There are four versions of the exhibit, which cost about $9 million to develop. Almost $10 million is spent each year setting up the exhibits at various venues around the country such as Six Flags Amusement Parks. The exhibits are huge, almost 20,000 square feet, and involve life size Humvees, helicopters, and “guns” that visitors can use to “shoot” bad guys on large video screens.

Participants enter a dark, inflatable dome. They climb into one of six modified Humvees or two Black Hawk helicopters. Each vehicle, mounted with fake M-249 Squad Automatic Weapons and M-4 rifles, faces three huge screens where the videogame is projected.

Players fire air-pressured guns, meant to mimic the recoil and kickback of real ones. The ethnicity of the bad guys they shoot at is ambiguous. The rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire blares from the game’s speakers and the Humvees shake from the simulated blasts of roadside bombs. Some participants hoot and holler. Despite the nature of the game, there is no blood or guts on screen.

Scores are higher if players only shoot people in uniform; they lose points for firing indiscriminately or at noncombatants.

After the videogame experience, players meet with real soldiers in a sort of “debriefing” that focuses on a positive military message. Participants fill out contact information before playing. Those meeting the Army’s criteria are contacted by recruitment personnel shortly after. About 55,000 people visited the exhibit last year, and about 2,200 met criteria and expressed an interest in volunteering for military service.

The military always faces criticism for its recruiting efforts, from being kicked off college campuses and in some places chased out of town. Naturally, the notion of using videogames for recruiting has faced sharp criticism, too. De Avila spoke with one young man who brushed it off, saying, “Beer companies have hot women. They have a videogame.” Due to complaints at a music festival in Wisconsin, the Army modified the game portion of the exhibit so players shot targets instead of the usual race-neutral terrorists.

References:
De Avila, J. (2008, July 28). War games: Army lures civilians by letting them play soldier. The Wall Street Journal. p.A1.

Mark Scott from BusinessWeek reports from England:

On display at the biennial Farnborough Air Show in Britain, this next-generation ground control system for the likes of General Atomics’ Predator UAV has more in common with the Sony (SNE) PlayStation 3 than with the Northrop Grumman (NOC) F-14 Tomcat made famous by the classic 1980s movie Top Gun.

David Hambling over at Wired notes a variety of videogame technologies are finding their way into military applications.

- A Wii-mote controller is used for bomb disposal robots

- X-box contollers are used for piloting drones and robots

- The world’s fastest computer, to be used for nuclear simulations, is made using chips originally designed for gaming systems

- DARPA is developing technologies for ground forces from gaming chips that include radar, mapping, and tracking of enemy forces in real time while a soldier is in combat

References:
Hambline, D. (2008, July 19). Game controllers driving drones, nukes. [Online]. Retrieved July 20, 2008 from http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/07/wargames.html

Scott, M. (2008, July 16). Raytheon taps video games to pilot drones. BusinessWeek. [Online]. Retrieved July 20, 2008 from http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jul2008/
gb20080716_470794.htm

It has been a while since I’ve read it, but I don’t recall being annoyed by the level of profanity in Ender’s Game. In contrast, I recently finished Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. This book was overly laced with profanity. One of the lead characters is Bobby Shaftoe, a rough and ready US Marine who frequently drops the F-bomb whether planting corpses with false information intended for the Nazis or killing Japanese soldiers in the Philippines. Shaftoe comes up with a cornucopia of imaginative profanity, and spews it out page after page. I just don’t recall nearly so much profanity from the Mormon author Card in Ender’s Game.

What intrigues educational gaming advocates about Ender’s Game is the vision Card painted of training and educating with games. For instance, videogames were used effectively as battle simulators to train soldiers. Battle simulators are old news nowadays, but not in 1985. Kurt Squire and Henry Jenkins noted in 2003 the prophetic value of Card’s book for educational gaming:

In Orson Scott Card’s 1985 science fiction novel Ender’s Game, the Earth is facing a life-and-death battle with invading aliens. The best and brightest young minds are gathered together and trained through a curriculum that consists almost entirely of games—both electronic and physical. Teachers play almost no overt role in the process, shaping the children’s development primarily through the recruitment of players, the design of game rules, and the construction of contested spaces. Games become the central focus of the students’ lives: they play games in classes, in their off-hours, even as part of their private contemplation. Much of the learning occurs through participation in gaming communities, as the most gifted players pass along what they have learned to the other players.

