Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week.
Brent thinks that a new dance game included in a new Kinect title could be a step up for the Star Wars franchise. Kinect Star Wars uses the Xbox Kinnect’s motion sensor to let players feel fully immersed in lightsabre battle, but also compete in a dance-off where Princess Leia and others are enslaved by Jabba and forced to bust a move to top-40 songs remixed with Star Wars lyrics.
Video games don’t create themselves… or do they? David found out that simple video games are being created almost entirely from scratch by artificial intelligence. Granted, Space Station Invaders is not exactly ready to sell millions of copies, but it helps prove the effectiveness of an AI technique known as cooperative co-evolution designed to make a game more fun or interesting over successive levels.
Eva got a glimpse into the future when Google revealed its new augmented-reality glasses, which Google employees have been testing this week. Project Glass takes the Google Goggles app, and makes it more immersive. Adding the ability to search to the real world makes for the company that has essentially mapped the online world for easy searching.
Also this week, we were happy to see our friend and colleague Laura K featured on wedding blog WedLuxe for the design of Ashley and Mark’s wedding stationery. Like all of her designs, they’re beautifully refined and polished, and we think the wedding invitations, menus and other printed material especially capture the personality of the newly married couple.