INSEMTIVES - Incentives
for Semantics
You can read the whole entry at http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/28/google-maps-cube-game-rolls-out/
A promotional video about the game can be watched at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVum3HsmZ6M#!
And you can play the game at http://www.playmapscube.com/
Researchers at the California State University launched a survey to characterize gamers’ personalities following Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology guidelines (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_Test).
You can help them participating in the survey just here. They will definitely appreciate it and everyone will benefit from their findings 
Traditional trivia games have a rule that you can’t cheat—you can’t look things up in books, you can’t ask your friends and you certainly can’t ask Google. But what if there were a trivia game where you could not only ask Google, but were encouraged to do so? Imagine how difficult the questions would need to be with the power of the world’s information at your fingertips.
A Google a Day is a new daily puzzle that can be solved using your creativity and clever search skills on Google. Questions will be posted every day on agoogleaday.com and printed on weekdays above the New York Times crossword puzzle. We’ll reveal each puzzle’s answer the next day in the Times and on agoogleaday.com, along with the search tips and features used to find it.
You can read the whole blog entry at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/trivia-game-where-using-google-is.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FMKuf+%28Official+Google+Blog%29
"Bing and Bong are branching out into rocket science - for real. Tiny Planets is bringing the Moon to kids."
Bing & Bong’s Tiny Planets (http://www.tinyplanets.com) has been a favourite with kids of all ages for a number of years now. The double BAFTA award winning television and interactive property features adorable furry aliens Bing and Bong, who travel the universe on their catapult-launched sofa solving problems and having adventures, and has been aired in almost 120 countries around the world.
Now however Bing and Bong are branching out into rocket science – for real. In conjunction with the European Commission’s cutting edge research project for the semantic web called INSEMTIVES (http://www.insemtives.org) and the Citizen Science Alliance (CSA, http://www.citizensciencealliance.org), Tiny Planets is bringing the moon to kids. MOON EXPLORER is a junior version of the CSA’s hugely successful Moon Zoo project, taking images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and asking everday web users to mark them up using simple graphic tools that provide vital information to space scientists. Now kids can help astronomers by marking craters, counting boulders and identifying strange features on the moon – all from the comfort of a furry white sofa.
It’s a lot of fun, but INSEMTIVES is a project with a serious purpose. The semantic web, the next generation internet, will require a huge amount of complex, interlinked data to make it work, and researchers at companies and universities right across Europe are trying to figure out the best way to generate this mass of data. The good news is that everyone can play their part – including children, which is why Bing and Bong are encouraging kids to get involved.
It’s not just all work and no play though; http://www.TinyPlanets.com features games, puzzles, quizzes and even the opportunity to adopt your very own small furry alien – green hexapods are apparently a favourite – so that children can have fun as they learn and as they help to do real research. Parents need to create a free account for their children to play MOON EXPLORER, and there’s a small subscription for access to premium content – such as streamed episodes of the TV series – but there’s plenty to do on the site without paying a penny, cent or euro.
Coordinated by the Semantic Technologies Institute (STI) in Innsbruck Austria, the objective of INSEMTIVES is to ‘bridge the gap bet ween human and computational intell igence in the current semantic content authoring R&D landscape.’ With partners in the UK, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria it’s an example of complex problems being tackled on a pan-European level with a very high degree of international, if not interplanetary, cooperation.
Bing and Bong still think the moon is an amazing place though; after all, you never know just who you’re going to bump into!
The RMIT University is launching next Tuesday, the 15th, the new Games and Experimental Entertainment Laboratory (GEElab).
The GEElab will invent new game and entertainment visions, products, services, narratives and business models, whilst critically reflecting the role of games and entertainment in culture and how play, games, and game mechanics can be used to innovate.
At the GEElab, games will be understood as a cross-disciplinary function as well as the engine of entertainment media and Internet innovation. Practice oriented game and entertainment media research will be carried out by the way of cross-medial experimentation and an understanding of science as fiction, and not being afraid to think and design differently and speculatively. GEElab members will investigate how to “gamify“ traditionally non-linear media such as TV, film, radio, developing design strategies, narratives and service prototypes.
One of the major goals of the GEElab is to explore the potential of games and entertainment to positively influence and change behaviour, seeking to suggest solutions for a more peaceful, sustainable, healthy and egalitarian – or playful – world. The GEElab will work closely with stakeholders from across RMIT, international game research institutions and sponsors from the game and entertainment industry.
The GEElab has two locations: the headquarters in Melbourne, impacting the Australian and Asia regions, and in Europe, which will serve as an RMIT satellite location to foster overseas collaborations in IT and creative media industries. Both labs are headed by VC Fellow, Dr Steffen P Walz, an award winning game and interaction designer & researcher, futurist and media experimenter, chart breaking pop musician & producer, former screen writer and TV satire journalist.
In conjunction with the launch, the GEElab websites will go live on March 15: http://www.geelab.rmit.edu.au / http://www.geelab.eu.
All the information at http://www.rmit.com.au/browse;ID=4660zypgwie6
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