I watched this film recently on the suggestion of friend, a great documentary film with some of the nicest cinematography I’ve seen in the genre. Check out some stills from the movie and the trailer at the bottom.
The movie provides a comprehensive analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008, which at a cost over $20 trillion, caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and nearly resulted in a global financial collapse. Oh, and corruption all the way in to the White House. Well worth the watch.
I had a bit of time on the train back from Berlin this week and checking Twitter on my iPhone I saw a couple of the people I follow mentioning Tiny Tower and the fact that they were sorely tempted to (or had already made) in app purchases. I was curious to see what the mechanic was in this game that was getting people over this typically high friction barrier.
I downloaded it and got started with the 21 step tutorial that introduces all the core concepts in a couple of minutes, then spent the rest of my journey building floors, opening businesses, getting “Bitizens” into apartments and their dream jobs, stocking products, earning “Tower Bux”, and generally cultivating an unhealthy addicition to the thing.
After using it for a few days, I’d say it’s a masterpiece of mobile gaming. Trying to identify why, I broke it down into these key areas and their contributing factors:
Concept
The tower is ideally suited to the device. The portrait format is the orientation that you’re most comfortable holding your phone in and you can play the game with one hand.
Game actions are geared towards creating character attachment. You’re ultimate goal is to build a towering skyscraper, but all the decisions you make on the way are how to best fill the needs of your Bitizens based on their skills and the “dream job” they aspire to. Visitors who ask for them by name for various reasons and the different personalities they write with in the “Bitbook” newsfeed humanize them further.
Mechanics
The simulation runs in realtime, and you can’t complete everything in one session (for example, restocking of floors takes time and you can’t create a queue of products, you must return to the app to restock the next one) so you’re compelled to check in on the status of your tower at intervals. Historically I’ve only ever exhibited this behaviour on my phone with social networking apps Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare.
The required multitasking between construction, getting Bitizens, stocking businesses and taking advantage of normal and special building visitors keeps the attention-deficient player engaged.
Design
The bright colours and charming 8-bit graphics give the game individuality and visual appeal, and will push the nostalgia buttons of what I presume is a big demographic of iPhone owners who grew up playing DOS games in the late 80′s/90′s (does anyone remember Jones In The Fast Lane?!)
The interaction design has smartly stuck to iOS precedents. The menu and prompts are located at the bottom of the screen in easy thumb’s reach, the modal overlay design pattern for the various app tasks is straight out of iOS and the menu view could be an 8-bit skin of your iPhone home screen.
The sound design has had serious attention. The smooth jazzy music supports the pleasant tone of the game without getting irritating, every floor type has custom sounds (e.g. a retail floor will ring a till when you tap it), and the quiet clinking of coins every time a sale is made provide an incessant audio stream of achievement.
Monetization
Tiny Tower’s monetization model is setup to leverage gamers impatience to progress. Alongside the standard ingame “Coin” currency there are “Tower Bux”. This premium currency can be used as a catalyst to instantly complete all game tasks that would otherwise require time.
The premium currency can be earnt through normal gameplay over time; no area of the game is locked off from users, they can invest time rather than dollars to acquire it.
The further up the tower you go, the longer floor construction takes. The more engaged the player, the higher the time friction gets, ergo the bigger the incentive to purchase Tower Bux.
The larger the amount of Tower Bux you purchase, the better the exchange rate is.
All in all, an impressively holistic piece of work from a couple of guys that call themselves NimbleBit. Watch the introductory video below, or go and get Tiny Tower here.
The guys at COSALUX were kind enough to send me to OFFF Barcelona the week before, a festival celebrating digital design, culture and art. It was a great three days despite some logistical issues with a shortage of seating and overloaded wifi. But, the quality of the speakers, the venue, the friendly people and general good vibes more than made up for the sore feet and backlog of emails at the end of the day. The tapas and cerveza available within three blocks in any direction was definitely a massive plus as well!
There was a great lineup of talented speakers and I’m going to try and do a series of posts about the ones that stood out for me. So without further ado, this was Seeper.
Evan Grant from interactive artist and technology collective Seeper gave a talk that went over their creative output, lessons learnt, and revealed a project that they have been doing intense R&D on for a couple of years that is best described as a three dimensional pixel display, codenamed “Straws”. It’s essentially a grid of RGB pixels that’s depth in physical space can be manipulated independently with the aid of a little mechanical wizardy. In hindsight, it’s a logical step that builds on their experience in architectural projection mapping, but it blew everyone’s mind in the room when he presented it.
