Otakon kicked off today, and included the east coast premiere of EVANGELION 1.0: YOU ARE (NOT) ALONE, and a fun little project called Pirates vs. Ninjas. Musical guests include VAMPS for those wondering what Hyde has been up to since he left L’Arc-en-Ciel, and MELL. It is being covered by all the usual suspects, including Anime News Network, Ani Gamers, Funimation, and more. The con has an official Twitter link and a dealers room webcam, but that’s not as much fun as being there yourself. It runs through Sunday if you still want to grab a daypass.
I am both a Geek and a Guy, which gives me two counts of wanting to know about, and play with, new toys. So I hang out at web sites like EnGadget, and skim the short version from DVice, and check the new stuff at Gizmodo. I also stop by the more specialized (and therefor lesser-known) sites like Dev Hardware or Girls N Gadgets or TechOn to name a few, because they cover things the monster sized sites miss. When I get seriously into Geek Mode, I hit the MIT Technology Review or the IEEE Explore sites.
Now there is a new player in town; GDGT is a hardware junkies forum, with a twitter-like community twist. It just launched in the last 11 hours or so, which means I can’t even hint at what it might grow up to be. But I love the premise, the interface is intuitive, the layout is clean, the posts are frequent and informed (quantity AND quality, my favorite combination!), and I am signing up for an account there. I recommend you do the same.
Three of the first sites mentioned here included an announcement about Asteroid Storm in the last few hours; a game played by raising your arms while siting in the theater. The tech works by mounting two cameras on the ceiling on either side of the screen and pointed at the audience. As the screen shows them the pilots-eye view, they can modify the spaceships trajectory by raising their hand. If 25 folks to the left of the screen raise their hands, and 22 on the right, the ship will gently steer left. If the count is still 22 on the right, but only 4 on the left, the ship will jackknife right… (It might be amusing to build a virtual version of that movie theater and use the voting of the House and Senate to steer, to see how many orbital rocks our government has tried to slam us into over the years.). This group game environment (NOT an MMORPG, but it should function a lot like one in some respects) will be introduced in UK theaters on July 10th, meaning next Friday. I can’t wait to see how the first few games go, and whether the audience works together to save the ship, or against each other to take it out. The next logical step would be two ships, with the two sides of the audience competing against each other.
Now play that game with a pair of Open Source Data Gloves, which you can build yourself for $23 in parts if you don’t want to buy the $400 commercial version, and you are ready to take over the theater!
If you enjoy the books of David Weber, particularly the Honor Harrington series, here is a gaming site you will wan to visit: The Honorverse.
On June 24th the 35th annual Saturn Awards will be handed out, and this time the lifetime achievement award goes to Leonard Nimoy. At a con in the UK last weekend Zach Levi (the Chuck of Chuck) led a Flashmob to Subway where he ended up making sandwiches for his fans. Much to the confusion of the local security folks, who thought it was the politest riot they had ever seen. Also from the UK comes Gratuitus Space Battles, a game who’s goal is to bring the over-the-top explodiness back into space games (their words). This one looks like a lot of fun.
And you can play God Games too! The SIMS are nice, but limit your godhood to a single environment on a single planet. To get into the game from a Universal level, try Discover’s Star Formation. You start with a dust cloud, and set up conditions to optimize star creation as gravity nodes gather mass. Another fun one is the Universe Sandbox, where again you start with the basic laws of physics, and modify the parameters to create your desired results. For a Gods-Eye view of the universe, you can try World Wide Telescope, the Windoze ripoff of the classic Open Source monster Celestia. And if you like the Open Source version better, be sure to visit Celestia Motherload, with a ton of upgrades and plugins, including the Selden Ball data.
Word is that Greg Bear will be writing the HALO Forerunners trilogy books, due out next year from TOR Books. Considering his background for writing epic galaxy-spanning SciFi, this is a good choice. The classic SciFi Anime Van Dread has just been released as a complete series box set by Funimation. With a slogan like If the enemy doesn’t kill them, their hormones will you have to suspect this one is silly fun (and it is, watch free episodes online at the previous link to prove it). Funimation is also running a 6 hour anime marathon at the Comic Book SciFi Con in LA on April 26th.