Swarm casts humans as ants in the first Google Glass MMO game | Hacker News Reader

Swarm casts humans as ants in the first Google Glass MMO game

wired.co.uk

22 pointsdjestrada8 comments

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Our app is based in research we've published, which we've made available here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.6376

We're also actively seeking developers and game designers for the project, and we're accepting donations =)

I'm watching this thread, and I'm happy to talk about anything related to Swarm!

edit: send any inquiries to swarm.over.glass@gmail

Why ants? (Other than it's a fascinating topic, but so are so many others...)

Ants are a great example of a self-organized complex system. They've figured out sustainable solutions to a lot of common collective action problems that all social organisms have to deal with, including humans: the division of labor, the production and distribution of resources, the management of waste and the raising of the young.

They are proof that you can have an agriculturally mature, technologically sophisticated eusocial self-organized system that will last for 100 million years. In contrast, humans have been a primarily agricultural species for less that 15,000 years, and our methods are demonstrably unsustainable. We could stand to learn a lot from the ants.

The ants solve their problems by tagging their environment with rich information about their own history. Our own technological situation is starting to give us the ability to do the same for human contexts, and we're working to make that augmentation explicit.

If you are interested in ants, Deborah Gordon's TED talk is an endless source of inspiration. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukS4UjCauUs

What will humans do with ant superpowers? I can't wait to find out =)

Love the concept, but

  Using GPS data collected by Glass, the game generates a record of each player's daily routine.

Scares me a bit. Do you have more details on it?

I left the following comment in a reddit thread:

Hi Thorse! I'm one of the developers for Swarm. You comments are well taken, and deserve a response. Our strategy for collecting and presenting data about collective action abstracts away from individual habits. We're interested in features of collective action (at the 'caste' and 'colony' level), not your personal daily routine. The data we collect will be groomed to remove individual data in such a way that, I hope, would allow people who are as concerned about privacy as you and I both are to confidently use the app.

The other thing to make clear is that not everyone needs to play Swarm in order to build useful models for everyone. Consider Yelp!: maybe you don't want people to know your eating habits, but some people love leaving reviews. That record potentially helps anyone looking for a restaurant, whether or not they contribute their own opinions to the record. Similarly, Swarm trails might be useful to you whether or not you contribute to the trails yourself. I would also (humbly) object to the claim that Swarm! treats your life habits as a game mechanic. Your life is your life. Swarm doesn't intrude on that process to give you 100 points for buying chips at the store, or anything so cheap. The game aspects of Swarm interact with trails at an abstracted level, in order to reveal patterns about collective human behavior; but it won't be possible on a system like ours to watch, mess or interact with, or otherwise represent the activity of individual players directly.

Its not about you, this is about us. For instance, which are the most scenic trails in Inwood Park? A populated Swarm! map instantly tells me how the populations that have traversed these trails before have distributed their walking patterns along the park. From passive players I see their aggregated preferences, and from the active players I may have incentive (both in game and out) to respond to the attractions they’ve built in the course of their travels. From that information I might choose to trust the reliability of the crowd, or contribute to the inspection of a road less traveled, or blaze a new trail altogether. In other words, you can live your life however you want; Swarm! just lets you do it with the ant superpower of instant access to collective memory. As long as enough people have that superpower, we'll all be a little smarter.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1jysa5/our_first_loo...

I'm torn between oculus and glass games on who's going to win the war with gamers. Opinions?

With gamers? Oculus, by a landslide.

Glass can enable some interesting layers over the real world (I'm personally looking forward to Ingress on Glass), but it isn't even close to the level of immersion the Rift offers.

There's room for both, of course. Initially I expect Glass and AR devices to be more palatable to the general public than VR.

I don't know that either has to "win." Oculus games clearly replace the hardcore FPS/Computer game sort of market, whereas Glass games are more a replacement for cell phone games, more casual things, or real-life MMOs/ARGs (which there hasn't really been a market for before, except maybe Ingress and a few others). I see both being pretty popular with gamers (although I guess the stereotypical ones who just sit at home all the time won't necessarily enjoy ARGs).

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