Text E.M.I.L.Y Lifesaving Robot – Floats Your Boat

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E.M.I.L.Y Lifesaving Robot – Floats Your Boat

I have to admit, its awfully difficult to imagine that summer is coming, even though the snow has finally left us, the chill is still in the air, its right about now that I get sick of winter and start longing for the days when we can pack up and hit the beach, the smell of suntan lotion in the air, tropical drinks with little colorful umbrellas, buff lifeguards in tight orange bathing suits with whistles and white noses.

Unless of course your lifeguard happens to be E.M.I.L.Y, she still has the orange suit, but this new version of last years lifesaving robot also has batteries, recently added sonar and the ability to “swim” at about 28 miles an hour. Baywatch hunk she’s not, but I take my lifesaving however it comes. As we reported last summer, lifeguards at Zuma Beach in Malibu California tested out this new lifesaving companion, E.M.I.L.Y. (Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard) Now she is also capable of  actually locating a distressed swimmer, by herself, through this new sonar detection. E.M.I.L.Y. can also travel up to 80 miles on a single charge.

Lifeguards can toss this thing in the water, and it can find and get to a victim in no time and then tow them back to shore, E.M.I.L.Y. might now even be equipped with a camera and speakers so that the real lifeguard at the controls can give reassurance or instructions to the person being saved. Woman all over the world can heave a collective sigh of relief, Pamela Anderson has been replaced for less than $4000.00 bucks and she is available now. There goes my husbands drowning fantasy.

During the I950's and I960's computers improved enormously. Still, only big businesses, universities and the military had them. Then in 1972 the videogame craze began.

Computers were scaled down to small boxes, using electronic circuitry instead of the Mark I's switches. They could do more than analyze data. They could play games.

The first big hit was a simple game called Pong. Two players sat in front of a television screen where a "ball", a point of light bounced back and forth. Using knobs on a cabinet, the players could hit the ball with inch-long "paddles" on the screen.

Nolan Bushnell grew up near Salt Lake City, Utah. He loved to tinker with machines and became an electrical engineer. He played primitive computer games that were even older than Pong.

"I built it with my own two hands and a soldering iron, Bushnell said of his creation of the first Pong game.

In 1972 Bushnell founded Atari Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., to build Pong games. By 1975 there were 150,000 Pong games in American homes.

Steve Wozniak, born in 1950, and Steven Jobs, born in 1955, the young video game fanatics, working out of a garage, invented the Apple computer in 1976. The age of home computers was born

One of Atari's early employees 19-year-old Steve Jobs and his friend, Steve Wozniak, who worked for another computer company, both loved video games.

Jobs and Wozniak dreamed of a personal computer, one that could do more than play games. From this dream, the Apple Computer Company started in a family garage.

In 1977 Jobs and Wozniak sold their first Apple II, which launched the personal computer industry. By 1985 they had sold more than two million Apple II 's.

The Apple II was more than a toy. People could use it to write letters, keep financial records and teach their children. And, yes, they could play games on it. The Apple II evolved into today's high-tech Macintosh computers. These computers popularized the use of the mouse, the hand-controlled device that moves the cursor on a computer display.

Элизабет Бро

Пока вы это читаете в метро, на автобусной остановке, по дороге на работу, десятки людей вокруг вас играют в Angry Birds. Действия новой серии игры происходят в космосе. Мы пообщались с Питером Вестербаком, создателем игры

Питера Вестербака называют Великий Орел. Он действительно заслужил это звание, потому что Питер – настоящий гypy Angry Birds. Кажется, теперь он хочет заставить весь мир заняться гимнастикой и разминкой для ума – конечно, вместе с Angry Birds.

- В современном мире все очень занятые. A Angry Birds – это отличный способ отвлечься от дел на пару минут. После игры можно вернуться к делам со свежими силами. На самом деле это очень здоровая привычка. Это вроде отпуска: в северных странах у людей длинные каникулы, но, когда они работают, продуктивность зашкаливает. И каникулы, и Angry Birds могут чудно «отремонтировать» вас после перегрузок на работе.

