Playing video games on your phone is all fine and good, but using your phone to control what happens on another screen? Now that's really cool.

This is called a Dynamic Shape Display. MIT built it, and it uses a Kinect sensor. In one of its applications, instead of a user in real life manipulating something on a TV, it puts the user on a TV, manipulating something in real life. See for yourself.

MIT developed this program which allows users to interface with a 3D character that judges your body language—it's called MACH and it's meant to help you socialize better. Reminds me of project Milo a little bit—can you imagine having games where the characters can read your body language like this? It's probably…

MIT's OpenRelativity engine, designed to model Einstein's special theory of relativity in a video game, now is being released as an open-source toolset. It is available for download here.

More than a year ago, Abe Stein of the Game Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reached out to me about a survey he was conducting, an examination of sports video gamers. Stein, himself a committed sports gamer, wanted to know who made up this segment of gaming—long viewed as an outlier to the main gaming…

The last thing I was expecting from a game built on relativistic physics principles was a gentle allegory about the afterlife. But that's exactly how A Slower Speed of Light starts off. The little protagonist in this title from the MIT Game Lab actually dies right at the start of the game and has to pick up objects…

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a long (long) history of student "hacks," harmless but clever pranks. Several tend to show up in any given year. Previous reasonably recent favorites (of mine) include turning a building into The One Ring, flying Nyan Cat through a lobby, and an upside-down lounge.

Four months ago, EA Sports opened up applications for a four-month fellowship meant to invite former college athletes into video game design careers. Today, the label awarded its first two, to graduates who played football at Colorado State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A group of researchers from MIT have developed a new version of the parallax barrier technology used by Nintendo to give the 3DS its signature 3D visuals. The new version of the screen, called HR3D ("High Rank 3D"), can produce the same glasses-free 3D images as the 3DS, but does so while generating a brighter image…

Poring over the data, sifting through more than 1,700 specimens, a team of MIT researchers is, as we speak, cataloging the species known as the sports gamer. The data is, so far, unsurprising.

GAMBIT, the video games research center at MIT, is investigating racism and hate speech in online multiplayer gaming. The results are not particularly surprising, but I'll confess to a morbid curiosity as to what a gamer would hear playing Halo: Reach under the gamertag PROUD_2B_MUSLIM, GayPride90 or…

The games development research lab GAMBIT, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has launched a study of sports video gamers, one a researcher believes will be the first comprehensive, independent examination of a very large video game segment, but one often seen as an outlier to the wider culture.

The tech behind the Xbox 360's new camera controller, Kinect, is now being used for an impressive—most impressive—new feat: to capture 3D images, stream them over the internet and display them in holographic form.

One of the core functions of a computer processor is to perform the basic arithmetical functions of the system. Why would we want a processor that gets those basic calculations wrong? Carnegie Mellon's Joseph Bates has the answer.

A robot playing video games at the MIT Media Lab... sans a savory treat. As seen on Blackaller's Twitpic.

I'm still on a semi-enforced vacation from academia, but I couldn't resist reading some of the essays found on electronic book review. The essays are a selection from two MIT Press books, First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media.…