Evan didn’t impress me because he’s an outrageously talented interactive artist and technologist (which he most certainly is), but because he’s a futurist with a vision who has assembled a company to realize it. In under an hour he covered topics as broad as the importance of humanizing technology, advocated biomimicry (borrowing solutions from the natural world), creating responsive environments that delight us, and designing buildings that are sympathetic to their occupants and adapt to their needs and moods. For a self-described “wannabe architect”, Evan’s ideas in architecture and spatial design seem right on the money.
And he’s achieved a kind of creative utopia. Do amazing stuff creatively and technologically, and some brand is bound to pay for it just to be associated with it. I mean, what’s not to love about that!?
To get a bit more of feeling for him and his outlook, this interview after his talk is well worth the watch:
And this isn’t the talk he gave but it’s a slide deck I found that describes some of their projection mapping work and what value it has for brands for those interested:
The Seeper Vimeo channel is a great place to checkout more of their work as well. I’ll try and keep momentum up and get another speaker up soon, if anyone else saw the talk or has seen Evan speak, please add your thoughts in the comments!
This might be a bit of a stretch, but it occurred to me how ironic the outrageous popularity (and the corresponding prices) of Calvin Klein underwear is. Don’t get me wrong, the man himself is clearly a fashion minimalism design genius and full respect to him as a self-made man.
No, what I particularly enjoy is how the meaning of the word “klein” in German literally translates to “small”. And they sell like hotcakes here too. So much so that they have flagship stores in Munich and Berlin. You’ve got a large portion of the male population paying around 30€ a pop for the privilege of running around with the word “small” emblazoned on their crotch while spending even larger amounts on cars with big engines and extreme sports trying to prove the opposite.
So what does it mean? I’m guessing, but I would say the brand has achieved exactly what it should – namely, it’s removed rational thinking from the buying equation. You aren’t buying the underwear that says “Calvin Small” on it, you’re buying the handful of cotton with a tag on it that makes your junk look good (or so you think). It isn’t two words anymore, it’s a graphic form that guarantees irresistibility to the opposite sex when applied to snug boxers.
The subject goes a lot deeper than that and I can’t do justice to it in a blog post, but the book “Mesmerization – The Spells That Control Us, Why We Are Losing Our Minds To Global Culture” can. This is one of the best written and designed books I’ve read on contemporary visual culture and I’m getting just a little bit sad writing about it knowing that it’s in a box about 18,000 kilometres from me in my parent’s house back in New Zealand.
If anyone else has noticed a case of brand irony or knows of other great books related to the subject please share it in the comments. For now, look at the man below; you can’t be him, but your boxers could look like his boxers.
The behaviour Nolan already had in place on the sphere was awesome, reading his code I could get the logic but figuring it out would have taken me a lot of time so big thanks to him for being so generous with his source. If you check out his post, I basically left the ApplicationView class alone, just tweaked the parameters on the sphere to exaggerate the particles’ response and added a ColorPool to have a few random shades from light grey to white on the particles.
What I really got stuck into was what could be done with the scene after the 3D had been rendered. I implemented HYPE’s BitmapCanvas to blit the scene which gave a nice performance boost and with a heavy blur rhythm running on the canvas it took on the lovely ethereal halo you see. So at this stage, I was getting outputs like this:
Pretty enough, but after my last greyscale effort I wanted some colour in there. I initially played around with TweenLite modifying the colorTransform property on the BitmapCanvas but the single colour didn’t really push my buttons either. I had this idea that just dumping a gradient bitmap into and spinning on the timeline would work but I was sure the performance would suffer. Still, it would only take me two minutes to test, so I figured why not? I’m really stoked I did because a hasty colour gradient bitmap from Photoshop and a few keyframes later the visualizer had it’s colours and only dropped the frame rate by a few frames (without it was benchmarking at 33fps, with the gradient it slipped to 30).
And that’s pretty much all there is to it. I did a little bit of refactoring to integrate the music streaming from SoundCloud so you can search for your favourite tracks and watch the sphere groove out to them (and launch the app with my current favourite D&B track, NetSky’s Pendulum Witchcraft Remix, B.I.G. tune!).
If there is a enough people who would be interested in a visualizer boilerplate/template project so they can get straight into visualization without messing about setting up a UI and SoundCloud api calls then let me know and I’ll take a couple of hours to get the classes nice and tidy for everyone. It’s not total chaos at the moment but it could be a bit more organized. ;)
Happy listening/watching and if you have any questions or want the code leave a comment below!
