Neuroweapons, Virtual Space Wars and Scientific Telepathy

It's been a long break but I am back! Recently I am preparing my newest set of experiments and I got a bit disconnected from RSS feeds drip-bag. Yesterday I realized that my Google account might eventually crash  from information overload and that I haven't uploaded myself and You with some new infornography for a long time. So here are my favorite highlights from the last month:

1. Those of you interested in hardcore military neuropsychology - there is new call for you. Air Force Research Lab just opened a call for proposals for a six-year long project with $49 million to deploy extreme neuroscience and biotechnology in the service of welfare. One of the potential projects include  'artificially overwhelming enemy cognitive abilities with external stimuli'. Speaking simply - the goal is to use set of audiovisual techniques in some unknown format to fuss enemy sensory system in any situation. Suddenly the Man Who Stare At Goats doesn't look so crazy...

2. In the virtual science-fiction world EVE online, two big 'space corporations' succeeded in destroying £14,000 worth virtual spaceships and resources of the third corporations. They just wanted to push it away from particular space sector. Because there is a currency conversion between real and virtual world of EVE, those were... well, the real money. You can watch the battle below:

3. Finally,  a super exciting study from recent Nature Review by Moran Cerf and lots of colleagues. In a huge chunk of neuroimaging studies, he claims that specific brain cells can be linked to specific topics, concepts, objects or people, and will flare up with the brain activity when the particular subject is mentioned. Because non-invasive brain scanners can't  achieve a resolution good enough to monitor activity of the single cells, Cerf et al. use patients with already implanted electrodes deep inside the brain. He found that when volunteers thought about Marilyn Monroe, a particular neuron reliably lit up. So he could build a brain activity database of different concepts, usually famous ones, from buildings like Eiffel Tower to different celebrities. After that, researchers could reliably detect what concept subject was thinking about, just on the bases of neuronal activity. Cool eh?

More stuff coming soon, so stay tuned for the online makeover celebrating the first year of Geek On Acid blog being online!

Video source: YouTube

FarmVille Phenomenon

What is the game which is played by 1% of world population every month? 

That's right, welcome to FarmVille with population 82.4 million players (as for May 2010). Some 30 millions of them check their crops daily.

This mean that 20% of all Facebook users login FarmVille every month to plant, tend and harvest virtual crops, over and over and over again. And folks from the company behind the game, Zynga, say that it's only the beginning - and they already released iPhone app, showed in most recent Steve Jobs presentation. 

Wow, I am not really a big gamer geek (regardless of what you all think, I only play Scrabble on iPad recently). But it is still fascinating for me - what is the key to the success of this shit-graphic, repetitive and extremely simplified game that looks like rip-off from early Nintendo adventure games?

There are a number of factors here, all purely hypothetical and only based on surveys rather than well controlled studies. 

First - social factor - if a player persuades their Facebook friends to become their FarmVille "neighbours", they can be rewarded for fertilizing their friends' fields or feeding their hogs. 

Playing games like FarmVille is “intimate, yet public.” You can publish your accomplishments to your Facebook Wall for all to see, in case you want your friends to know that you’ve mastered the art of farming strawberries or won a blue ribbon for your prize eggplants. Obviously, this is something that non-invasively keep people in touch as well - a phenomenon I call 'ping communication' - when you don't actually exchange any particular information with your social contact online, but rather virtually 'poke' each other, or send invite for some stupid quiz or send a pig to friend in FarmVille. 

What's more, FarmVille mechanics is based on the oldest action-reward idea in the gaming history, borrowed from old Chinese games, which are in turn based on old Japanese RPG games. You have control, you make an action, which will have predictable result. You don't make an action on time, and your crop will die. So you have to come back to the game after a while when you leave the Facebook to maintain your farm. Simple. 

And it's extremely simple to play as well. Almost every age group from teenagers to older players can set up their own virtual farm within couple of minutes. Simple diagonal layout borrowed from those old Japanese games combined with straightforward options menu, and minimalist iconic graphics, makes the game learning process almost instant. And the fact that you have to get back to the game regularly, works like a virtual pet, a Tamagotchi - you have to nurture it and look after it every day, otherwise it will be sad and will die soon after.

We can add more theories to it, like an urban fantasy of having farm, but at the end of the day, it seems that FarmVille is a masterpiece of simple combination of all the things we already know in gaming - simplicity of interface, control, predictability, direct action-reward model and social networking. All those aspects shifter social online gaming to the mainstream. Today's average social online game player is 43-year-old women and generally housewives staying with kids at home. But FarmVille population covers all group ages, which is absolutely unprecedented phenomenon. 

It also looks like Zynga reported a revenue of over $200mln in 2009 and FarmVille is definitely one of their key product. It's a good figure, but not as much as you would think. There are no exact numbers on how many users actually spend money, but it looks like only a small percentage of users do so. To put it in the context - Blizzard, with biggest online MMORPG game World of Warcraft (population of ONLY 11.5 millions - 8 times smaller than FV), gets an average profits of $100mln PER MONTH. Console games producers also report much more profits than Zynga. 

But Zynga strategy of keeping it simple and continuously expanding FV universe by a small elements keeps users logged in for a long time. Ultimately, they seem to learn well from other games producers and combine best features to keep you attached to your farm, so the future... might be interesting ;-)

[photo credit: Wired.com, Wikipedia, Zynga]

Size of your brain striatum predicts computer game skills.