As a parent myself, and educator to boot, I can certainly empathize with parents wishing to shield their children from inappropriate material. However, I also like to read the books my kids read. We’re all active readers. There are books that express worldviews I don’t agree with, and when my children read those we talk about the role of fiction and how we can enjoy a book or a movie or a television show while disagreeing with its worldview. This holds in videogames as well.

My oldest has rediscovered Oblivion on the Xbox, and has been leveling up a thief. He can sneak into a town and steal the shirt off a guard’s back and get away with it. But, we’ve discussed how thievery is not what we’re about in RL. I remind the kids of the time one of them walked out of the nearby country store with a pack of gum without paying. When I discovered it, we drove back to the store and paid for the gum. We are not thieves; it’s part of our morals, part of our worldview. However, leveling a thief in Oblivion, a fictional environment, is okay just as reading about a character who is a thief is also okay.

And so it goes. While I empathize with a parent wanting to monitor the fiction their child reads, I can’t agree with banning Ender’s Game from an AP reading list. The violence in the book involves killing enemy space aliens, and I don’t recall it being gratuitous or overly bloody. Battle scenes are common in many books for young people, including the Narnia series and Tolkein’s Middle Earth tales.

Finally, I was interested to find out the book is required reading for Marine privates wishing to level up to corporal. According to the Marine spokesman quoted in the news article, the book is about leadership in combat; therefore, the Marine Corps says aspiring corporals should read it. I’m sure Bobby Shaftoe would approve.

References:
Jenkins, H., & Squire, K. (2003) Harnessing the power of games in education. Insight, 3, 5-33.

Tompkins, J. (2008, June 15). Alvin ISD mother protests novel. The Facts. [Online]. Available: http://www.thefacts.com/story.lasso?ewcd=b56d920d8eb0be82

Imagine a videogame adaptation of Ender’s Game where players navigate the interface sub-vocally … Or how about a game the speech impaired can play as well as others? Or how about a military immersion training that users control on several levels, including vocally, hand-eye, and sub-vocally? The possibilities are intriguing.

1) 2007 was a seminal year for the US Brain Fitness software market, which reached $225 million in revenues – up from an estimated $100 million in 2005.

2) Over 20 companies are offering tools to assess and train cognitive skills to four customer segments: consumers; healthcare and insurance providers; K12 school systems; and Fortune 1000 companies, the military, and sports teams.

3) The Nintendo Brain Age phenomenon has driven much of the growth. The consumer segment grew from a few million in 2005 to an estimated $80 million in 2007.

4) There is major confusion in the market, so education will be key. Users and buyers need help to navigate the maze of products and claims.

5) Over 400 residential facilities for older adults have launched computerized “brain fitness centers.” Sales to the healthcare and insurance provider segment grew from $35 million in 2005 to an estimated $65 million in 2007.

6) More than five programs have shown results in randomized controlled trials. Cognitive functions that can be trained include: visual and auditory processing, working memory, attention, and decision-making.

7) A product has obtained 510(k) FDA clearance for rehabilitation of stroke and Traumatic Brain Injury patients. Another product is being used by a growing network of ADHD specialists.

8 Large-scale, fully-automated cognitive assessments are being used in a growing number of clinical trials. This opens the way for the development of inexpensive consumer-facing, baseline cognitive assessments.

9) The potential for K12 Education remains largely untapped due to limited research linking cognitive training to academic performance.

10) Companies, sports teams and the military are finding opportunities to improve productivity. The aging workforce will make this a must.

Total cost for the report is $495, with a 10% discount to blog readers until Mar. 20.

I’m particularly intrigued with the report’s findings on Brain Age, and the potential for brain fitness software in the form of educational videogames for K-12 schools.

Video games for entertainment have been pushing the boundaries of
graphics research and capabilities for the last 2 decades. More
recently, these technologies have been extended to include
interaction with and modification of data-driven, complex 3D
models, performed in real time on graphics processing units. As
this industry has become more mature, other applications of video
game technologies have become apparent for the purposes of
scientific simulation and visualization, industrial and military
training, medical and health training and education, geographic
information systems, as well as public awareness and policy
change. The models used in these serious game applications may
contain millions of 3D primitives from point sets to voxels, to
complex higher-dimensional data sets. The use of serious games for
education, decision-making, health, and training applications makes
the realistic, real-time representation of models and data through
geometry, appearance, illumination, visibility, and behavior
critically important.

