Reality Crowd

Have a seat and enjoy your free virtual reality haircut (with headphones). Enjoy the amazing ability of your brain to perceive the location of a sound by calculating input from both ears.

Researchers now say they have strong evidence to suggest that the area of the brain responsible for this discerning ability is the planum temporale. Read this Science Daily article here discussing recent findings of the planum temporale and the brain’s amazing ability to locate sounds in three-dimensional space.

*****Update - See below for an update to this story*****

If you have recently been using the website recommendation site StumbleUpon (like we have), you might have recently stumbled across something like this:

Depending on your point of view, stumblecards are either the latest, greatest craze sweeping the internet or yet another marketing scheme ruining the social media landscape. But what exactly are stumblecards? Lets start from the beginning. The internet recommendation site Stumbleupon.com uses a tool bar that integrates with your browser. There are 3 main buttons on the toolbar, Stumble!, Thumbs Up, and Thumbs Down. Hitting the Stumble! button takes you to a random website that other users who like similar things to you have recommended (by hitting the thumbs up button). The more thumbs up votes a site gets, the more Stumbleupon users it is shown to. Stumbleupon is a great way to discover new articles and websites that you might normally have missed and has gained a huge following. The latest (and most contentious) thing to hit the Stumbleupon network are stumbecards. Rarely has any topic (other than Spam) elicited such a huge response…both positive and negative.

The positive reaction to Stumblecards is baffling at best. They are not actually cards in any meaningful way, just images placed on an image of a card. They appeal to the collector in us (the text above them even asks us to ‘collect them all!’) yet there is no real way to “collect” them. You can thumb them up, which will add them to your Stumbleupon list of ‘liked’ sites, but that seems a rather poor substitute for actual collection. They don’t contain any useful information, nor are they funny. They also don’t take any skill to ‘collect’… you can run across them while hitting the stumble button looking at random websites, but if you actually want to find them you can just search for “stumblecards” in the stumbleupon search engine. There is also no ‘official’ list of cards to collect and anyone can make them. So in other words you have a collectible card game where:

There are no actual cards
There is no discernible game or strategy
There is no fundamental difference between ‘collecting’ the cards and not
There is no use for the cards once you find them
There is no way to know if you ‘have them all’

So in other words we have a ‘game’ that is not a game at all. The interesting part is that for some reason it seems to bypass people’s usual mental filters against promoting stuff like this. Something about them makes people who are otherwise pretty discerning about what they give the mythical ‘thumbs up’ to ignore their inner voice and gleefully promote stumblecards to the masses. While the stumblecard backlash seems to be in full force on StumbleUpon, the phenomenon has yet to show signs of slowing. This raises interesting questions for social media in general. We like to think that social media sites are a way to sort the good sites from the sea of mediocrity that is the internet. But if it is so easy to short circuit our filters for ‘quality’ with a simple psychological trick, how can we trust the wisdom of crowds to filter the internet for us? And this is just the beginning… as marketers infiltrate social networks they bring with them all their psychological tricks. Are we ready for it, or will social media websites become just another marketing channel?

So what do you think? Do stumblecards have any redeeming quality? Are they the ruin of Stumbleupon or just an annoyance? Is there hope for humanity? Let us know in the comments!

****Update - 2/19/08****
Adam Atom, the creator of stumblecards, stopped by this post to give us some information. Apparently there is an official list of stumblecards available. You can find that list at http://www.upnatom.org/ the official site of stumblecards. In addition, Adam did an interview with E3internet where he describes the point of stumblecards. It makes for an interesting read as it turns out Adam is not a marketer at all, he was merely trying to create an interesting new game. From the article:

People seem to be attributing this meme to SEOs or online marketers but from my own investigations, you come from an artistic or web design background. In fact your website doesn’t offer any marketing services at all. Do you find it strange that the first StumbleUpon viral came from a non-marketer?

I don’t think it’s strange at all. I’m a web designer so it’s important that I have at least a basic understanding of viral marketing. However, my intentions were always coming from a desire to inspire, entertain and engage Stumblers in the hope they might participate. I don’t have anything to sell or advertise, only the idea itself.

