janxt

While there has been a glut of GuitarHero- and RockBand-family of games hitting the market recently, I think this actually has the potential of keeping the genre fresh — a marketplace for user-created content. Wellllll, not exactly user-created, but artist-created and user-augmented-for-XBox. Take a song, do some simple beat detection, layout the basic “melody” to correspond to the guitar buttons, and publish it to the XBox 360. Awesome.

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/08/upcoming_rock_band_network_lets_you.html

mmmmmmm… gets your mouth watering just thinking about it, no?

My last two robot-related posts have been more frightening in a “oh, no! SkyNet is coming!” sort of way; this one is just plain creepy. Some people probably find human-looking robots unsettling, but me… I’m WAY less into insect-looking ones. More detail here.

I’m ready to start stockpiling electromagnetic pulse defenses…

Uh-oh… one of the things we (humans) have been able to do that eluded robots was fine-tuned manipulation of objects (which we can do through our independent, flexible digits and opposable thumbs). Looks like some Japanese roboticists are aiming to level the playing field (bringing SkyNet and our eventual subservience that much closer).

The MIT team from the DARPA Grand Challenge has posted a bunch of cool videos:

http://grandchallenge.mit.edu/wiki/index.php/Public

Highly recommend watching this one:

http://people.csail.mit.edu/lukesf/files/perception.avi

The singularity approaches!