The anti-Minecraft

Lots of Second Life-people don’t like Minecraft. They consider it too primitive, too childish or whatever. I disagree, I think it’s a fantastic game helping young and not-so-young people all kinds of digital literacies. Joseph Flaherty Wired made me discover another game with Minecraft-like aesthetics, but with themed worlds which… Continue reading

Microsoft’s HoloLens delivers a new level of augmented reality

Dieter Bohn and Tom Warren at The Verge had an amazing mixed realities experience at Microsoft. They tried out the HoloLens, a headset that projects holograms into real space. They report about having Minecraft on a coffee table and about an amazing experience during which an engineer who was communicating… Continue reading

Progressive and emergent games / online courses

I’ve been looking into an interesting course going on right now, Understanding Video Games, at Coursera by Leah Hackman and Sean Gouglas (Alberta University). It’s a rather institutional Massive Open Online Course, not the connectivist style we experience at connectedcourses, but I’m very interested in the subjects they teach. The… Continue reading

What does the success of Minecraft mean?

‘Could Minecraft be the next great engineering school?’ Scott Smith asks at Quartz. He explains that Minecraft can be considered as a particularly interesting MOOC – and an example of peer2peer learning. Minecraft has become a kind of anarchic massive open online course (MOOC) all on its own, without developing… Continue reading

Apps on top of the world: another Minecraft-in-Reality

In an earlier post about MetaMeets I briefly mentioned the Dutch artist Sander Veenhof with his eye-opening and often subversive usage of augmented reality. In yet another post we referred to Minecraft Reality, an app which allows you to position constructions built in the virtual Minecraft-environment into the physical world…. Continue reading

Apps on top of the real world

This seems to be pretty cool, but as you’ll see in the ‘read more’ section, it’s much more than just ‘cool’: And here is how it works: It’s build by Stockholm-based 13thlab.com and it’s an app available on iOS. Using advanced computer vision, Minecraft Reality maps and tracks the world… Continue reading