I was recently looking at a bunch of game reviews and was also prompted by a job ad I saw to think critically about various PC games, or console games for that matter.  This post is I guess ”Part 1“ of the conclusions I came to.

So I started to wonder where I think computer gaming should go?  Considering the developments over the last few years and the current crop of games under development and those due out shortly, (some of which, sound great), I did find it difficult at first to think of something better.  So while I tried to break free of the usual ideas, I started to think about the gaming past.  

Looking back at the past decade of computer games.  Apart from the huge development in game graphics, the games themselves have not actually changed all that much.  Turning points that stand out, off the top of my head, might include the rise of FPS’s, online gaming, and MMORPG’s.  Although there have been refinements along the way, not to mention the refinement of older game genres eg. racing sims, sports games, dictator sims.  I could, unfortunately, not think of anything that you could call revolutionary.  I find that a bit disappointing.  So I went on to consider my personal favourite gaming moments so far.  I would probably have to list them as; Op Flashpoint, HL2, Racing Destruction Set, Elite, Interceptor FA-18, Test Drive 2, Mafia, Civ III … 4D Driving (it had another name at the time), Max Pain and ummm well I guess I could think of a couple more but that’s enough.  So what can I say about those, well the release date has little to do with how good they are.  Having said that, the level of detail in the newer games is amazing, but boy I miss some of those old games.  

Something that makes my point in a rather strange way:  How much did I spend on my last graphics card, and how much did I spend on my last CPU?  Heaps on the graphics card, and not much on the CPU… hence how powerful is a graphics card next to a CPU - very!  Why have I spent so much on a graphics card - well the latest games look real nice with a good card.  Why haven’t I spent more money on a CPU, well a better CPU doesn’t make the games play any better at all.  I left wondering what sort of games I would be playing if the demands of the game on the CPU had risen along with the demands on the graphics card!  Unfortunately, it is relatively simple to make a game better by making it prettier, and a bit harder to use some imagination to achieve the same thing. 

Still trying to discover a future direction for computer gams, I decided to watch a trailer for a FPS currently in the works.  Not sure if this will help, but I came up with a list of nit-picks.  They’re sort of specific, but there’s a general concept behind each one which is more important.

1.  Every character is a cloned throughout the game.  Every monster ‘X’ looks identical to every other monster ‘X’.  Not even the colours change!  The computer has the power to alter each one a little, so why not?  Must everything thing be set in concrete the day the game ships!

2.  Linear game play.  There was a time when games started to look like moving away from this, but it seems even the best games around are still run along a singular path from ‘the start’ to ‘the end’. 

3.  The player has no personality.  I mean that regardless of how I act in the game the results are the same.  It is nice that some games allow the player to move through the game using different techniques, but that’s just scratching the surface.  Every payer is different… why not use that to effect in the game?  (I think Stalker makes some inroads here!)

That list is really aimed at FPS’s, other genres do take up some of those ideas and apply them nicely.  However, it’s time that all games regardless of what genre they fall into, try and incorporate a wider variety of techniques and ideas into their game play.   Get those CPU’s doing something, not just physics calculations either… 

Computer games are ridged… it’s about time they were a little bit more fluid. 

Ok, there was actually another part of this process I went through first… that was to ask “What do I find entertaining?”  Which after all, ought to be the reason why I might want to play a computer game in the first place!  I’ll go into that in my next post.   

What do I mean by that?  Well I think the time is right, the technology is ready personal computing technology can start to evolve into something coherent and clever.  (don’t get confused – I’m not talking about the old-fashioned PC !)  

Although technology is racing into this area, it always bugs me that the use of it takes another decade to evolve into something you could actually call ‘clever’.  So what’s the current situation?

