Photo by Allie on Unsplash

Happy MayTheFourth everybody!

It’s conference season, and in the news this week are several articles about virtual worlds, MMORPGs and games becoming an accessible way to connect with others.  After a quick discussion on the games to be played this weekend, Michael, Michael and Andy talk about how there would be often be a meta conversation happening during a conference, for example, with a specific twitter hashtag that people would use to exchange ideas, frequently shown on a video monitor on stage.  It is easy to see how games, MMORPGs and virtual worlds can help augment the virtual conference experience with people bumping into one another because of the place where they’re interacting.  Fortnite continues having concerts, recently with Travis Scott drawing over 12M concurrent viewers, and also establishing a Party Royale mode where the objective is not to have a battle, but rather a place to be cooperative vs combative.  Once again, very reminiscent of the Second Life experience.  Ian Hughes’ avatar in SL gets an upgrade, and Animal Crossing is used as a conference venue for Deserted Island DevOps.

In the world of robotics, MIT uses gesture controls to guide and fly a drone through hoops, which also then reminds Andy of the Myo armband and the Nintendo Power Glove.  iRobot reportedly will not launch their lawn mowing robot in 2020.

Contact lenses are back in the news, with new smart wearables designed to monitor diabetes and deliver medicine to the wearer.  How do they get the micro doses of medicine into the contact lens?  Scrolling down in the same article, Mojo Vision (not Mojo Nixon) calls their version of AR “Invisible Computing” because it overlays what you see with relevant information, without needing to wear something over your eyes to block out real reality.

In the time warp games section, a 1994 baseball fighting game reminds Michael M of Arch Rivals, a basketball fighting game from 1989, where players are encouraged to punch their opponent to steal the ball, and score.

We continue to hope that everyone is staying safe, healthy and well.  The team is looking forward to reassembling again for another episode next week! 

Selected Links

Board Game Geek: Civitas Nihilium — https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/273825/civitas-nihilium 

Board Game Geek: Andy Piper Board Game Collection — https://boardgamegeek.com/collection/user/andypiper 

Fortnite continues to push away from BR/gun-based play as it pursues more social/hangout-based virtual world experiences Launching a new island focused on races, building, fishing, dancing, skill competitions – no guns allowed, no deaths https://t.co/7wua9XmesV— Matthew Ball (@ballmatthew) April 29, 2020

PCGames N article: Fortnite Party Royale is live – a social hub to relax while you queue — https://www.pcgamesn.com/fortnite/party-royale-release-date-map 

I had to look this up to discover what the constant was when