarish radio plate that is fastened on a light pole that is reachable from my roof. Bits wobbling in the air for a little while before they are tucked into a cable again.

This week has been very busy, we have been working on the design document for the Massively Multiplayer Reaching Out Package. Very fun, but tiring. I found a way to use qualities of relations so that can affect mood nodes values varies in a way that might make sense conceptually as well as being functional for the game play.

Klastrup's thesis now availiable

Lisbeth Klastrup's Ph.D. thesis "Towards a Poetics of Virtual Worlds:
Multi-User Textuality and the Emergence of Story." is now availiable! I have been so curious about it!

The Ultimate Pessimism

world_philosophies_p_339,
originally uploaded by mimmi.

Jenny is reading this book now, and i just _had_ to capture this quote! In one of the Mumin books by Tove Jansson there is this really gloomy character that tags along and whines and carries a big book. Was that book by shopenhauer in Janssons fiction??? I have forgotten!

Reality of flight taking a bite of the simulation cake

Yesterday I met my old friend* Carl Henrik von Hofsten at a café in the south part of Stockholm to talk about the paper on simulation in games that he is writing.



We were both puzzled by Salen and Zimmerman’s use of the expression “immersive fallacy” in relation to simulation in games and suspension of disbelief in fiction. Since CH is using flight simulators as main example we have been discussing the sensory experiences in relation to the constructed ontology/cosmology of the game worlds, and the level of suspension of disbelief that can be required for how the game is experienced. Z&S describes beautifully describes the players of a game to be immersed in meaning, juxtaposing it to “the sensory transport promised by the immersive fallacy”.



CH doesn’t make that kind of juxtaposition, rather he sees the outputs to the player’s sensors as signifiers that function reciprocally with fictional framework and world cosmology. What is even more interesting with his work is that he examines flight simulators that go beyond the constructed reality of a world to fly in to see how players use real-world GIS data and flight-time tables. Thus, he may give a very illustrative example of how simulation and reality bleeds together.

*Old friend = 17 years friendship