All of us at sometime wished that we really had Jedi Mind Tricks where we could lift a starfighter out of a swampy mess. We can’t do this yet..but about a month ago the game Mind Balance was demonstrated for the first time at MIT Media Lab Europe in Dublin (everything awesome happens in Ireland now).

Mind Balance is based on a new wireless headset with six different types of nodes positioned over the occipital lobes (on the back of the head just above the neck) which are resposible for processing light, vision, and hallucinations. The cap is able to monitor electrical signals from the surface of the scalp and basically create a direct connection to the eyes from the brain’s optical nerve. The Mindgames Group was able to take the brain activity into a C# signal-processing engine that can analyze these signals in real-time and decide which way the player is looking.

They have created several different games and the most effective is Mind Balance. Here the player must help Mawg-a cosmic tight-walking crazying frog looking guy that’s suppose to represent a Behemoth. The player helps this Scottish bloke keep his balance by a brain cap.

If Mawg totters to the right, the player can shift him to the left by staring at an orb on the left hand side of the screen. So that the blinking orbes produeces a signal that can be detected, the orbs have to render a consistent 60 frames-per-second or more.

Mindgames have developed several other games like Peace Composed- where the player must relax to fully enjoy a piece of Phil McDarby’s orchestral music. The more the player relaxes: the more intricate the music becomes. Also, Still Life was developed by physiotherapists at the Central Remedial Clinic in Dublin. It uses a movement interface designed to reward the player for practicing a movement over and over again correctly. Still Life turns boring exercises into a ‘engaging interaction’. The program is able to monitor the improvement of patient/player’s exercise.

Today, we might be taking Mawg for a walk on a cosmic tightrope or making pretty colors while we exercise, tomorrow we could be pulling an X-Wing out of the icky swamp mud!

OK. I can say without much expectation of negative feedback that the Nintendo Wii has universal appeal. The realistic demographic of this system is probably quite similar to the age range found on those Yes & Know invisible ink books.

Video games used to be a relatively focused territory of adolescent/teen/20 something boys. Rarely would parents or grandparents or girls venture into this button-mashing pastime. When mom or sis would somehow get reeled in for a game of Sonic the Hedgehog or MarioKart, we would laugh as they’d gesture emphatically with their controller in an effort to assist whichever character they were controlling. As if Mario would jump higher if you thrust the controller upward at the moment of your jump…how silly!

Fast forward to now. All those amateur game maneuvers have become an essential part of playing many games on the wii. They’re putting wiis in nursing homes and these old people are digital bowling their liver-spotted heads off. Moms, sisters, girlfriends and wives are all waiting in line for their turn to play wii tennis.

But there’s more to the wii than just extreme overall likability. The wii and its components have huge potential for abilities beyond what they already can do. Thankfully, there are people who realize this and are doing their best to take advantage of it. Take, for example, Johnny Chung Lee. He’s put together a number of different projects using the Wii Remote. Here’s a quote from his website:

“[The Wii Remote] happens to be one of the most sophisticated [computer input devices in the world]. It contains a 1024×768 infrared camera with built-in hardware blob tracking of up to 4 points at 100Hz. This significantly out performs any PC “webcam” available today. It also contains a +/-3g 8-bit 3-axis accelerometer also operating at 100Hz and an [expansion] port for even more capability. These projects are an effort to explore and demonstrate applications that the millions of Wii Remotes in [the] world readily support.”

Here are his projects:

Tracking your fingers…think, Minority Report

Multi-Point Interactive Whiteboard

Headtracking (3-D)

www.johnnylee.net

I was going to attach this to the last post, but it got a bit long, so I decided to just give it it’s own post. If you’ve read my old blog, you’re familiar with my HitchHiker’s Guide entries. If not, they’re basically additional related information at the end of a post (usually), done in my best HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy style. So keep an eye for the occasional guide entry at the end of a post.

On to the subject at hand:

It’s a feeling that can go straight to the pit of your stomach. You have difficultly swallowing. Vision is slightly blurred and your head is spinning. A million curses go through your head as you stare at your Ipod (or other important electronic device) at the bottom of the washing machine.

Actually, when I found my iPod, after the full heavy duty wash setting, none of the above happened. I was pretty confused about why my Ipod (his name is Moose, by the way) would want to be in the washing machine. I’m what you would call a ‘Google Child’. I Google the unknown.

For example, we had a bird stuck in our wood stove. My mom thought she could put bread crumbs in her hand; the bird would hop into her hand and she carry it outside after singing a song with it. My dad wanted to stick Ringo (my cat) in the woodstove and shut the door. Google child checks it out. You use a pillow case on your hand like a glove, grab the dumb bird, turn pillow case inside out and release the bird outside.

After five minutes of painful research about my iPod: plan of action! The good news was the ever powerful ‘Hold’ setting kept it off during the spin cycle. I was smart enough to not try to turn it on right away.

So number one— DO NOT TURN THE iPOD ON. It is recommended to shake in a circular motion (taken care of with the Spin Cycle) or sucking on the end of it to draw the moisture out (I think they just wanted to see how many dummies would do that).

It needed to dry in a warm place but not somewhere so hot it fried the gizmos. I decided not to try the ‘Oven Technique’ like a friend of mine did with his phone after he ran into the ocean with it. I have an adapter for my DVD Player and TV (I cannot remember why I even need that now…) that generates a nice bit of heat so I stuck it under there. Tried it a day later and it worked but there was a water stain on the screen.

Later that evening, a crazy message about my battery being dead came up (that’s stupid–my iPod battery only died once and took a week to do that). I was worried that there was water still in there. So I plugged it into my computer and stuck it between two adapters in the wall. A day later of being nice and toasty—works better than ever and what I thought was a water stain is gone. One of the websites said that if my iPod survived this was actually a good thing because it cleaned out all the dust and grime.

So if you submerge your iPod (or other electronic device of importance) hope is never lost as long as you have the power of Google [ed. note: or TheFourTwo.com]. Chances are someone else has done the exact same thing and, like myself, made themselves the center of humor by revealing their stupidity online for everyone to see.