A couple of interesting points of note from this new information. The official list is interesting in that it doesn’t actually contain some of the cards that most of us think about when we think of stumblecards (the Joker card being a prime example). In fact, most of the postings out there on the internet talking about stumblecards use cards that are not ‘official’ as an example of what they are.

Adam’s interview does shed some light on the origin of the phenomenon as well as the original intent of the game. Adam places the blame on marketers and copycats for a lot of the negative reaction the stumblecards have been getting. However, it seems the goal of the game and the way that StumbleUpon works are almost inherently at odds. The game seems to be about searching out the cards, almost like a treasure hunt. StumbleUpon is designed to serve you random webpages that match your interests. If I was looking for something very specific (such as a specific page) I would never really use StumbleUpon to find it, I would use something like Google. It would seem that the random delivery of StumbleUpon and the specific nature of a stumblecard are somewhat at odds. If I am actually looking for stumblecards I would look some other way, and if I am just using stumbleupon to find useful websites then stumblecards are just an annoyance. This combined with the quick appropriation of the phenomenon by marketers would seem to be at the heart of the stumblecard backlash.

Thanks to Adam for stopping by and adding to the conversation.

*****Update 2*****

Adam has now updated the official site to clear up some confusion about stumblecards

A new film premiering at the South By South West (SXSW) Film Festival in Austin this March will explore virtual worlds and the real people who inhabit them. Second Skin explores several different Massively Multiplayer online games (such as World of Warcraft and Everquest) as well as virtual spaces such as Second Life. As these worlds become more and more realistic people are choosing to spend more time in them than in the “real” world. The film examines this phenomenon and what it means for society at large. The questions asked in the film will only become more and more important as our technology advances and the line between real and unreal, virtual and reality becomes increasingly blurred.

The filmmakers sum up the movie nicely on their site www.secondskinfilm.com

Second Skin takes an intimate look at computer gamers whose lives have been transformed by the emerging genre of Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs). World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Everquest allow millions of users to simultaneously interact in virtual spaces. Second Skin introduces us to couples who have fallen in love without meeting, disabled players who have found new purpose, addicts, Chinese gold-farming sweatshop workers, wealthy online entrepreneurs and legendary guild leaders - all living in a world that doesn’t quite exist.

and here is the trailer for the film:

Links:

Second Skin Site
Boing Boing Story
BBC Story
Second Skin Blog

Researchers have successfully taught a computer AI system to play the game Ms Pac Man using evolving rule sets to maximize the success rate. Simply put, the computer plays the game with a set of rules to follow (ie - run away from ghosts, eat ghosts when possible, don’t backtrack, etc) and then prioritizes those rules based on success or failure in the game. After playing several times the computer learns what rules are most effective at achieving the highest score in the game. AI programs using this method were found to be much more effective at coming up with successful strategies than ones where programmers would try to “hand craft” a winning strategy.

While the computer AI eventually developed a strategy that was better than it’s human counterparts, the researchers noted that certain human strategies never developed in the AI:

While the AI agents showed they could hold their own against human players, the researchers noticed that humans sometimes used different tactics. For example, humans sometimes tried to lure the ghosts close to Ms. Pac-Man so that they would all be close by before making them edible, allowing Ms. Pac-Man to quickly eat them. The researchers noted that this strategy didn’t evolve in the AI experiments. Humans also calculated the time remaining in the period for eating ghosts, as well as approximate the future positions of ghosts - both abilities that the AI agents did not demonstrate.

Link to original story on Robot World News
Link to the Boing Boing article about the study

Read on for some videos of robots that have been taught to play games

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It is exciting to think that through technological advances in computers, we may soon be able to simulate the human brain, every cell represented.

This article, published by MIT, describes a project with the goal of modeling 10,000 neurons and 30 million synaptic connections of the neocortical column of a rat. Though only a small component of a mammal’s brain, it is one of the most complex. Researchers feel that they will model the entire brain of a rat within a few years and be able to simulate a human’s brain in about a decade.

According to the article:

By mimicking the behavior of the brain down to the individual neuron, the researchers aim to create a modeling tool that can be used by neuroscientists to run experiments, test hypotheses, and analyze the effects of drugs….

