Gravity Bone – An Experimental Espionage Adventure

Simon Slangen — Sun, 17 May 2009 17:00:19 +0000

When I say espionage adventure, there are a number of things (clichés, really) that will pop in most people’s minds: slick guys in black tuxedos, beautiful traitor women and phones that look like shoes.

This is where we get off. Although this might be true for the major part of all espionage books, movies and games, it’s an entirely wrong attitude to start playing Gravity Bone with.

Let’s try again, shall we? Rule out the aforementioned things, and put down two new ones – experimental short-film and art.

Gravity Bone

This single player adventure was developed by Brendon Chung, Blendo Games. It’s based on the Quake 2 engine (don’t worry, you won’t need it to play the game) and lasts about 20 minutes.

That’s right. Although the game feels like it’ll go on forever, the end shows up suddenly and the game ends prematurely after just two levels. With the length, we conclude anything remotely negative that can be said about the game.

It’s a first-person game, in which you complete missions by finding objectives within the game. Please note the absence of “shooter” behind first-person; although you’ll encounter armed individuals, you’ll never so much as touch a weapon. Instead, the whole game is devoted to searching and platforming.

The Story

Calling Gravity Bone a first-person game might be aiming too low, or perhaps simply in the wrong direction. It’s impossible to classify it in any of the popular genres, and as such is best defined as an interactive experimental film. Although the gameplay is simple, it is intriguing, and will likely have you seated at the edge of your chair until you have the end forced on you.

For a story-centered game, the substantial lack of cut-scenes and dialogues is nothing less than impressive. Almost every single part of the story is communicated via environment and, most of all, experience.

As a result, you’ll suffer the ride of a lifetime, and will most likely be left without a clue of what has just happened. Similar to a good work of art, this leaves the game open for interpretation.

Because of the length of the game, it’s hard to reveal the story without spoiling it. Because of that, this is about as much depth as I can in to now. Play the game, and make it out for yourself.

The Looks

Although the aforementioned aspect of art refers mostly to the experimental storycrafting, the looks play their part as well.

The characters and environment highly resemble paper craft. By deliberately deploying these low-scale models, Blendo delivers a remarkably smooth game.

Amazingly, while avoiding the current trend of polygon realism, Gravity Bone puts down a functional, but also a very artful and characteristic portrayal.

This game comes highly recommended. Download it now and live the experience.

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Google Introduces Video Audio Indexing to Labs

Mark O'Neill — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 21:27:02 +0000

In their quest to make everything searchable, Google is now starting to index what is being spoken in video clips, or to be more precise, what is being spoken in YouTube clips. This is done by using speech recognition technology to convert the audio into words which is then indexed into Google search. Then if you want to find a particular video clip or if you want to find out if someone has mentioned a particular subject in a video clip, you can enter keywords into the search engine and be taken to those clips right away (if they exist of course). This is being called Google Audio Indexing.

That’s the theory anyway. Since GAI is a Labs product at the moment, everything is still a little rusty and doesn’t quite go 100% as planned. While I’m using it, I half-expect Beaker from Sesame Street to come out and go “meep-meep!!” at me! But it’s still a good product, you can see the vast potential in it and it won’t be long before it becomes completely perfect.

Right now, Google is limiting the search results to the US presidential elections. After the election is over, they should hopefully expand it to the rest of YouTube, provided the Audio Indexing service works as planned.

So to use the service, just go to the page and enter the search term you are looking for. Since it is just confined to the election right now, let’s say you are looking for the candidates’ position on gas prices. Just enter “gas prices” and hit enter. You’ll then get a list of YouTube videos where the words “gas prices” come up.

If you see one that fits your query, click on it and it will open up in the right hand side of the page.

Now, see those little yellow squares in the blue bar? They signify where your keyword is mentioned in the video and if you mouse over those squares, a little window pops up showing you the context of your keyword. You can use your mouse to click and jump directly to your keyword, instead of watching the whole video if you’re in a hurry or if you’re not inclined to listen to long windy speeches!

As you can also see, you can “search inside the video”. So you can make a new search with a new keyword inside that one video.

Right now, if politics isn’t your cup of tea, Google Audio Indexing probably isn’t a whole lot of use to you. But once they open it up to other non-political YouTube videos, then it will become VERY useful to EVERYONE. For your videos to be indexed by GAI, it just needs to be on YouTube, nothing more or less. So if you have say speeches on YouTube or screencasts, tutorials, anything which is heavily tilted towards you talking a lot then GAI is going to be your best friend. Simply because your voice is going to be turned into words and then indexed on Google Search.

So now is the time for you to get all those other videos uploaded to YouTube. So when GAI is finally taken out of Labs and opened up to other videos, your work is sitting there ready and waiting to be transcribed, converted, indexed and searchable for people to find on Google.