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it’s cross platform and cross device — so you don’t need specific hardware to get a gaming session up and running

You won’t be able to play the newest AAA games with it, but that’s also not really what we’re all about. AirConsole is to play a few quick games with friends while having a beer.

Zwift’s software can then convert the signal into power data, which is calculated by considering rider weight, the virtual terrain and even drafting into account to convert the power to speed within the game.

the virtual environment is impressive as it gives off sound effects from your surroundings and from the other riders that pass or are around you, making it a supremely immersive training session

showcase four experience prototypes that demonstrate the novel interactive experiences that are possible with RoomAlive and discuss the design challenges of adapting any game to any room

describes the rules and restrictions we put on screen time. Some of these restrictions limit time, other restrictions filter content.

Restrictive Mediation

Unlimited access to media becomes one of the markers of adulthood.

Instructive Mediation describes what happens when we talk to our kids while watching a movie or playing a video game with them. Make it a teaching opportunity

Instructive mediation is key for raising kids that are critical thinkers and intelligent adults in a media saturated world–kids who know how to THINK about the media they consume.

Social Coviewing is when you watch something with your kids but don’t necessarily talk about it. This is what happens in a movie theater.

This is what happens when I watch Phineas and Ferb with my kids.

Parallel play is kind of like multitasking. I can be typing on my Chromebook next to my son while he’s playing minecraft. We engage in peripheral conversations, some tangential, and some directly related to the game he is playing.

Asymmetrical joint media engagement

While interacting with me online, I hope they learn good web etiquette. I’m teaching them lessons about propriety and social media. They see the kinds of things I write in emails and chats.

physical objects to understand the real world and using that information to behave intelligently, we can treat these characters in the physical world as if they were just characters in a video game

elements that make video games so engaging and fun and literally program them onto physical characters to make an entertainment experience that has never been possible before.

a massive opportunity in consumer products to change the way people interact with the physical world around them

new category of entertainment that brings these technologies to people in a familiar and fun way

Almost anything we interact with in the physical world has the potential to act with autonomy and purpose, and the challenge is in identifying the truly high-impact opportunities at the right times

the BBC followed with The Doctor and the Dalek, a web game based on Doctor Who that featured a series of programming challenges

Alongside this launch, Oculus announced a new multiplayer game that makes use of some of these new social features.

Schilowitz hopes to engage brands to make 270-degree short films to show before the actual movie. Think Red Bull's Red Bull's many extreme sports videos. Now picture them in an immersive experience.  The money coming from brands could help offset the costs of the Escape screen.

Schilowitz believes you could take that experience into the theater. Have two people playing a virtual reality game while strapped into Oculus Rift-type devices and people would pay to watch the game on the big screen if top- ranked players were competing.

Escape will also be used to show things like concerts which can be better experienced with a wider screen. A Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett show will debut in Escape theaters in 2015.

“The way kids talk and communicate is very different from how adults do, both in terms of how they use language and the fundamental frequencies that come out of their throats,

But as he points out, the way today’s children use technology will likely dictate the tech landscape for decades to come. If you can get kids hooked on speech technology young, they’ll stay with it forever.

Kids don’t want to ask a monkey character in a game what the weather will be on Tuesday. They want to sing him a song or ask him about life in the zoo.

While ToyTalk uses existing third party technology for its raw speech recognition, it works with those partners to develop better recognition models using ToyTalk’s own data. Now, ToyTalk has a trove of some 20 million children’s utterances, which Jacob believes is the largest database of kids conversation in the world

“Virtual assistants are awesome when they can answer every question. In our case, it’s the opposite,” Jacob says. “I have to know a lot of things that I’m not able to answer, and redirect the conversation to something that is within character.”

And Jacob says some toy companies are already testing PullString to power apps based on existing characters.

this technology could give kids a whole new way to play that falls somewhere in between the playground and the imaginary friend. “I think at some deep level if we succeed, we’ll inspire the imagination of kids to talk about things they might not otherwise talk about,”

neural network—a vast network of machines that approximates the web of neurons in the human brain—and this neural network analyzes the information in order to “learn” a particular task.

Google’s Smart Reply system doesn’t always get things right. But that’s part of the reason the company provides three potential replies to each email—not just one.

The system uses what’s called a “long short-term-memory,” or LSTM, neural network. Essentially, this is a neural net that exhibits something akin to human memory. It can “remember” the beginning of an email as it’s parsing the end—and that helps it, on some level, understand this natural language

“Ultimately, new technology can reveal desires that already exist on a deep level in society,” says Rafman of the works, which pull from and amplify the seductive forces of video games and cinema. “This desire to escape completely into another dimension has existed for a long time.”

Virtual reality’s recent resurgence in prominence begins with Oculus and its visionary 23-year-old founder, Palmer Luckey. In 2012, the then-18-year-old with an affinity for retooling defunct ’90s VR headsets took a hacked-together model to Kickstarter with a funding goal of $250,000. A month later, over 10,000 individuals contributed $2.4 million to the campaign for what was at the time mainly aimed at being a gaming peripheral. Two years later, Facebook wrote a check to buy Oculus VR for $2 billion

“This is not a drill. It’s real. It’s a moment,” says Michael Naimark, Google’s first resident virtual reality artist (like Char Davies, he’s listed as a pioneer of VR on Wikipedia). “And the arts community can play a huge role in propagation.

Throughout art history, art has reflected the prevalent social relations of the time. It makes sense, then, that the most relative and innovative art forms being produced today would mirror our reality—one defined by a perceived sense of agency in a world filled with invisible algorithms and clicks baited to us by past clicks. The internet spoils us with infinite choice: opportunities to invent our personas, refashion our self-brands, optimize our lives, and enhance our experience. But with mega-corporations quietly holding the joystick, can we really self-determine our destiny?

Transmedia Storytelling

Virtual Reality

Interactivity and Video Games

Audience Participation

Enhanced Perception

Expanded Sensory Experience

Stories emerging from a bottom up, rather than a top down process