It should be noted that the simulation is being developed specifically for medical research and is not an attempt to create artificial intelligence. Though, seeing that a small portion of the brain can be so accurately constructed leads one to the tantalizing prospect that we may be able to soon create some type of functional model of the entire brain--researchers seem sure of it. Enjoy the article in its entirety:

“A Working Brain Model”
Technology Review-MIT

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It used to be that you traveled around the world to see different places and cultures. You jumped on a boat and headed to the other side of the globe and came across a place that was totally unique. Of course as travel got easier inevitably those different places started looking…a little similar. In the US at least, many cities and towns no longer have much of an identity…afterall, one highway exit ramp strip mall looks a lot like any another.

Well it seems that several countries, when faced with the challenge of building new towns and cities are opting to copy famous cities from different parts of the world. Instead of trying to create a new town that has it’s own history developing countries are simply recreating pre-existing cities. Dubai is the latest to throw their hat into the ring. They are planning to build a 700 acre version of the French city in the middle of the desert.

But Dubai is not alone of course. Las Vegas is famous for recreating famous world cities on the strip with the New York Hotel & Casino, the Venetian, and Paris Las Vegas. But those are all resorts and casinos. What happens when our cities and towns start to become carbon copies?

This looks like a picture of Paris, but it’s actually a recreation of the city being built in the area of Tianducheng in China. But that’s not the only one, the Chinese are using their newfound wealth to recreate a number of world landmarks and cities. Some other recreated cities include Venice and London.

But that’s not all. Shanghai has ambitious plans for a ring of settlements around the city based on European locations.

Perhaps in response to this growing trend, Egypt is attempting to copyright the pyramids and other recognizable landmarks. This issue will come up more and more as globalization heats up and questions about ownership of culture begin to surface.

Have an example of another cloned city? Post it in the comments!

Anyone that missed “A Scanner Darkly” when it came out in 2006 would be well served to check out the film. It’s the perfect combination of Richard Linklater’s Rotoscope animation style (developed on “Waking Life“) and Phillip K. Dick’s paranoid tale of drug hallucinations in a society obsessed with surveillance. The film is both highly entertaining and extremely thought provoking.

Hit the jump to see more clips from the film:
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When talking to someone about the validity of religion, out of body experiences usually come up at some point. When close to death many people have the experience of floating outside their own body and observing themselves from outside their own skin. Scientology was supposedly inspired from an out of body experience L. Ron Hubbard had while under the influence of Nitrous Oxide. These experiences would seem to lend credibility to the soul / body split that nearly all religions preach. It would seem to indicate that our “self” can be separated from our body. If I can float outside my own body, it must mean that I posses a soul…right?

Well, hold on a second. Now it seems that by using virtual reality equipment, two teams of researchers have been able to induce out of body experiences in healthy test subjects. Wearing virtual reality headsets, subjects were shown a live picture of their own back. Then, two plastic rods were used to stroke the back of the subject as well as their “virtual” back. It seems that the combination of visual and tactile input easily tricked the body into believing it was behind the actual body.

Link to the scientific American Article

Hit the jump for some videos about out of body experiences
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Sometimes even the virtual reality of video games can cause us to question what exactly reality is. In a video game world you are presented with a character or avatar to move around in a virtual space. Rules are defined and “winning” is determined by completing a certain predetermined set of actions. In the original Super Mario Brothers game for the Nintendo you accepted the rules that you only existed in two dimensional space and jumping on top of various creatures was the best way to stay alive.

Anyone who purchased the Game Genie soon found out that these rules in the virtual world were alterable. You could make yourself jump higher and become invincible. But that was just the beginning… all sorts of weird effects were possible just by playing around with the codes a bit.

Well, in this video (by way of boing boing), Japanese hackers have changed the rules for the game even more. In place of a controller, a ghostly hand moves Mario along. Then suddenly there is not one, but a sea of Marios struggling to make it to the end of the level. This drastic shift in reality is rare in the “real” world, but happens all the time in the virtual one.

Got another example of a re-imagined game being played in a totally different way? Post it in the comments!