Pong, 1969: A Milestone in Video Game History

in History, Technology | July 5th, 2011

The world’s first video game, OXO, was invent­ed in 1952. As the title sug­gests, it was sim­ple tic-tac-toe, and you could only play it on the EDSAC com­put­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge. (Watch it in action here.) The fun did­n’t real­ly get start­ed until the late 1960’s, when Robert Baer, Bill Har­ri­son and Bill Rusch devel­oped a ping pong game you could play on your tele­vi­sion. The above video shows Baer and Har­ri­son play­ing the game on the “brown box” — the pro­to­type for the com­put­er con­soles that would make the 70s and 80s such won­der­ful, seden­tary decades to be a child.

Baer insist­ed on detailed note-tak­ing, with the hap­py result that you can now read all of his team’s ear­li­est notes and mem­os at the online archives of the Lemel­son Cen­ter for the Study of Inven­tion and Inno­va­tion. Or you could just play Pong.

via Matthias Rasch­er

Sheer­ly Avni is a San Fran­cis­co-based arts and cul­ture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Week­ly, Moth­er Jones, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @sheerly.

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iPhone Magic by Techno-Illusionist Marco Tempest

in Apple, iPhone, Technology | June 29th, 2011

No more top hat and hand­ker­chief. Mar­co Tem­pest uses iPods and iPhones to cre­ate mag­ic for the 21st cen­tu­ry. He calls him­self a tech­no-illu­sion­ist. “I explore the bor­ders between tech­nol­o­gy and mag­ic,” says Tem­pest, “between what’s incred­i­bly real and incred­i­bly not.” Orig­i­nal­ly from Switzer­land, Tem­pest now lives in New York City. He was fea­tured in the inter­na­tion­al­ly syn­di­cat­ed tele­vi­sion series, The Vir­tu­al Magi­cian, and his work can be viewed on a YouTube chan­nel of the same name. His newest release, “iPod Magic–Deceptions,” fea­tures an appli­ca­tion he devel­oped to syn­chro­nize video play­back on mul­ti­ple screens. The App is called “Mul­ti­Vid.” You can down­load it for free here, and learn how to use it here.

via Dar­ren Brown

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The Elements of Creativity

in Art, Creativity, Technology | June 22nd, 2011

The Ele­ments of Cre­ativ­i­ty. They come down to this: Copy. Trans­form. Com­bine. Noth­ing is tru­ly orig­i­nal. Every­thing is a remix, more or less.

Direc­tor Kir­by Fer­gu­son first traced this idea through lit­er­a­ture and music, then through film­mak­ing. Next up? Tech­nol­o­gy, com­put­ers and user inter­face. Above we have the third and penul­ti­mate install­ment in the “Every­thing is a Remix” series. (You can watch it in large for­mat here.) Look for the final seg­ment to appear this fall, and con­sid­er sup­port­ing the project here.

Nice work Kir­by and h/t Brain­Pick­ings.

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Anatomy of a Computer Virus: A 3.5 Minute Primer

in Science, Technology, TED Talks | June 21st, 2011

Last week, Cit­i­group admit­ted that hack­ers exposed the pri­vate finan­cial data of more than 360,000 cus­tomer accounts. Mean­while, in an unre­lat­ed attack, Lulz Secu­ri­ty man­aged to bring down the CIA web­site, and this week they’ve declared war on gov­ern­ment agen­cies around the world.

Now might be a good time to beef up on your knowl­edge of mal­ware, cyber­crime, and cyber­war­fare, start­ing with Stuxnet, a com­put­er virus that was launched against Iran­ian nuclear infra­struc­tures in 2010 (most like­ly by the U.S.). For a quick primer on Stuxnet, check out Anato­my of a Com­put­er Virus. It’s only three and a half min­utes long, but you’ll learn enough to decide whether or not to set your lap­top on fire, sell every­thing you own, and run scream­ing for the Yukon.

For a more detailed explo­ration of the virus, watch Crack­ing Stuxnet, A 21st-Cen­tu­ry Cyber Weapon, a TED talk by cyber-secu­ri­ty expert Ralph Langn­er. Dis­claimer: It won’t nec­es­sar­i­ly put you at ease — the pre­sen­ter clos­es by thank­ing Mr. Langn­er for “scar­ing the liv­ing day­lights out of us.”

Via PopTech and Hun­gry Beast

Sheer­ly Avni is a San Fran­cis­co-based arts and cul­ture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Week­ly, Moth­er Jones, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @sheerly.

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The Next-Generation Digital Book

in Books, e-books, Technology | May 12th, 2011

There will be a day — maybe it’s already here; maybe it was always here — when the Kin­dle will look incred­i­bly retro. Mike Matas, once a design­er of user inter­faces at Apple and now co-founder of Push Pop Press, may make that day of visu­al reck­on­ing come soon­er rather than lat­er. The demo above (which is eas­i­ly worth a thou­sand words) lets you peer into the near future.. Text, images, audio, video and inter­ac­tive graph­ics — they’ll come togeth­er in a seam­less read­ing expe­ri­ence, mak­ing the tra­di­tion­al ebook look entire­ly one dimen­sion­al. You can down­load the book on dis­play, Al Gore’s “Our Choice,” on iTunes here.

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Inventing the Digital Camera: A Short Portrait of Steven Sasson

in Technology, Video - Science | April 14th, 2011

Work­ing for East­man Kodak back in 1975, Steven Sas­son, an elec­tri­cal engi­neer by train­ing, was tasked with build­ing a cam­era that used sol­id state elec­tron­ics and sol­id state imagers to cap­ture opti­cal infor­ma­tion. Or, put very sim­ply, he was asked to build the first dig­i­tal cam­era. And he did just that.

In the lat­est of a series of short doc­u­men­taries on con­tem­po­rary inven­tors, pho­tog­ra­ph­er David Fried­man sat down with Sas­son at Kodak’s head­quar­ters in Rochester, NY and revis­it­ed the tech­ni­cal and cul­tur­al chal­lenges faced by the inven­tor. So far, Fried­man has pro­duced 32 por­traits of inven­tors, and, for the most part, you’ll rec­og­nize the inven­tors’ cre­ations soon­er than their names. You can access the full col­lec­tion of por­traits here.

via Fast Co Design and Brain­Pick­ings

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Every Step You Take, They’ll Be Tracking You

in Media, Technology | April 12th, 2011

Malte Spitz, a mem­ber of the Green Par­ty in Ger­many, sued Deutsche Telekom and forced the com­pa­ny to hand over six months of record­ed cell phone data. The results were fair­ly eye open­ing.

Dur­ing a five month peri­od, DT tracked Spitz’s loca­tion and phone usage 35,000 times. If that sounds like a lot, you’re right. And it looks even worse when you visu­al­ize the data. Zeit Online took this geolo­ca­tion data and com­bined it with pub­licly-avail­able infor­ma­tion relat­ing to Spitz’s polit­i­cal life (e.g., his Twit­ter feeds and blog entries) and pro­duced a screen­cast that doc­u­ments two days in the life of the Green Par­ty politi­cian. The YouTube video above traces his steps. But the visu­als on the Zeit site let you track Spitz’s move­ments around Ger­many with fin­er pre­ci­sion. The moral of the sto­ry: Every step you take, your tel­co is like­ly track­ing you, whether you give con­sent or not. The New York Times has more on the sto­ry…

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The Quadrocopter Opera

in Music, Technology | April 4th, 2011

Physics gets its own lit­tle opera. And you’ll nev­er look at quadro­copters, those ball jug­gling robots, in quite the same way. Nice work “Opera­man­da”…

via @chr1sa

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