Let’s take a look at what we can currently load into some typical geeky pockets.  Mobile phone, that’s now the most basic necessity, but for some people, they like to have something that works a bit more like a mini computer as well; so we add a PDA.  Next, if you like a bit of music you’ll want a MP3 player, even though your PDA probably plays music, and maybe your phone as well, but a MP3 player looks cool and you can compare colours with your friends etc, oh and it produces better sound right!?   What next, maybe you’ve got a digital camera.  Even though you’re PDA has one, and your phone and your MP3 player as well, you’ll want a proper camera as it takes much better pictures, oh and it has a flash, the other’s don’t - right?  Yeah it will really bug you taking photos at concerts if you don’t have a flash! 

(more…)

Right after my last post about the s725x I did a bit of looking around the web for ideas of how I could bring all the things I want in a cycling companion together into the one gadget.

Well I quickly found that Garmin (popular GPS makers) have already responded to people like myself and have a range of products out for sports and the like.  Hence, I would like to intorduce you to the Edge 305!  (Garmin should be paying me for this I guess!)

It’s a lovely little (well, sort of) device that pretty much does what I was wanting in my previous post.

Lets look at it’s basic functions for a moment:

1. GPS receiver
2. Barametric altimeter 
3. Optional heart rate monitor
4. Optional wheel speed and cadence sensor
5. Programmable way-points
6. All sort of time measurements - lap times, splits.
7. Virtual training partner etc.

There’s more too, but that will get you across the general idea.  In fact you can go to these good reviews here and here.

But before I get onto my little question about how it works.  I want to quickly mention the website that Garmin has put together for those who have got one of these things.  It’s called MotionBased, and it’s excellent!  Once you’re a member (it’s free) and upload your ride or run data to it, you can then share it with everyone else who is a member.  It shows your track on various types of maps and replays your trip with a little red spot, plus all sorts of more detailed info too.  It can even output the path to a Google Earth file. 

The part I like about MotionBased is it’s an accurate way of learning about nice rides, trips or whatever really that might be in an area you are visiting, or just around the corner from home for that matter.  You can search for rides by location, then download another person’s ride and stick it on your Edge gadget where you can then follow them around guided by GPS.  They have in mind that you use it to compare your fitness level with others and compete against them virtually, but I think it would be a great way to go sightseeing in a new place.  Or even just share a really great ride.  Much better than reading vague directions with lines like “you can’t miss it!”  Yeah, well I’ve missed it many times!  This would be an end to that. 

Now back to my little question; I’m particular about having good distance measurements, so it would be nice to know whether the GPS part measures your trip distance accurately or whether the optional wheel speed sensor does it much better?  I’m thinking here of those tight tree covered trails where you might go around 10 turns in 20meters!  Does the GPS alone track that sort of thing accurately?  Some of the trails around Canberra would be about 10km shorter if you took all the tight twisty turns out of them! 

What it comes down to is about $90 to have the cadence and wheel sensor included.  I suppose, by comparison to the overall cost of the basic unit (about $400, hmmm does that include the HRM?) and extra $90 is probably worth it.  I mean if you don’t mind spending $400 then, you probably don’t mind spending $500!  Still that’s quite a lot of money to spend, but if it motivates you to get out and exercise more, maybe your health is worth it?

In my first post about this, there was something deeper eating me away about the current state-of-affairs with regard to all the little CPU’s and gadgets sitting around here.  The fact is many of them are sitting doing nothing for most of the time.  What I wanted to do is put something to use which I already have sitting in my pocket that has to the power to do all this cycle computing stuff!!  But, instead I’m forced to buy yet another gadget. 

Can someone make a Bluetooth heart-rate monitor and wheel-speed sensor?  I already can get a GPS card for my PDA so don’t worry yourselves with that one, but the other 2 would cap it off nicely.  All this will have to go under a heading of Personal Computing Devices.  Maybe this will need another post to explain what I mean.

I believe gadgets help me ride my bike faster, better higher etc.

It makes perfect sense.  Take your mind off any sensations of muscle fatigue, breathlessness, dizziness and concentrate your mind on some cleaver little device telling you something interesting.  More to the point, concentrating on something which is hopefully telling you how well you’re going - despite the pain. 

