Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 320

Hatsune Miku is here to destroy everything you love (and hate) about pop stardom

Pop’s uncanny valley makes her way to the States.

Scientists are trying to make robots that can feel things

The use of robots is widespread throughout society: in medicine, combat, warehouses and factories. However, one limitation is holding them back from advancing into other industries: a lack of touch.

Human touch is complex and highly sensitive, sensitive enough to detect textures on a nanoscale level. So, translating that into equivalent haptic feedback is a difficult task.

Human touch is complex and highly sensitive. 

“It just takes time, and it’s more complicated,” said Ken Goldberg, a University of California, Berkeley, in an article for the New York Times. “Humans are really good at this, and they have millions of years of evolution.”

One of the major obstacles in designing a robot with haptic feedback is processing power; it requires significant hardware to allow a robot to compute something so sensitive. Goldberg is currently trying to develop cloud-based robotics that can use the power of the Internet to solve that problem.

“I’m very excited about the idea of cloud robotics,” Goldberg told the Times. “It is lifting the limitation of computing that we’ve always had.”

Haptic feedback in robotics is one piece of a greater puzzle in creating the complete sensing robot. Advances in visual and kinetic senses are also required, but together, autonomous robots that can identify objects and interact with them properly would allow robots to function in roles like health aides or more sensitive surgical roles. But, just the haptic feedback alone will also help pave the way to more sophisticated human augmentation.

The technology is not yet there and there is no timeframe for its arrival, but the industry is trying. As for the future where humanoid robots work alongside flesh-and-bone humans in major aspects of daily life, we’re a touch closer.

Image credit: Richard Greenhill, Hugo Elias - Shadow Robot Company

Image credit: NASA

This ambient toy aids appreciation of Manfred Mohr's computer art

Do not fear the hypercube. 

Sexting with robots with Kara Stone

The Medication Meditation creator makes the personal interactive.

Alex Harvey’s genre-bending, game-destroying take on Burroughs

Sharing headspace with a maniac.

You've defended towers, now defend your gross internal organs

It's not until you fall sick that you appreciate good health. You enter a state of hyper-sensitivity, suddenly realizing the labor of your every action, every movement, and every breath. Sometimes, when ill, I sit up in bed to fully concentrate my newfound awareness of the coiling and squelching of my inner systems, and think to my medicine-drunk self, "Man, being alive takes a lot of hard work."

But, even then, it's not possible to truly grasp the scale of your body's to-do list that it's constantly ticking off and rewriting with every passing second. When you think about it, most of us have the privilege of running on automatic, only occasionally clutching our chest with worry when our precious organs practice an irregular beat. I like to think of that as your body asking for some recognition for everything it does.

So, say it with me: Thanks body. Thody.

You draw a system of veins between each organ and muscle 

I say all this after having swapped places with my bodily organs in the real-time strategy game Prophour23. In it, you have to protect a beating heart from a louse invasion (yeah, eww, seriously) by growing muscles, "scream organs", and bones. Success is found in constructing clockwork co-ordination between the innards of this grossly abstracted organism (the title screen suggests it's a fish).

Attempts to do this haven't gone well for me so far. Put it this way, it took me 15 minutes just to get through the tutorials, learning how each organ functions. And, on this note, the appropriation of certain body parts as defense units makes for some interesting translations.

The heart and stomach generate blood that drips down the screen; the energy source used to grow further organs. Eyes act as searchlights when the day-night cycle plunges you in darkness. You draw a system of veins between each organ and muscle in order to power them, while stretching bones out from ribcages to hands provides a solid wall that confuses the louse's path. Your main defense are thorns, stalks of which you stretch around like barbed wire, and place in turret-like "scream" circles.

But the one that made me slightly uncomfortable were the breasts. In Prophour23, they're stripped of their primary function—to feed young—and used instead to attract the louse toward them and away from your vital organs. It's a gesture that provokes metaphor: you are using the physical attraction of your body to avoid letting in those that would otherwise break your heart. The introduction of the breasts seems to equate the louse to sex-driven beasts, as they forget their primary goal due to the mammary lure, crawling all around it with a disturbing enthusiasm.

This never lasts long, mind, as Prophour23 stresses the difficulty of creating an interconnected highway of bodily innards that can self-protect from bacterial bugs and harmful disease. It appeals to me for two main reasons. Firstly, its presentation has the unclean feel of a Victorian surgery: it all takes place on old brown paper and consists of lavishly pen-drawn scientific diagrams of the body and surgical instruments.

Secondly, it is as laborious as trying to puppeteer an alien organism should be. It's hard work, and when the organs start to fail due to infection it really makes you panic. Playing Prophour23 has the urgency and repulsiveness of picking through someone's guts, trying to untangle their intestines, and shoving them back in to prevent them from dying. 

You can purchase Prophour23 for $10 on its official website, as well as Steam.

Lucas Pope finds his procedural zen

The follow-up to Papers, Please is looking lovely and decidedly lo-fi. 

Lauren McCarthy takes on Silicon Valley optimism

What a kingdom of apps and tech obsession hath wrought.

Watch the trailer for a game that takes "life hack" pretty literally

Consider me else { excited() }. Or whatever.

Studio Oleomingus wants to take us to an impossible Somewhere

A collection of shorts, fragments of a mirror.