I’ve been having a pretty quiet weekend here. I’d run out of both entertainment and the desire to be entertained, having re-read The Star Fraction and watched another disc of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. I really like the former for its “What if capitalism is unstable and socialism is impossible?” premise. It’s a fun, action-filled tale.

I was thinking, there’s an interesting sort of game which I’ve never seen, which might be quite playable — a first-person shooter, where the enemies are all invisible, but with sufficiently good audio processing that with headphones or surround speakers, an average person can develop the ability to play it rather well, based on the sound of the enemy’s movement, etc.

And, it looks like someone did this, in a different fashion than I was thinking of. Demor takes that idea and makes it into an augmented reality game. Pretty cool, though I’d like to see this idea in a mainstream FPS somehow — like, certain levels you could only pass via auditory techniques?

I think I’m going to have more to say about HCI in the future. The matter of how people interact with computers seems really important to me. It’s hard to imagine not trying to improve it in some way. I feel that development of user interfaces has lagged behind the pace of development of computer hardware. Most of the time, we apply new hardware capability to ‘eye candy’ because it’s easier to do that than make definite innovation in usability, either incremental improvements in the tasks we already do, or larger attempts at completely different styles of human-computer interaction.