The Independent Developer Shall…

This PPT by Greg Costikyan is from his keynote at a German games conference last month. It’s got some nice economic analysis, and some nice *hope*: internet speed has caught up with game size, so internet distribution can support more game development business models that it did 5 years ago.

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Multimedia malware in Second Life robs avatars

There’s a role for almost every area of Computer Science in game development, including security. A article Exploiting QuickTime flaws in ‘Second Life’, describes a vulnerability in Second Life that allows an object with a multimedia link to inject malicious code into the victim.

“Researchers Charlie Miller of Independent Security Evaluators, and Dino Dai Zovi, turned their attention to Second Life during a Saturday morning presentation at ShmooCon, an East Coast computer hacking conference. The researchers didn’t exploit a flaw within Linden Labs’ Second Life, but within QuickTime. They showed how an attacker could make money stealing from innocent Second Life victims.” (link)

Their SmooCon talk was titled “Virtual Worlds - Real Exploits” and had the abstract

“Virtual worlds serve as a new way to deliver exploits to the masses. Besides traditional attacks, they also allow attackers to control the “avatars” of players, including being able to steal the player’s virtual money and possessions. When there is a link between the virtual money and real money, this can be an easy way for an attacker to profit. This talk will address these issues and illustrate the technical details of a Second Life exploit.” (link)

Apparently the general approach used in the exploit has been around for a while, as Vint Falken blogs in The Second Life Quicktime exploit soon redone?. Here’s how Miller and Zovi demonstrated the current version of the exploit.

“For their demonstration, they created “the most evil pink box you will ever see.” They could have linked their malicious code to attributes of an avatar’s hair, clothes, or anything else. They also could have buried the pink box underground or otherwise hidden it, but both researchers admitted they weren’t very good players within Second Life. … In the demo, the researchers were able to show that their avatar became infected when it came too near the pink box. The code they used raided the avatar’s Linden dollars and emptied the bank account.” (link)

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A new life for physics engines?

You can’t buy any PC these days without some graphics acceleration, and you certainly can’t play games without a decent GPU. Yet add-on physics accelerators have yet to catch on. It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Why would a user spend the money on a physics card if games don’t use it? Then again, why would a game company target a physics card if no users have them? The few games that have made use of physics accelerators have just used them for “eye candy” — fancier explosions or slightly more real incidental animation with absolutely no impact on the gameplay at all. After all, if they required a physics card (as they do for specific GPUs), then many fewer people might by the game.

Well, some recent developments might change that. Several recent news stories report that NVIDIA is buying physics-accelerator company Ageia. Hard to say where they’re going from here, but certainly a combo GPU/physics processor might finally break the deadlock and get enough physics accelerators out there to make them viable.

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Dawrin motion-based game controller to challenge Wiimote

Motus Corporation has developed its Darwin game controller and hopes that it can replicate the popularity of the Nintendo’s Wiimote to other consoles and PCs. Darwin is scheduled for release in Fall 2008, and is said to feel more realistic. Darwin uses a combination of accelerometers and gyroscopes to track its motion. The New York Times has a good overview of how the Wiimote works. A recent note in Technology review, Moving In on the Wii, has more information.

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Wiimote head tracking

CMU PhD student Johnny Chung Lee has done some amazingly cool things with the Nintendo Wii remote (Wiimote). My favorite is using it for true 3D virtual reality head tracking. Compare that to the thousands you’d spend for a magnetic tracker from Ascension or Polhemus. Admittedly, magnetic trackers don’t have the line of sight constraints of the infrared Wiimote, but for “fish tank VR”, where your computer screen serves as a 3D window into the virtual world, that’s probably just fine. Need convincing? Check the video out the video on his web site.

Posted in Hardware, Wii, technology, virtual worlds | No Comments »