[From The Verge’s Vox Games]

Creating the illusion of emotion or why you care about ones and zeroes

By Brian Crecente on March 12, 2012

As much as you may love video games and the stories they help you tell, it’s impossible to escape the fact that much of your experience is a trick of the mind.

The thing that separates video games from other forms of media, the ability to interact with and perhaps shape a virtual world, is mostly powered by the artificial intelligence of the characters that populate that experience.

But at its best gaming artificial intelligence systems, AI expert David Mark says, are, like 2-year-olds, basically sociopaths. What he means is that they are intrinsically anti-social. Getting past that problem doesn’t mean imbuing a character with personality, it means tricking gamers.

“We can’t create psychology in our characters,” Mark told a gathering of game developers at last week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.… read more. “Creating the illusion of emotion or why you care about ones and zeroes”

[From Voice of San Diego; more information, including a comparison of answers by the virtual candidate and the iPhone’s Siri, is available here]

The Tragic and Fascinating Life of Carl DeMaio

Posted: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 | Updated: Wed Mar 14, 2012
by Liam Dillon

Carl DeMaio’s favorite color is blue. He usually eats dessert before his dinner. He’s afraid of heights, loves zombie movies and one time, when he was a high school freshman, he caught his tie in a newspaper vending machine. DeMaio freed himself from the machine by surrendering his neckwear. He still remembers how the tie looked hanging from the box when he walked away.

“Like a tongue,” DeMaio says.

You won’t hear DeMaio, a 37-year-old city councilman and mayoral candidate, tell these stories during his ubiquitous local media appearances. When he’s on stage, DeMaio is all about his plans to save city finances.… read more. “Mayoral candidate has online virtual self to answer voter questions”

[From Ars Technica]

[Image: Forth Dimension’s display technology packs all the pixels of a new iPad into a display less than an inch across, diagonally]

Virtual reality that doesn’t suck: My time inside Half-Life 2

By Kyle Orland | Published March 13, 2012

For decades now, the futuristic dream interface for video games has been some sort of head-mounted display (HMD) that removes the world around you and projects an all-encompassing, head-tracked 3D environment across your entire field of vision. But this dream has been largely dead in the water since the mid-’90s, when everyone from Nintendo and Sega to Atari was prototyping or releasing ill-thought-out Virtual Reality headsets, even though the technology of the time was far from capable of fulfilling the VR promise.

Now, we may be finally be reaching the point where the display technology is finally catching up to our collective virtual reality dreams.… read more. “Virtual reality that doesn’t suck: Getting inside Half-Life 2”

[From Boston.com; much more information is available in an article in Eurgamer]

‘Heavy Rain’ game creator debuts high-tech ‘Kara’

March 08, 2012 | Derrik J. Lang, AP Entertainment Writer

The future of performance-capture technology is right around the corner, and its name just might be “Kara.’’

David Cage of video game developer Quantic Dream unveiled a new way to simultaneously capture and digitize an actor’s performance — including voice, face and body — during a presentation Wednesday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The innovation came in the form of a 7-minute non-interactive demonstration titled “Kara.’’… read more. “‘Kara’ shows next step in performance-capture technology”

[From The Times Union in Albany, New York]

[Image: RPI doctoral student, Yiming Gao wears a motion capture suit in a room as an array of 12 3D motion capture cameras with infrared LEDs capture his movement which is seen on the computer screen at the RPI Nuclear Engineering Lab on Thursday, March 8, 2012 in Troy, NY. Members of the Rensselaer Radiation Measurement & Dosimetry Group have been working on the virtual reality and motion capture systems for use with radiation dose analysis. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)]

Virtual practice for real disasters

RPI research centers on how to keep repair crews safe in a nuclear catastrophe

By Brian Nearing
Published Thursday, March 8, 2012

TROY — When the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan began to melt down last year after being struck by a tsunami, technicians entered damaged radioactive areas to attempt repairs without knowing exactly what they would face.… read more. “Simulating nuclear catastrophe: Virtual practice for real disasters”