We were getting all nostalgic about Lego at the agency a few days ago, and the day after Wolfgang brought in “Das große Lego-Buch”. As someone who grew up in an era when Lego came with glossy step-by-step manuals, and was getting marketing savvy doing stuff like licensing themes from movies, this book was illuminating. It started by giving kids a loose narrative (it began on a rainy day…) and takes them on a journey to ports, farms, train stations and finally “building the new world”.
And it makes you wonder what we’re doing to our toys that once encouraged creativity, overactive imaginations and exuberant invention. There was an article on fastcodesign about fostering creativity play with great points about open-ended play, and the importance of ambiguity, complexity, and improvisation. And as play goes more digital, will future generations creativity be stifled by the parameters of a game? Food for thought…
It’s been a long wait, but Google’s Chromebook is going to hit the market June 15 and has the potential to remove the notion of the desktop, local storage, irritating software updates, boot sequences that take an eternity and losing your holiday pictures for good. It’s a product that Google has been working for 2+ years to realize and been rolling out all the necessary prerequisites (online apps and the pivotal Web Store) – a cloud-based operating system.
Ben Parr breaks down exactly why this is a worthwhile (read lucrative) goal for them. The more time you’re on the web, the more money they make. And for the everyday consumer at home, it makes a lot of sense. Compare the bewildering array of features offered by Microsoft Office to the stripped down functionality set in Google’s online suite – there’s precious little missing from the online offerings that you actually need.
With the marketing playing to Google’s obvious strengths of speed, reliability and security it’s well positioned. Hardware launch partners Samsung and Acer will be putting out a 12.1″ and 11.6″ notebooks respectively with Wi-Fi and 3G options starting from $349. It’s an appealing price point, and it’s going to be interesting to see at what rate the market adopts this new offering in a busy segment where the lines between tablet, notebook and laptop are getting blurrier all the time.
Check out the feature tour and please add your ten cents in the comments below!
New Zealand Music Month is a celebration of homegrown Kiwi musical talent and it’s back in a little under a week from now. Anytime I get a little bit homesick spinning some Kiwi tunes reminds me of beaches, jandies, barbecues and summer as it should be.
I’ve played with music visualization in Flash a little bit in the past, and combined with a lot of investigation into the HYPE Framework (developed by Branden Hall and Joshua Davis) recently with my current work at COSALUX, I decided it was time to do a little side project to try and solidify my learnings and enjoyment of Kiwi beats into something. After a few evenings work, this is the result (Flash Player 10+ required):
My “plan” for the project was pretty vague as I was still exploring the capabilities of HYPE. In development the structure evolved into two sets of visualizations, backgrounds and foregrounds. The foregrounds (the NZ Music Month logo, the type, and the map of NZ) are vector graphics in the library that HYPE FunctionTrackers adjust the scale, alpha and in some cases the rotation of the graphic assets based on an octave from the SoundAnalyzer. I used the backgrounds to try out the Swarm and SimpleBallistic behaviours as well as a more vanilla equalizer line draw. A FunctionTracker adjusting the spin speed of all of these gives the visualizations some uniformity.
The amount of performance you can gouge out of Flash with HYPE is pretty impressive, with all of this being captured by a BitmapCanvas the framerate rarely strays below the target 25fps. The SoundAnalyzer class takes all the headaches out of trying to write a decent sound analysis Class yourself (checkout Branden’s explanatory video on Vimeo), just grab the octave or frequency you want and start animating something.
To get the audio streams I initially implemented an EchoNest feed reader which was particularly good at finding the original songs. This worked like a charm locally but as soon as I put it live the visualizations stopped reacting although the audio would still stream in. Long story short, to use the computeSpectrum method on your Sound objects, you need file permissions to be granted by a crossdomain policy on the source server. EchoNest is basically Google for audio so I had little hope of the results having crossdomain policies in place. So, I had to swap out the audio source for SoundCloud (bless them and their crossdomain policies) which runs great online. The only little irritation this gives me is that you will find a lot more remixes in the track listings, but that’s just me being picky.
Other libraries that came in handy were CASALib to promote garbage collection, TweenLite for the transitions, MinimalComps for the simple artist/track picker UI and SWFProfiler for frame rate and memory profiling.
If you don’t have Flash 10 or are on your mobile there’s a few stills below of the visualizer in action. Oh, and if you’re a Kiwi artist please (please!) leave your SoundCloud user name in the comments below and I’ll include you in the artist list. ‘Nuff said, go and listen to some Kiwi music already!