So I have decided that I will never perform at my best unless I have a fancy heart rate monitor, more exactly the Polar S725x which looks like it’s made from carbon fibre (making anything look like carbon fibre immediately increases a the value by at least 50% if not 100%).  It’s about $300, that’s $200 for the device and $100 for the carbon.

If you think that’s a bit too much, just wait until you hear what it does.  It’s more than just a heart rate monitor!  It’s a watch (I think), but it also links up to your bike to measure how fast you’re wheels are spinning.  AND! it has an altitude function which monitors the air pressure and tells you how high you’ve gone up and down, unless the weather is changing of course then it just tells you about impending rain, but even that is handy!  Then, if you’ve got money to burn and legs to burn as well, you can get an energy measuring kit, which tells you how many watts you’re pumping out! 

On a side note:  I found out when I was young, that measuring your output in watts if you’re a skinny kid is very disappointing.  I found out, the energy I put out racing up some steps (in record time!) is about the same a big fat kid puts out while they’re standing in line at MacDonald’s.  Teacher’s words, “don’t worry Miles, 60W is a big figure for you…” !!

I won’t bother with the energy stuff, but I’m not completely satisfied with what the S725x is offering.  Why don’t these things include a GPS?  A GPS would be fantastic, with the height stuff, (do they do height anyway?) and the wheel speed, and the heart rate.  You could look at the data at the end of the day and know all sort of interesting (but ultimately useless info).  But the GSP could be useful at the time as well.  I’ve been lost before! Or finding those hidden tracks?  I don’t know, I’m sure it could be very useful for all sorts of things that I haven’t thought of…

Sadly, it doesn’t look like Polar is going to bring out a GPS model any time soon, (plus it would be even more expensive!)
So I am wondering if I can turn my PDA phone into a cycling companion?  Here’s what I’m thinking:

1. I can get a GPS thing for it (a Bluetooth one) I know this. 
2. I can upload street maps to it as well, a nice little side benefit of the GPS.
3. But can I get the other measurements into it as well?  Bike speed?  Altitude?  Heart rate?
4. Is making you’re own Bluetooth device hard?

So, is it possible?  Does there happened to be a bluetooth bike computer out there?  Or a heart rate monitor?
How good is GPS these days at measuring altitude and speed second by second.  (The speed is important, as you want to know you’re top speed is a real one, and not just a glitch in the GPS reception.)

I guess the Polar thingy, and a GPS for the phone would have all the ingredients, but I really don’t want to have two things hanging around.

I’ll look into it!

I thought, I had better put up a second post about that human powered flying machine thing I was thinking about.

It turns out that these things have been in steady development over the last few decades. NASA have had a couple of goes at it - they still hold the record for distance 115km done in a little under 4hrs.  Although I don’t know who to believe, NASA say 199km, FAI (who keep the records) say 115km.  Since then, the main development seems to be by Japanese students trying out for the Birdman Rally which they run there every year. The record for distance in that competition is 34km.  I guess it comes down to a matter of fitness.

So it seems I need not wonder if it’s possible, or if humans can generate enough power, apparently they can! Just on that, it seems that 200W is the figure to go on for flights of any duration. Elite athletes can conjure up more for short periods, 1600W and 1000W for a few minutes, or 2000W for instantaneous measurements.

So I want to know why we aren’t all using them to get around in? Well there’s the The Royal Aeronautical Society Human Powered Flight Group who are wondering the same thing. They have put up a prize for first sports flyer that can be used for racing and the like and a second prize for first flyer to cover the distance of a typical marathon in under 1 hour.

We I looked into it a bit more, it’s easy to see why these things aren’t common place. They can only fly in all but the stillest of air, they typically have 20m - 35m wing spans and do not handle anything more than slight turns. Not exactly convenient.

This hasn’t ended my thoughts on this though, all it’s done is make me wonder how these things can be made better. After all, someone has already flown one 115km. Now I assume that they didn’t take it all that high as they probably didn’t want to risk their life, so they’ve got to pedal constantly, which was a huge effort probably. But in reality, once the risks were reduced (ie. take a parachute), wouldn’t you get up a bit of height, pedal pedal pedal - then glide? Find a thermal maybe - pedal some more, gain even more height - then glide maybe even the rest of the way?

