BigShinyThing

Scratch is a free programming tool that allows anyone to create their own animated stories, video games and interactive artworks has been developed. Primarily aimed at children, Scratch does not require prior knowledge of complex computer languages (although, given the apparent hacker mentality of most digital natives this might not be an issue).

Instead, it uses a simple graphical interface that allows programs to be assembled like building blocks.

“These days, kids interact with all kinds of dynamic things on screen but it is usually a one-way street — they are usually interacting with things that other people have created,” said Professor Mitchel Resnick, one of the researchers at the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT which developed Scratch. Resnick also invented Lego Mindstorms, a robotics toolkit often used in teaching.

With Scratch we want to let kids to be the creators. We want them to create interesting dynamic things on the computer.

The program works by making the act of creating a computer program more like building with Lego bricks.

“Kids make programs by snapping blocks together,” said Professor Resnick, whose position is in part supported by the toy company (way to survive in the 21st century, Lego!).

Objects and characters, chosen from a menu and created in a paint editor or simply cut and pasted off the web, are animated by snapping together different “action” blocks into stacks.

“They don’t have to worry about the obscure punctuation and syntax common in most programming languages,” he said.

Each block contains a separate command, such as “move” or “play drum” and each action can be modified from a drop-down menu. Blocks can only be stacked if they fit together.

So, for example, if someone wanted to animate a cat walking across the screen they could modify the move block to tell the cat to walk forward 10 steps.

If they then wanted the cat to bang a drum as it walked, they could stack the play-drum block underneath, choosing a sound for the instrument and how long each beat should last.

Other actions, such as speaking, changing colour or triggering music, can then be added to complete the animation.

Scratch is inspired by the method Hip Hop DJs use to mix and scratch records to create new sounds. “With Scratch, our goal is to allow people to mix together all kinds of media, not just sounds, in creative ways,” said Professor Resnick.

“We want people to start from existing materials — grabbing an image, grabbing some sound, maybe even bits of someone else’s program and then extending them and mixing them to make them their own.”

Digital creations can then be shared on a site where users can watch other creations and even borrow elements from other Scratch projects to act as raw materials for their own.

Scratch is now available to download for free and works with both Apple Macs and Windows PCs. If you are reading this close to the launch date (15th May 2007) you might want to wait a little while — coverage from digg.com and the BBC et al caused such a huge amount of interest that their server crashed.

AND a version of the tool is also currently being developed for the XO laptop, designed by the One Laptop Per Child Project.

Source: BBC.

It’s list time again — MIT’s Technology Review has just published its annual roundup of important emergent technologies. And what a wide-ranging list it is — ranging from new methods for the early diagnosis of cancer (this time dogs are not required), the mandatory longshot on medical nanotech, and cool new things to do with stretchable silicon. Pick up on the buzzwords now and be prepped for when epigenetics and Diffusion Tensor Imaging start to get namechecked in the mainstream press. Big Hopeful Future or Big Techno-Hype? Read and decide for yourselves.

ABC reports from a recent conference of America’s top sex researchers (including one of our all time icons Annie Sprinkle) that it’s all looking well, a bit mechanical. In a field called ‘teledildonics’ people can already via two remote computers manipulate electronic devices such as a vibrator. According to Steve Rhodes, president of Sinulate Entertainment, “Cybersex is here! The Sinulator lets anyone control your sex toy over the Internet!”:

People who use it are just blown away. This is not something that just the lunatic fringe does. The Iraq war… was kind of a boom for our company.

And it’s not real life relationships that are benefitting. Kyle Machulis (or qDot as he’s known online) talks in this month’s Bon Magazine about all the shagging that goes on in MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games). In particular, he’s interested in the sex life of one of the most popular, Second Life. Originally conceived as an economic experiment along the lines of The SIMS, the game emulates the pioneer experience with the slogan, “Your world. Your imagination.” As befits any kind of ecoculture, the game is teeming with sexual experimentation. According to Machulis, who edits a news site MMOrgy.com:

Users can build their own objects and program them themselves. And people make .. well… everything imaginable. It’s hard to be more specific. Literally everything can be found in there. Second Life has been around for three years, and I promise you that every sexual fetish you can imagine is represented.

And it’s now getting truly interactive. The programmers are alert to this: the game has developed a porn mag starring nude female avatars called Slustler, which is both shot and distributed within the world of the game. More recently Second Life was equipped with new hardware, enabling objects that exist only in the virtual world to control physical sex play in real life — in other words, it’s back to teledildonics again.

Entrepreneurs are unsurprisingly looking to cash in by melding traditional video porn with real-life sensation. Brad Abram, president of ZStream3D Multimedia, says that his firm’s “Virtually Jenna”, an online game in which the player has sex with a realistic cartoon of porn star Jenna Jameson, can even link hardware devices following the action to genitalia. Which sounds painful. We’ve already written about realdoll.com whose products recently co-starred with Tom Ford in a racy shoot for W Magazine. Real Dolls have reached such critical mass now that there’s even a Real Dolls Surgery site (as featured on this week’s Popbitch — good lord).

At the other end of spectrum is a recently published book of DIY auto-erotica — Sex Machines: Photographs and Interviews — which explores the readers’ wives/Forum territory. Fucking in the future — shiny or sordid — take your pick.

With thanks to Tom who reads ABC News so that we don’t have to and apologies to Walter Benjamin. Pictured is the sex machine from Barbarella (top) and Paul Gaertner, inventor of the Thumpstir and Gangbang (above).