The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)Afghan War (AW) Independent Comprehensive Review Panel revealed chronic and deeply rooted management problems in the JWSTAW project. These issues led to the project cost being underestimated by as much as $1,400,000,000trillions of dollars relative to the most recent baseline, and the budget could continue to rise depending on the final launchwithdrawal date determination. Although JWSTthe AW is a particularly serious example, significant cost overruns are commonplace at NASADoD, and the Committee believes that the underlying causes will never be fully addressed if the Congress does not establish clear consequences for failing to meet budget and schedule expectations. The Committee recommendation provides no funding for JWSTAW in fiscal year 2012.
The Committee believes that this step will ultimately benefit NASADoD by setting a cost discipline example for other projects and by relieving the enormous pressure that JWSTAW was placing on NASA’sDoD’s ability to pursue other sciencenational security missions.
Last September I started a PhD in Astrophysics at Arizona State. I really enjoy doing public outreach and engaging in informal education, so as I learn new and awe-inspiring things I spend a lot of time thinking, “What’s so cool about this, and how do I explain it to my mother?” I think Carl Sagan expressed the motivation best in The Demon-Haunted World: “Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.” What set Carl apart, however, was his unique ability to articulate this love in a way that expressed his enthusiasm and was understandable to a wide audience. Your mother probably doesn’t want to sit through a stuffy lecture, even if the contents are astounding.
One of the most amazing discoveries of modern astrophysics is that almost all of the chemical elements we see around us were produced in supernovae — energetic explosions that typically mark the death throes of massive stars. Elements heavier than oxygen are disseminated mostly through supernovae, and elements heavier than iron come almost only from supernovae. This means that literally everything around you is full of atoms that were originally created in massive stars that exploded and sent those elements flying into interstellar space, where they eventually coalesced into dust and became you and the Earth you’re standing on.
Being a big fan of stickers you can put anywhere, I thought a sticker campaign would be the perfect cheeky way to engage in some informal education! I modeled them after the labels warning of cancer risk that you find on household chemicals, furniture, and almost every building in the state of California. They’re both factually correct, but while knowing that everything causes cancer is a buzzkill, knowing that everything came from supernovae is awesome.
The image I chose is one of my favorite Hubble Space Telescope pictures, the Antennae Galaxies. I’ve photoshopped the fake supernovae over the top. As always, there’s a Flickr set that will continue growing. Here are the source files so you can print some yourself — they’re intended for 2.5″ x 2.5″ sticker backs. Master psd UBahn font Patagonian font (with bonus dinosaurs!)
Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on some improvements and extensions to my Power Glove 20th Anniversary Edition. On the tech side of things, I replaced the ugly 9V battery I was using with a low-profile, rechargeable Lithium-Polymer battery. I’ve updated the steps in the Instructable with new pictures and instructions.
I also re-wrote my Java-Unity bridge using a UDP socket. This is a lot more elegant than the text file approach I had been using before. Now the Java program acts as a server, reading in serial data from Bluetooth and broadcasting each line as a UDP packet. The Unity input manager then reads the UDP packets and parses the actual sensor values. This should reduce disk writes, and is more reliable, so I don’t have to reset the Java bridge as often. I’ve updated the code bundle with the new Java and Unity source code.
The other big news is that I’m going to be exhibiting at Maker Faire Bay Area! Maker Faire is one of my favorite gatherings — a fantastic nexus of creative people making wonderful things. If you’re in the Bay Area, you can come try the Power Glove out for yourself this weekend, May 30-31, at the San Mateo County Expo Center!
As a bonus for Maker Faire attendees, I’ve finished adding Power Glove support to our most popular Blurst game, Off-Road Velociraptor Safari! I recorded a demo video to show it off:
I always loved the Nintendo Power Glove. Not because it was a fun or useful peripheral — it wasn’t. In fact it wasn’t bad, as Lucas asserted, it was absolutely terrible. Only two games were ever made to work with it — Super Glove Ball and Bad Street Brawler. You could use it with other NES games of course, but it was just an obfuscated controller. Plus, it was horribly imprecise, and since it required a sensor bar to find its orientation, you had to hold your hand at shoulder level all the time. No, I loved the Power Glove for what it represented — a precursor to virtual reality, a way for humans to directly manipulate computers, like an artifact from some sort of alternate future Earth.
I realized one day that we’re actually living in that future. It doesn’t look the same as we imagined it, but the necessary elements are all there. It’s been 20 years now since Mattel released the Power Glove, in 1989. Especially in the last few years, the availability of sophisticated sensing equipment to hardware hackers has grown by leaps and bounds. Technology like programmable microcontrollers, accelerometers, and Bluetooth are readily available — and cheap. In short, the time is ripe to re-make the Power Glove — and make it right.
Over the past month, I’ve done just that. I stripped the guts out of an original Power Glove, replaced the ultrasonic sensors with an accelerometer, the proprietary microcontroller with an open-source Arduino, and the wired connection with Bluetooth. I wrote an input manager to get the data into Unity, and hooked it up to the boxing game Adam and I are making for iPhone, Touch KO. What’s more, I’ve documented the whole process so that you can make you own!
I have a video, photos, and an instructable of the build process, and have the schematic, Arduino, and Unity code available for download. You can read the data in any way you like, but since many software packages don’t have direct access to serial ports (Unity included), I’ve also written a small Java program that takes the input and dumps it directly to a text file.
Side note: Since my last post I tried and now totally dig twitter. Follow me.