- Именно. Игры - это вообще отличная вещь. Вы знаете, почему финские молодые люди говорят по-английски лучше, чем финские девушки? Потому что они играют в компьютерные игры, которые часто попадаются без перевода. Нет никаких причин, чтобы не учиться, играя. Кстати, именно из-за этого принципа мы и решили открыть несколько тематических парков развлечений Angry Birds: почему бы не сделать подвижность веселой? Вы, конечно, можете бегать по несколько километров, но не всем это кажется развлечением. В наших парках мы хотим, чтобы люди двигались, бегали и прыгали. Мы хотим построить их в сотнях городах, по всей планете, чтобы любой мог легко до них добраться.

- В этих парках можно будет зарабатывать бонусы для компьютерной версии. Бонусами мы хотим заставить людей двигаться. Бели вы играете в Angry Birds, вам будут очень интересно сходить в такой парк - и не только повеселиться, но и получить бонусы и новые возможности. По-моему, это здорово.

- Ну, это была наша 52-я игра. Мы поняли это очень занятным образом. Один из наших сотрудников, Николас, поехал к родителям на Рождество и показал маме Angry Birds. Знаете, обычно родители смотрят на наши новые игры и говорят «да, очень мило», после чего возвращают телефон обратно. А мама Николаса играла в Angry Birds все Рождество. Дело даже не в том, насколько хороша игра. Хочу вам сказать, что, если кто-то хочет всерьез заниматься разработкой игр и приложений, придется всерьез заниматься маркетингом.

- Каким маркетингом?

Мы не тратим деньги на традиционную рекламу, а организуем разные акции, вроде той, в которой мы запустили в космос нашу космическую версию (попросту подарили их нашим астронавтам). Больше никакие игры в космос не запускали. И мы подумали: а почему бы и нет? Кроме того, сотрудничество с НАСА сильно повлияло на имидж игры, сделало ее более серьезной.

- Секрет в том, чтобы быть немного сумасшедшим. Мы хотим изменить мир, и надо быть сумасшедший, чтобы поверить, что ты сможешь это сделать. Нас называли психами, когда мы говорили, что хотим добиться 100 миллионов скачивании, но сейчас у нас уже 700 миллионов.

- Именно так. Быть психом не обязательно, но это помогает.

"Если у вас нет 100 млн долл. на рекламу на ТВ, вам приходится быть умнее. Мы - маленькая компания из 300 человек из маленького городка. Мы делаем рекламу по-иному. Маркетинг упирается не только в деньги".

Как вы думаете, носит ли жена Питера Вестербака платье Angry Birds на званый обед? Читайте полную версию тут,

Имя: Питер Вестербак

Откуда: Эспо, Финляндия

О нем: Великий Орел, создатель Angry Birds

London calling

More news, movies, screens &features at our Mario & Sonic at the London Olympic Games game hub.

When Danny Boyle directs the opening ceremony for London 2012 he'd be wise to watch M&S's CG intro. It's a masterclass in Olympic hype: heroic athletes, dramatic action and London scrubbed to within an inch of its sordid life.

They've shooed away the one-legged pigeons and broken-faced tramps, dredged the Thames of its McDonald's cartons/corpses and patched up the windows smashed in by restless teens. It is London as only Sega could see it, depressingly far from truth. Although Boris Johnson does have something of Dr Eggman about him.

Dream London gets a similarly romanticised Olympic Games. Don't you find the real Olympics to be unbearably slow? Watching the BBC's build-up to ten - sometimes less - seconds of action is enough to turn a man to murder. Or worse, ITV. In videogameland, however, events miraculously stream from a disc.

Better still, Sega unlock all disciplines from the outset, letting us schedule a Games to our liking. You know: female synchronised swimming, female trampolining, female ribbon twirling - all the classics. Alas, scandalously, mud fighting continues to go unrecognised by the Olympic Committee.