I left this discussion last time on whether wings or propellers are better? All the ones made so far have large propellers, driven by pedals and chains as far as I can tell. Maybe a dynamo and motor might be another option in certain circumstances as well. But what about flapping wings? Ornithopter is what you call something with flapping wings. Planes have been designed as such, but gee they look ugly! Plus, they make an unpleasant racquet. Of the radio control variety, there do seem to be a couple of exceptions. One, which has stiff foam wings looks a bit like a flapping glider, it appeared to fly effortlessly!

The only reason why I want to consider the alternative is that propellers were developed along with an engine with a rotating shaft. They went very well together at the time. The Wright Bros actually had a little 4 cylinder engine built for them which was lighter than normal. Engines were developed further and hence the propellers have their place ever since. Now considering things for human power I didn’t want to assume the propeller would be best just because they are so widely used.

But I don’t know. Maybe propellers are best, and flapping wings around is just a bit impractical. Obviously, one of the main factors is efficiency. Are they more efficient, both when in use and when not? That is, when you’re not driving flapping wings or a propeller, is the aircraft a good efficient glider? When in use, do they use the available energy efficiently?

I’ll look into that more between now and next time

I have always enjoyed thinking about human powered flight!  Why not, after all it would be good, to be able to hop on a thing something like a bike and hit the skies.  Sure it would be dangerous, but if it was possible it would be a revolution!

Anyway, I discovered something new about this the other day which I’ll get to in a moment.  But how I first started thinking about this was to wonder if nature had actually succeeded with this already?  I mean is there precedence?

So I went about looking up the biggest flying bird, just how big is it?  My search ended with the Kori Bustard, here’s the wikipedia entry for it.  Up to 34kg!! That pretty big.  There’s even a link there to a video of one flying (ok.. here it is for you).  

At that stage, I decided that if the biggest flying bird was only 34kg (only!), and even then it was reluctant to get airborne.  Well maybe it was going to be much harder to get a human up in the air at 60+ kilograms.  Not forgetting the extra weight of the device.  So what took me down that path of thought?  My first step was to consider the energy required!  More or less, I wondered, if no other animal body could output enough energy to overcome gravity, one way or another for a given size… then as far as I was concerned it was over. 

If big bird weighed 34kg, then I figured human powered flight was not impossible, just very very hard.  Let me explain one step further.  Nature had apparently hit a wall, Yep, plenty of birds are bigger than 34kg.  So it was not that birds simply didn’t get any bigger than 34kg, it was more to the point that once they got bigger - they stopped flying!  That in my opinion, didn’t bode well for human flight.

Then something popped into my head, I remembered the terradactyle!  Those things were huge.  So I went looking.  Ok so, I didn’t find those exactly, but I found the Quetzalcoatlus a Pterosaur.  These things were hanging around with the dinosaus, and left when they did.  But their size! - 12m wingspan, no 18 metres maybe and their weight? 65kg!! We have a winner!  Well, that was until I just discovered the condor like Teratorns.  These were very big birds that lived 3-8 millions years ago… apparently like overgrown condors.  Weighing 80kg! with a 8m wingspan, (or maybe 7m). 

I know all these figures are best guesses, but the bones are big!  You can even find larger estimates, but the point is… it’s been done!  Nature has created creatures that can fly, that weigh as much as humans do.  That’s a much better start.

Mind you, on a side note, I noticed that apparently aroud the times of the Pterosaurs O2 levels in the atmosphere were considerably higher than they are now.  Maybe they were turbo charged!  I was also reading that birds consume far more energy or if you like far more rapidly than humans do.  Well I guess that’s not hard considering what the majority of us do most of the time.

Now, what next?  In my head, I did a couple of quick calcs on the energy that has to be expended to keep 65kg in the air.  My mechanics is rusty… I know not all that energy has to come from the flyer all the time… but on average a significant amount of energy has to come out of them sooner or later, and how much can a human produce on average? 

