I think WACOM's pen technology is some pretty interesting stuff; about a year ago, I set about constructing my own Cintiq using whatever was available to the average consumer. In doing so, I learned a lot about how a WACOM tablet works, and what can interfere with the reception of the pen. While I never completed construction of my own Cintiq, I did play around with the WACOM Intuous on a Powerbook for a short time after seeing a video of someone who had crammed a WACOM Graphire inside a 800mhz Titanium Powerbook.

I had started this project in January of 2007, and lazily worked on it until stopping in October, when the announcement of the Cintiq 12WX was made in the UK.

A few months ago, I purchased a WACOM Cintiq 12WX Pen Display. After using it for a few hours, it became very clear to me that even if I had managed to hack the hardware together to make a Cintiq, the software would still be lacking in the functionality that the Cintiq provides (such as a way to calibrate the pen to the screen, and quickly tabbing between screens).

Lenovo has produced a Thinkpad that has a WACOM tablet built in. Rather than using the WACOM Penabled technology that most Tablet PCs use, they are instead making it a traditional WACOM tablet, meaning that right next to the trackpad is a larger pad for the WACOM pen to draw on. The Lenovo W700 has a rather interesting looking wristrest:

The Lenovo W700 features a 17" display, a 512MB or 1GB graphics card, Pantone Color Sensor, and a Core 2 Duo T9400 (2.53GHz 1066MHz 6MBL2) with 2 GB of RAM (expandable up to 8GB) for $2900 -- this is a serious machine aimed at graphics professionals, but I have serious reservations over the actual use of the built-in WACOM tablet. While most artists I know use WACOM tablets, most of them use nothing smaller than a 6x8 pad, and the Thinkpad's is a small 120mm x 80mm (4.73 x 3.15 inches), which is smaller than their smallest tablet available, the old 4x3 (147.6mm x 92.3mm) , which limits the W700's WACOM use to little more than a novelty. Also, notice that there are no extra ExpressKeys for customization, nor any TouchStrips which normally are on the professional-level Intuous models of their WACOM Tablets. Considering the size of the laptop, Lenovo would have better off with a WACOM board that fit under the screen of the laptop, making it a Cintiq-type tablet. For $99, one can purchase a small WACOM Bamboo Fun which is larger than the built-in pad, and includes a mouse in addition to the pen and tablet at a cost less than the cost of the W700's upgrade to the Wacom Tablet. The additional $51, of course is in convenience; you never have to carry a Tablet with your laptop, and the pen is stowed away Nintendo DS style in the base of the computer.

When I left Blizzard in '03, Blizzard North had done quite a bit of pre-production work on Diablo III, as well as some protoyping on the 3d-game engine. Today at the Blizzard Invitational in Paris, they announced the release of Diablo III. Since much of the work we had done on Diablo III was concept and prototype work, seeing the development they've done over the last 5 years was very interesting; while some of the concepts we were developing definitely looks like it made it through to the version of the game they displayed, some of the design choices they appear to have made seem counter to the decisions the original Diablo team members would have made had they remained on development of the title -- the most apparent change that I can point to is the appearance of "floating numbers" as seen in the gameplay video -- this was a feature that Blizzard Irvine continually "suggested" during development on Diablo II, which Blizzard North refused to implement -- with development now located within Irvine, the decision to add floating numbers to the game isn't one which surprises me.

One of the design choices which again shows Blizzard Irvine's hand in the changes made is the re-appearance of the Barbarian character class -- the original design documents for Diablo III included a set of all new character classes, with no reappearance of old character classes (our reasons for this was simple -- since we were enhancing and improving the skill system, we didn't want to try and adapt old skills into a new system -- we'd rather create all new skills for the new character classes. The return of the Barbarian class feels like a change that was made after development of the title was moved to Irvine 3 years ago.

One of the reasons why the Barbarian return shocks me so much is that I always felt that the Barbarian character class was the most broken of the classes in Diablo II. The Barbarian's ability to Leap, for instance gave him advantage over other classes which had to walk around the barrier -- it is the showcasing of this skill in the video (during which a bridge crumbles away, leaving no way to cross the gap) which makes me wonder if they have an alternate way for other characters to cross the gap or if all the characters have Leap now.

Of course, going 3D means that a lot of the things that were hard to do with sprites (such as actual armor looks being reflected on the character) is much easier using polygons and textures, as well as real 3d lighting. The use of a physics engine (Havoc, according to the game specs) is also a nice touch.

While I have more or less given up on the PC as a gaming platform, I'm glad to see that Blizzard is still committed to releasing titles that aren't first-person shooters; such a shame that we won't be seeing this title on the shelves for another year or two at the earliest.

The other day, one of the Gold Box specials on Amazon was the Complete Series Set of Angel on DVD. Looking at the picture on the product page, you might think that this is a big box, after all, even 30 DVDs in Thinpak packaging is a good 7 or 8 inches long.

Actually, the whole thing is about the size of a small stack of CDs, and features one of the best designed packages I've ever seen for a DVD set. The top flips up, and one of the sides of the box folds down to reveal the booklet and season-by-season sets of the DVDs.

I'm told that the 40-disc Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Collector's Set is similarly designed.

Ray Kurtweil was the keynote speaker for GDC 2008 today, a futurist and inventor, and while he's a very enthusiastic speaker, I wasn't quite sure if he was the right person to be a keynote speaker for the GDC, as very little of his keynote was actually focused about games -- even though the talk was titled "The Next Twenty Years of Gaming", he talked mostly about technology, and how the adoption rate of technology is fast, and progress of technology is fast, and how he as a student at MIT in the 60s chose to go there because MIT had their own computer, and how that computer cost 11 million dollars, and how the price-performance of a modern cellphone in comparison is about a billion times better -- the processor is a million times cheaper, and yet thousands of times more powerful, and all that progress has happened within the last 40 years.

Part of the problem, Kurtzweil explains, is that humans tend to think linearly, and not exponentially -- this is why the sudden growth of technology like the internet came as such a surprise to many people -- first it didn't seem to be growing very quickly, and then boom, it was everywhere. Nanotechnology and immersive VR were things that he said we should be seeing within a few years, and he seems to believe that the extension of life expectancy is within our grasp.

Kurtzweil demonstrated two pieces of technology that got thunderous applause; the first was a program on a cellphone that took a picture of text, performed some OCR and then read the words out loud to assist blind people, and the second was an audio translation program that translated English to French.

In the past, GDC has managed to have games industry heavyweights make keynote addresses at the conference; this year's speakers have been somewhat of a disappointment -- while I enjoyed hearing Kurtzweil speak, he seemed to geared towards the Wired crowd, rather than the gamers, and the Microsoft VP of Live (yesterday's keynote) is just pretty unexciting -- because when it's Microsoft giving the keynote, you know that inevitably it turns to a advertising pitch.

Someday I'm going to get tired of continously bashing the Kindle ebook reader, because it's such an easy target. Today, Phillipe Stark, famed industrial designer makes his opinions known about the Kindle:

Link: sevenload.com

New Star Wars Series 2 Mimobots, shipping in January/February. 49.95 for 1GB, 69.95 for 2GB, and 109.95 for 4GB. Some of these new ones have helmets that reveal a painted face underneath.

I think the design of these bowls is just brilliant -- they're friendly and inviting, and will probably end up in a hipster restaurant near you. They were designed by Jensen and Holbaek for Eva Solo