M&S 2012 certainly uses better events than the original game. Beijing over-relied on athletics, with too few mechanical twists to differentiate sprints and jumps of varying lengths and heights. Track is kept to 100m sprint, hurdles and relay and simplifies controls for less RSI. Meanwhile, field events refocus on throwing, with a neat throwing arc system replacing the tired 'power bars' of old.

With athletics out the way, Sega are free to pursue games with better competitive potential. Noticeably, team sports - football, badminton, volleyball, rowing, cycling - dominate the package.

Quality varies from event to event. Team sports are better fleshed out than other events. Football and volleyball could almost be standalone games, like Mario Sport Mix. Not amazing standalone games, but certainly more than you'd expect from a minigame compilation. Table tennis and badminton go down the Wii Sports route, moving characters automatically so you can focus on shot timing and placement.

Again, neither quite rivals the source material - the character animations are too rigid for any sense of one-to-one control - but we've enjoyed several long rallies playing these two games, nonetheless.

Most events keep controls nice and simple, essential for any pick up and play party game. Many include rhythm elements, challenging you to maintain steady flicks while performing minor button prods for bonus points. If you can wobble a remote you can trampoline, row and fling a Nintendo mascot between the uneven bars.

Bizarrely, ribbon twirling is an unexpected gem - jabbing the remote in time to visual cues plays like My First Ouendan. After two years of mindless Just Dance flailing it's nice to be reminded that the Wii remote can detect some nuance.

Of course, it wouldn't be a minigame compilation without a few jokers in the pack. Fencing is properly rotten, trying to win over hands weaned on Skyward Sword's miracle controls with crude remote thrusts. Maybe we're doing it wrong, but there's none of the poise or strategy of the real event.

Likewise volleyball, where we found flicks would sometimes fail to register. Solo players also have to contend with cheating AI in most events, though this is easily rectified by adding friends to the mix (friends sold separately).

Dream events also return, splicing sports with Nintendo and Sega DNA to create Mario Party-ish bursts of fun. Hurdles becomes a frantic conveyor belt dash in Battlerock Galaxy, uneven bars plays out in Sonic's futuristic Celia City, and the discus itself is ridden round Green Hill Zone.

Some are better than others (see the 'Dream A Little...' box, above), but there's a nice mix of selfish solo efforts and team-based co-operation. Getting four players to steer a raft down Cheep Cheep River is a particular hoot. More co-op events in Rio 2016, please! (With sales figure like M&S's, you know it's going to happen.)

The usual complaint that dream events show up the 'realistic' events doesn't apply here. Sega pump real world disciplines with more gimmicks and arcadey guff than before. There are special attacks, flaming bursts of speed and glittering star trails from perfect jumps - as there should be.

In the past, we've always sensed Sega shying away from their natural excessiveness in an attempt to appease their Olympic licenser - for the first time they've shown you can pay homage and keep tongue in cheek.

Party time

All the various bits are held together in London Party mode. It's a Mario Party-esque contest where contestants trot around a model village London looking for events and with them the chance to win stickers. Bumping into Mario and Sonic characters triggers minigames independent of the main events - coin-grabbing, maze-exploring, Boo-escaping bits of fluff.

When Big Ben tolls, everyone is pulled into a sporting event to compete for a big prize. It brings together London 2012's disparate parts quite nicely, and certainly trundles along faster than Mario's board game bore-a-thon.

London Party doesn't hold up half as well for single players, and they might miss having a dedicated mode of their own. Winter Olympics weaved the events into a 16-day replica of the event - would it have been too much to throw in similar cladding here? Instead players make do with challenges, a series of Xbox-y achievements awarded for chains of perfect hurdle jumps or besting events with different characters. Many are challenges you'd be doing anyway if you wanted a shot at the online leaderboard, so it does feel a little superfluous.

That said, Wii already has two hulking solo adventures for Christmas: Skyward Sword and Xenoblade. Mario & Sonic fills the multiplayer gap, and does it with good-humoured minigames and a renewed focus on throwaway Olympic fun. As far as party games go, it's the gold standard.