That’s about it for the time being… next time I touch on this subject, I want to go over the economies of flight.  Wings vs propellers vs something else??  Propellers are great for things that spin!…but humans don’t really spin all that much - ok they do pedal, but birds flap.

In the mean time, I’ll brush up on my physics a bit and address that energy issue.

Okay, so this is really just a placeholder to prevent a dead link that used to occur when somebody like you pressed on “general thoughts” just up there. 

But since I’m here I may as well make mention of those UMPC’s that seem to have come and gone even before they have come out!  I think UMPC stands for Ultra Mobile PC for those who don’t know.

(I should mention that I don’t plan on turning this into a technology blog but I just read something about these things a moment ago and since I’m here now trying to think of something to write, well…)

I’ve never been quite sure just how many varieties and sizes of computers we actually need, and what we actually need them to do?  Funny thing is, that don’t think it’s just me who’s wondering that.  I think actually nobody really know what they want to do with one of these things.  I know you can probably come up with a list of things you think you might use it for, I can to.  You see I came up with a similar list when I bought my first PDA, and I used it for a couple of those things at least once… maybe twice.  That was a long time ago now, these days I have a PDA phone which I must admit it’s very useful and I use many of its functions quite often.  Let’s see, I guess I use for:

1. A phone
2. I scribble messages down on it
3. Take the occasional photograph 
4. A calculator
5. Calendar
6. Address book
7. I play a couple of games on it.
8. Read PDF files
9. Show my Demoreel off
10. Keep files; and,
11. Occasionally, when I am very desperate I browse the internet on it.

That’s probably not a bad list, but that has taken me several years of training to remember to use those functions and still I have to remind myself to use it when I normally might find the back of an envelope to write on instead.

So where would a UMPC fit in? 

I have a laptop as well, nothing unusual, a bit big and heavy admittedly but I can carry it around.  I like it because I can use it like a normal PC, keyboard and screen, easy-to-use, easy to see.  However, I do think twice about taking somewhere because of its weight. 

So a UMPC would fit in my bag, I wouldn’t notice its weight I guess.  It can run all the applications I’m use to.  But, can I work on it like a laptop?  Probably not. Why?  Because I can’t type on it, it probably won’t recognise my speech, and I will probably find the screen too small. 

Can I watch a movie on it, probably.  But that’s not too important to me.  I simply don’t want to watch movies if I happen to be sitting in a park somewhere and at the moment I don’t have to travel very far on public transport.  What else is it good for?  Music?  No.  Data storage, maybe but my 1 GB CompactFlash card is much smaller.  Wireless Internet, now there maybe a use for it there, so do I have to signup for some sort of wireless account, will it work here?  hmmm… what would be useful, is to have internet in my car!  Maybe it’s good for that.  I’ll think about that, but in the meantime…

It seems that it has fallen into a funny position; too small to be useful like a laptop, too big to be pocket sized. 

So what is the solution?  The people who are working on these sorts of things really have to figure out a better way to communicate with such a device.  Keyboards are simply too big, that’s the problem!  And you can’t make them smaller because then our fingers are too big!  Only once a solution has been found to that problem (the keyboard problem not the fingers one!) will such a device be any more useful than a large PDA.  A large PDA by the way, is not much more useful than a small PDA, except a small PDA fits in your pocket!  I hope you see my point. 

Okay, thinking about the some more , I know handwriting recognition is getting better all the time, so maybe I should get use to handwriting things again, as I guess that’s how you supposed to communicate with a UMPC. But, I’ve only just got used to typing and even so, I can probably type faster than I write.  So, I’m not sure if that’s the right answer, who knows maybe it is?

A few years ago I would have been going on about screen size as well, but I get the feeling that rollup screens are not too far away.

I hope you enjoyed my little rant, that feels like enough for a first go.  Feel free to make a comment, any comment, it would be the first!

Cheerio, Miles