In the fresh paper from January issue of Cerebral Cortex, authors argue that the size of your striatal volume (indicated in procedural learning and cognitive flexibility) predicts video game skill acquisition. They asked participants with different levels of gaming experience to play Space Fortress and their measured their brain volumetry using MRI. They've found that people with bigger dorsal striatum were overall better in performance and their performance improved with learning quicker than people with smaller striatum. Additionally, hippocampal areas (implicated in declarative memory) didn't predict learning improvement, suggesting lack of experience effect (interesting...). Those results suggest that there might be some major brain size effect for procedural learning and cognitive flexibility in general. I'm just wondering if there is any task specific effect related with playing computer games, so it would be nice to test participants with different other cognitive tasks (like some IQ test) to see if there is any correlation in such cases as well. You can read the paper here. Discuss ;-)

You brain can process only 150 Facebook friends.

I am back to my geek space for a moment after busy week of massive literature search/review I am doing. So today - some science stuff for change.

First - something for Facebook freaks - a theory by Professor Robin Dunbar from Oxford Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology. The thing is about to get publish so I can't give you the full paper reference, but the idea goes like this: we have in the brain area called neocortex, responsible for processing complex thought and language (probably). However, the volume of neocortex is limited, and therefore we are only able to actively manage social circles of about 150 friends.

Social circle is defined by Dunbar as "relationships where a person knows how each friend relates to every other friend". Dunbar calculated this number when he surveyed such social circles as Neolithic farming villages, unit sizes in Roman armies and even non-primates groups. It seem that when the circles go larger than 150, then some part of links deteriorate and stagnate. Now, he is arguing that the same rule ('Dunbar number') works for online social groups like Facebook. He showed that you can have as much as 1000 friends, but you actively manage only about 150 of them anyway. There is a gender difference here: females communicate more via Facebook and manage their circles more than males (surprise?).

I am reluctant to agree, there are so many other factors that could determine our social circle management skills (e.g. personality traits like 'openness' or 'extraversion', level of anxiety). But I acknowledge the fact that we have a limited cognitive capacity which could effect managing our social circles. What do you think?

[image credit: Geek On Acid with shitty and broken camera]

Nexus One, Transparent Display, Project Natal and shit loads of touch tablets.

Its the beginning of 2010 and there is a lot of stuff happening in the technology world. Particularly, I have been focusing on Consumer Electronic Association (CES) conference to see if there is anything worth cyberpunk attention.

First - everyone has been hooked on the release of Google Nexus One phone (pictured below), which for me looks really like another iPhone copy. Some specs are better (larger screen, 5 Megapix camera, voice recognition, multitasking), but to be honest - I would expect more from Google. All the internet gossips about Nexus One came true, which was... very disappointing, because it was all so predictable! I really like the fact that you can dictate your SMS's to the Nexus, but I know from experience that as a non-native English speaker, those technologies doesn't work so well for me. Nothing really new there, it is like Google just recycled iPhone. Not impressed at all. However, what has to be admitted is that the real war is not in the hardware but software that matters in mobile phones at the moment. As Mike Harvey reflects in his Times review from yesterday that only Google Android OS is a real candidate to overtake Apple on the mobile market. We shall see how it develops, and what phone we will have in our pocket in a year time...


Second - the cool stuff, is the prototype for Samsung transparent OLED display and 0.05 mm OLED panels (pictured below in the format of window displayed during CES conference). Yes! I was waiting for it! I already see my mobile phone with transparent display scanning the reality around me with augmented labels, or my flat windows being my displays. Also, the perspective of reading a e-newspaper on 0.05 mm display is even more exciting. Ok, maybe I haven't outlined the most practical aspects of this technology (like hmmm... transparent medical body scanner - you know, the one from Aliens) but it still has very high cyberpunk-geek factor for me. It's the kind of stuff from sci-fi movies that comes true. Ah, shame it's still in research and development, no release date yet...


Third - Microsoft Project Natal for 'new' Xbox 360 - finally. 'You Are The Controller' as the advert says - full body gaming interface. I think it was inevitable after Nintendo Wii, but it will finally be here, this year, in your living room. Project Natal is a tiny camera (pictured below), that combines depth sensor, multi-array microphone, and software which provides camera with 3D full body motion capture, face capture, voice recognition, acoustic source localization and ambient noise suppression. So you slash, shot, speak, shout, kick, or jump, and your on-screen gaming character does the same. However, on the CES they didn't actually demoed this device. Microsoft folks just showed cheesy clips of Natal and jumped around excited how amazing it's going to be. Demo please Microsoft, we want proper user demo. Anyway, its coming soon, this summer. I think I will actually buy Xbox just to experience it...


Forth, fifth, sixth... all the other releases are taken by so called 'Slates' or touch tablets. Lenovo Tablet, Dell Tablet, Freescale Tablet, T-Mobile Vega Android Tablet... This year on CES almost every possible company decided to release their own tablet, probably in competitive anticipation for widely-gossiped iSlate (that is supposedly coming soon from Apple). And, I totally agree with my pal from lab, David (who already criticized it here), that tablets don't fill any market gap, and therefore they are useless. Ebook I understand, because I want to read and store journal papers, newspapers and articles on the thin and light device with E-ink display (and they are cheap). Netbook I acknowledge, because I would like to have a light laptop working in the Cloud (and they are cheap). But I don't need a 10" copy of my iPhone with touch LCD or LED screen. Not useful for writing, not useful for reading, shit, it's a retarded technology and it's expensive. Enough for today.

[photo credits: Google, Engaget, Wikipedia]