I’m working on a larger-scope project right now that involves collecting a lot of sensor data with an Arduino to transmit over Bluetooth. For past projects, I’ve relied mostly on individually cut wires, but even if you use heat-shrink tubing or the like to bundle them up, they’re still a pain to keep in order. Consumer electronics often use ribbon cables for this sort of thing when they can’t just run traces on a board. I realized that I could make custom cables using the ribbon cables from old floppy and CD drives. With a steady hand and a utility knife, cut off the number of cables you need, cut them to length, and split and strip the ends. Voila — custom-sized ribbon cables, and a great way to recycle old computer parts!
I just finished writing up a post for the Flashbang Technology Blog about integrating custom Cocoa content with Unity iPhone projects. I spent about two and a half weeks in December developing a system that would work for all of our Unity iPhone projects. The goal was to allow me to develop all of our menus and other non-gameplay content using Apple’s super-slick UI development application, Interface Builder. I used this in !Rebolt! and managed to finish all the menus in a couple days. Here’s a snippet:
So I set a goal: Make an easily extensible Cocoa frontend for Unity iPhone that supports Blurst logins and supports any menus we might want. It should work for any project we add it to, so we don’t have to do tons of custom code for every game. Further, it should require changing as little of ReJ’s existing Objective-C AppController code as possible, in the event that it changed in a later build. Finally, I wanted an easy way to add my additional files to the XCode project once I created a build. This is particularly important because, to maintain rapid iteration times, there must be a minimal amount we have to do in XCode between creating a build and installing that build on the phone.
Just a quick update on !Rebolt!, the excellent little robot-combat game Adam and I have been working on the last couple months. We’re just about done, having spent a good deal of time optimizing the game for the phone. I’ve been pretty much eating, sleeping, and breathing iPhone since we got Unity’s first beta. We both love how it’s been coming along, and I’ve just spent the last couple weeks integrating login for Flashbang’s Blurst.com accounts. You’ll be able to save your high scores and track your achievements online using the same kickass system (and account!) we developed for Off-road Velociraptor Safari. Here’s the final !Rebolt! trailer, which Adam whipped up today:
We’re also releasing another iPhone game, Raptor Copter, simultaneously, along with our new web game, Minotaur China Shop. That’s three games being released in one month, oi am I gonna need some vacation in December!
One of my favorite authors is the late Robert Anton Wilson. His own particular brand of absurdism resonates well with my own and has given me inspiration for all manner of crazy things! My favorite works tend to be his fiction — especially the Illuminatus! trilogy and its successor the Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy. Illuminatus! in particular tells the story of the most fantastically absurd far-reaching conspiracy ever dreamed up in fiction or even reality. In short, it’s pretty much got to have some truth to it.
In Illuminatus!, it’s noted that you can tell where the Illuminati are exerting their influence by watching for subtle and recondite symbols they use — the numbers 17 and 23, the images of the Ouroboros and the Eye in the Pyramid, and the phrase “Property of the Bavarian Illuminati! Ewige Blumenkraft!” Now, 17 and 23 I see everywhere. The Eye in the Pyramid is on the one dollar note. But I’ve noticed a disproportionately small number of property claims by the Illuminati, given their clearly far-reaching influence. In the spirit of accurate labeling, such as “antibacterial,” “All-natural,” and “Now SLOWER and with MORE BUGS!,” I’ve made these “Property of the Bavarian Illuminati! Ewige Blumenkraft!” stickers. They should be placed wherever the Illuminati’s influence is painfully obvious, yet conspicuously undeclared!
There’s a developing Flickr set where those came from! If anyone wants to modify them or make their own, I’ve posted the source psd. I’ll also have gobs at Maker Faire Austin this weekend (look for a gentleman in a top hat).
Adam and I have been hard at work continuing development of our robot game the last couple weeks, which we are now calling !Rebolt! A lot of this has been simply fleshing out gameplay flow (doing the weapon equip menu, etc), and optimizations to make it run well on the iPhone. However, we’ve also made two new weapons, the Torch, a little flamethrower, and the awe-inspiring Singularity Cannon, a weapon which rips small black holes in the fabric of space, crushing your enemies inside. I made a new video last night to show off this piece of work:
This last weekend saw a gathering of indie video game developers for the inaugural TIGJam, hosted by TIGSource and us at Flashbang Studios. 20 indie developers from all over the US and Canada came together for 72 hours of game-making with our comrades in arms!
Armed with a bottle of guarana pills, the company of awesome friends, and the promise of a fabulous Indian dinner as culmination, I set out with my brother Adam to start a project from scratch and finish as much as possible. We decided on a game for the iPhone, made using the beta for Unity‘s iPhone version of their software. Our game is a 3D customizable robot brawler, in the spirit of the fantastic Sega Genesis game Cyborg Justice.
After three days of TIGJam, we ended up with a nicely fleshed-out prototype, including enemy robots, three selectable weapons (grabber arm, minigun, and rocket launcher), and, of course, exploding barrels. We made this video earlier today, showcasing a total of four days of work:
There were some other fantastic games being worked on during the jam, including a number for the upcoming Gamma 3D showcase. My personal favorite (other than of course World of Goo, which Kyle and Ron of 2D Boy were working on) was Alec Holowka and Adam Saltsman’s curling game, which looks completely sick after only three days of work!
Photos from the jam are up in my Flickr stream. Adam and I plan to be finished with our robot project by the time that Unity iPhone reaches release — I’ll update as it comes along!