Another significant set of problems concerns the representation and
animation of avatars and other life-like characters in a game, and
the interaction of the player with their own avatars as well as the
avatars of the other players. For training scenarios, a significant
challenge is the provision of artificially intelligent characters
for players to interact with. For persuasive applications, e.g. the
realism of the social behavior of the characters bears additional
importance. Characters must react to the player(s) in a way that
supports the application goals and is immediately and realistically
responsive.

Serious games require the real-time acquisition, processing, and
visualization of changing data sets at high bandwidth and low
latency, often with multiple simultaneous users. Rendering rates
and interaction in these games are ideally at or above 30-60 frames
per second. Advances that accelerate the management and
interaction of large data sets, including techniques based on
sample-based representation and rendering, polygon rasterization
and shader hardware, and ray tracing are important for serious
games, but the examination of the effects of these techniques on
fidelity for decision making and training is particularly salient.
Towards maximizing real-world training effects as well as making
game play a more ubiquitous aspect of everyday life, serious games
increasingly aim at bridging the real world behavior and the
virtual world performance of the player. The emergence of
sophisticated low-cost sensor technologies to monitor activities,
biometrics, geospatial location, proximity, and contextual
influences promises to greatly enhance players’ direct and indirect
interaction with games, and therefore has great potential to
improve their effectiveness. However, the richness of these new
modalities will also require a rethinking of the general
interaction paradigms commonly associated with video games in order
to draw maximum benefit from multimodal input capabilities.
This special issue seeks papers examining some of the latest
advances with respect to data representation, algorithms and data
structures, systems issues, and applications for serious games that
include real-time interaction with complex models. Topics of
interest include, but are not limited to:

· multi-player systems architectures,
· player-to-player coordination
· automated and semi-automated modeling techniques,
· compression and playback of simulation data,
· scripting and control of animated characters,
· training scenario planning & execution,
· human figure animation for training,
· intelligent characters,
· individual, group, and crowd behavior modeling and simulation,
· lighting, and relighting sampled models,
· representation and storage of large data sets,
· scalable parallel algorithms and architectures,
· rendering of complex and hybrid data sets,
· sampling and filtering for complex models,
· image- or sample-based representations,
· simplification and compression,
· visibility computations,
· data-driven procedural modeling,
· hardware for processing large data sets,
· data and resource management,
· configuration management and change control,
· delivery considerations (networking, system configuration),
· novel interaction techniques for massive data sets,
· sensor-based input and interaction technologies and
techniques, and
· systems and applications.

Articles should be no more than 10 magazine pages, where a page is
800 words and a quarter page image counts as 200 words. Cite only
the 12 most critical references, and consider providing technical
background in sidebars for nonexpert readers. Color images can be
interspersed through the article and should be limited to a total
of 10. Visit CG&A style and length guidelines online.
Please direct any correspondence prior to submission to one of the
guest editors:

Tiffany Barnes
Woodward 403E
Computer Science Department
UNC Charlotte
9201 University City Blvd.
Charlotte, NC 28223
tbarnes2 at uncc. edu

L. Miguel Encarnaçãcao
500 W Main St., HUM10
Innovation Center
Humana Inc.
lme at computer. org

Chris Shaw
13450 102 Ave.
Simon Fraser University Surrey
Surrey, BC, V3T 5X3
Canada
shaw at sfu. ca

Although the links to Lee’s pages over at Carnegie Mellon were not working last I looked, the YouTube video where he shows how to do the trick is still up and working on Richards’ site. Some of Richards’ commenters discuss other ways to leverage inexpensive laser technology this way.

In the video, Lee connects the Wiimote to the computer that is being projected, then uses a laser pen to create an instant interactive white board. Besides walls, he demonstrates on a table and a common LCD screen.

Richards attests that educators watching the video get very excited about the possibilities for creating cheap interactive whiteboards on the fly. We’ve seen this appropriation of common videogame hardware for ulterior purposes before, mainly with the military using Xbox controllers to guide robots. These days, gaming hardware is off the shelf compatible with regular computers and software, using standards like USB, and can be repurposed for other things. It will be nice to see more educational uses in the future.

Article author Dianna M. Náñez indicates the Army is getting creative in its recruitment efforts through local sponsorship of gaming tournaments. Such efforts are an attempt to cut through media-instilled perceptions of military life.

References:
Náñez, D. M. (2007, December 27). Army using video game as recruiting tool. The Arizona Republic. [Online]. Retrieved December 27, 2007 from: http://www.azcentral.com/community/chandler/articles/
1227cr-recruiting1228.html