I’ve been wanting to write something about this for a while, but watching Terminator 4 (the plot’s not genius, but give me post-apocalyptic futurism, robots, and a lot of explosions and I’m pretty happy) last night gave me the burst of inspiration to try and give my thoughts some kind of structure. We aren’t at risk of world domination by SkyNet as far as I can forsee in 2011, but there’s some interesting and potentially concerning trends emerging.
As digital and networked technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous, so does our reliance on it for communication and public infrastructure. The present risk of technology dependence today does not stem from a “self-aware” artificial intelligence but rather how political groups or corporate interests might choose to leverage it against each other. Trying to research this topic I found a mixed bag of terms like Cyberwarfare, Cyberterrorism, Hacktivism, Network-Centric Warfare or Weaponized Software which all help to confuse the issue a bit more. I found this nice definition of a software weapon in this serious white paper “A Taxonomy Of Software Weapons” which I think sums it up pretty well:
“Software for logically influencing information and/or processes in IT systems in order to cause damage”
If you’ve read this far and are thinking “So it’s a flash name for a virus? Big deal”, this is where it gets more interesting. A virus typically causes damage of a digital ergo intangible nature; you get annoying flashing crap all of your screen, lose all your holiday photos and have a frustrating few hours reinstalling Windows. But what if software was capable of tangible, physical damage?
Well, it actually already is. For those of you reading who didn’t catch the news about StuxNet that rocked the tech community last year, to quote Wikipedia verbatim:
“Stuxnet is a Windows computer worm discovered in July 2010 that targets industrial software and equipment. While it is not the first time that hackers have targeted industrial systems,it is the first discovered malware that spies on and subverts industrial systems, and the first to include a programmable logic controller (PLC) rootkit. The worm initially spreads indiscriminately, but includes a highly specialized malware payload that is designed to target only Siemens Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems that are configured to control and monitor specific industrial processes.”
Heavy, heavy stuff. The article goes on to say how the majority of the affected devices were in Iran and programmed to only affect a very specific software and hardware configuration, presumably isolating the activity to the Iranian uranium enrichment infrastructure. It had two major objectives; one was industrial espionage which was performed by uploading data to anonymous servers in Denmark and Malaysia. The second (and far more mind boggling) function was to fritz a motor’s rotation speed from 2hz to 1410hz, all the while hiding this activity by returning a constant speed to the system software. I don’t know what the consequences of such a thing might be in a nuclear workplace, but it doesn’t sound good.
Knowing that this is possible, let your imagine run wild for a minute and see where you get to. Dependent on your political outlook, StuxNet could be construed as being used for good (less enriched uranium to make nuclear stuff with in the world is fine by me) but when you start to think about power generation, water filtration, air traffic control and all the other components of our infrastructure that rely heavily on digital networks or will in the near future, you can’t help but thinking of how this could be turned to malicious uses with some nasty impacts.
This got a bit heavier than the kind of stuff I intended to post here but it’s an interesting and open-ended subject that I’m keen to hear some more opinions on. It’s impossible to know when the next piece of weaponized software will appear, but the idea of a digital action having physical consequences is a metaphor that’s starting to echo through our daily lives as we commit more of our thoughts and feelings to the pixels of the Internet.
Anyway, is there anything we can conclusively draw from this? I would advise, be nice to geeks. They may not be able to give you the beat down in real life yet, but the “digital ninjas” could be coming out of the computer (and pwning your local Seven Eleven, see article image) sooner than you think.
I had a moment of realization as I was developing the website you’re reading this on. At some point in my five years of digital dabbling, I started to take open source as a given. The quantity, quality and availability of code libraries, frameworks, content management systems et al. had become so pervasive in my everyday workflow that they had become invisible.
The idea that I had become ignorant of this mountain of generosity I was building upon was kind of appalling, so I took a step back and tried to quantify it all. This quickly turned out to be a bigger job than I had anticipated as the various frameworks, boilerplates and plugins begun to add up. Long story short, it called for an infographic. So, after some research (which took the majority of my time but is still woefully incomplete I fear) and a couple of evenings designing, here’s a thanks to all the talented people who’s work and generosity I rely so much on; see the full-sized version here.
Creating this has made me appreciate how much time goes into the research of a infographic before you get to start having fun with type and pushing pixels around, it really is “graphic journalism”. This visual doesn’t even take into account the enormous efforts of people to create the 5+ programming languages used and all of the computer science that went before them. So, I’ve opted to qualify the title with “the 90+ people who helped me build” because I’m 100% certain that I’ve missed someone(s).
Who’s shoulders are you standing on that deserve some credit? Give them a big up in the comments below!