The aim of educational computer games is to get kids to have fun while learning art, politics, sports, science and entertainment. There is a place for the seemingly mindless fun that is provided by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. It is plain to see that video games are at least a small part of the entertainment budget of any household where fun, competition and spectacle are appreciated. However, educational games are developing right alongside the first person shooters, the tycoon games and the RPG's (role playing games); just to name a few types. Games with an educational side can be enjoyable as well as challenging. That learning can be fun, is the promise of educational game makers. Learning can be fun for children when they are really engaged in the learning process, actually not wanting to be taken away from it

The Educational Game Market

An ideal educational game may be characterized as one that teaches a skill that is useful outside of the game, and sells like crazy. And, maybe not in that order. One that did not cut it was called "Zap!" by Edmark, for Windows and Mac. Zap! would let players put on a music show, though that was just the payoff in this educational game designed to teach youngsters ages 8 to 12 about light, sound and electricity

The pretext of this cartoon-style game was that most of the equipment for a concert is broken and the player, as "guest director," must help repair it. The game then posed a series of increasingly difficult questions. With enough correct answers, another piece of equipment would get fixed. The more equipment, the more elaborate the concert. In the electricity section, players were quizzed about ways to build and complete circuits. In the laser laboratory, the task was to position a series of mirrors, prisms and lenses so that a laser beam strikes a target. "Zap!" offered the right blend of humor, challenge and help

For example, Surge, one of the three hosts, would inquire to know who judges an electrical baseball game (answer an amphire) and what sign you would find in a resistor's home ("Ohm Sweet Ohm"). Obviously Surge dragged his feet across too many carpets. If you asked for help, the game provided increasingly detailed hints

Those hints became important because the higher-level problems (there are at least 22 per topic) could become devilishly complicated. ("Zap!" also gave parents handy access to a special on-screen control that would allow them to track each child's progress through the lessons, or choose which problems will be presented.) "Zap!" may not have been the most electrifying educational board game ever made, but most kids who tried it were sure to get a charge out of it.

Marketing Educational Games

More than a little time and money has been spent by video game companies in the hopes of being able to provide educational games that are both marketable and that kids can enjoy. Ideally, even while playing the games, youngsters would be learning without it seeming as though they were sitting in a classroom

This is an elusive goal, as games that teach kids in the home environment are not wished for and neither are they purchased in anything like the volume of the mainstream video and computer games. Who could not guess that in the choice between education and entertainment, the inevitable pick is for the stimulation and escape offered by entertainment.

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В современной электронной сфере вряд ли кого можно удивить различными интерфейсами и формами мобильных телефонов и прочих электронных устройств. Однако, благодаря семимильным шагам инноваций и технологий, электронные системы становятся более функциональными и более удобными с точки зрения взаимодействия с пользователем. И одним из последних устройств, которое присоединяется к этим инновациям, является полностью рабочий мобильный телефон в виде печатки, разработанный конструктором Брайаном Серой (BryanCera) из Милуоки.

Мобильный телефон Брайана получил соответствующее название "GloveOne". Внутри его корпуса, состоящего из многих частей и изготовленного с помощью трехмерной печати, скрываются динамики, микрофоны, аккумуляторные батареи и кнопки для управления этим устройством. Создавая это технологическое новшество Брайан пытался подчеркнуть то, что современные технологии еще больше усугубляют на малоподвижный сидячий образ жизни.

Согласно Брайану, коньком его идеи является расширение за счет цифровых технологий функций наших рук и других конечностей. В данном случае рука человека превращается в высокотехнологичную интерактивную систему мобильной связи.

Опытный образец телефона GloveOne работает должным образом, позволяя осуществлять звонки и выполнять функции простейшего мобильного телефона. Конечно, сейчас никто из людей не станет одевать на себя такую перчатку-телефон, но кто знает, может быть в недалеком будущем эта идея будет воплощена в виде более удобного для ношения и использования устройства?