Off The Wall
In yet another strange development in the world of gaming, none other than Nintendo has devised a game where real men date fake women but pay real money for the privilege. Okay so lots of men are thinking – so what. They have experienced all kinds of fake women on expensive dates. Except that these women are real fakes. Well, they are virtual, existing only inside the Nintendo game. But the men are real, unless they are fake men – and this could go on and on. In any case, the Nintendo game, Love+ is quite popular in Japan where men who play it are required to seduce a virtual girlfriend and maintain a relationship with her. And if they are less than arduous, the girls reportedly let them know by being cold and distant – and possibly quarrelsome.
One version of the game features Atami, a city in Japan where the men can take romantic trips with their virtual girlfriends. They check in to a hotel and can pay the extra person fee even though the only extra “person,” is their Nintendo DS. This helps keep the fantasy more real – go figure. They can go to restaurants alone while pretending to be there with the virtual girlfriends – who are accessible via the game. Men can speak to their “girlfriends” via the device’s microphone. In the town of Atami restaurants and tourist attractions are up with the digital times. They all play along with the fantasy, indulging the men who pay for “vacation” dining and outings with their virtual girlfriends. Who would have guessed? No word on plans for a female version of this game but some gentlewomen may actually prefer virtual dates.
What to do with that windowless, basement room? Could you be interested in a digital remodel? An app for it? Ah yes, a digital remodel. The sort of project a group of geekly friends might consider for a weekend project will transform that claustrophobic, basement room into a show-and-tell worthy space that’s sure to impress. And no landscaping is required. Using Winscape, a piece of software, and two HD Plasma screens along with a fair amount of carpentry and electrical work, you can eventually achieve something that looks like you’re viewing a scene through two windows. The Winscape folks offer a collection of scenes, mostly in the San Francisco area, that could be purchased for the views. But they also offer advice on shooting footage to personalize tour views. Zooming around is forbidden, unless you want to give your guests the feeling that they’re in a tornado.
At a glance this would seem to be much ado about something that’s already been done. But Winscape isn’t just your average picture window. They have taken extra steps to create an experience that would give you the feeling of looking out. A “necklace” with a remote control “perceives” your location in the room and adjusts the scenery to something more realistic for your position. Meanwhile, news of the Winscape kit and it possibilities are causing some folks to grumble that the necklace interface in cumbersome and not the least bit fashionable. But others speculate there could endless possibilities for 3D screens. And as always, there’s also an app for Winscape.
It seems the happiest state is Hawaii. The grumpiest states are on the East Coast. Some states are mad and they’re not going to take it anymore. And how would we know this? Twitter told us so. In a study of 300 million of the billions and billions of Tweets, researchers sifted the content for happy words and sad words and probably ambivalent words as well. But it’s usually the extreme words that make the news. The happiest words are diamond, love and paradise while the sad words are suicide and funeral among others. It isn’t known where ice cream, coffee and winning the lottery are. Of course there are certainly possibilities for messing with the outcome by Tweeting something along the lines of – I’m not suicidal, or I’m not in love with the idea of diamonds today.
In the big scheme of things such mapping has been used to measure all sorts of data, most notably Netflix movie rental habits by region. Now in addition to knowing what your neighbors are watching, you could also know how happy their Tweets are. Do happy Tweets mean happy people? In terms of the happiness index, it turns out that song titles and lyrics trended downward from the 1960s to the 1990s. Who would have guessed the 60s to be a happy music time? Researcher Sune Lehmann, who spearheaded the Twitter mood studies believes such mood mapping can be used to assess other things, such as the impact of a Presidential address, or public policy. Perhaps some day corporations can test customer mood according to Tweets about a certain brand or specific products.
