Using Minecraft to help teach history a hit with Rockhampton students

by Stone Marshall | Apr 1, 2016 | Minecraft News | 0 comments

Minecraft, one of the world’s most popular video games, is being used as an educational tool at a Rockhampton school.

Year 8 students at Emmaus College are studying medieval times in history class, and are building worlds within Minecraft that correlate with what they are learning.

The concept was introduced to the school by history teacher Seamus Toman, after a visit to his home country of Ireland.

Mr Toman said the idea came through his old school.

“They alerted me to the possibility of Minecraft for spatial learners here at Emmaus,” he said.

“We’ve picked up within this group there are a lot of spatial learners.

“They’re very hands-on. They don’t learn through chalk and talk and traditional learning, they like to discover.”

Mr Toman said his students had wholeheartedly embraced using Minecraft in class.

Photo: Students at Emmaus College in Rockhampton are being taught history with the aid of computer game, Minecraft. (ABC Capricornia: Blythe Moore)

“Once they got into the Minecraft, it just went completely crazy,” Mr Toman said.

“They kept going and going. I had to hold them back a little bit.

“They’ve really immersed themselves in it, they’re all just really engaged … we’re trying to have a lesson tailored to their educational needs.”

However, he said Minecraft had not replaced traditional learning tools.

“They have to do their normal research, they have to learn how to use the normal library … but we hope that with the likes of Minecraft and other things, it would enthuse them and drive them on a bit further,” he said.

“There’s a few boys there too and boys are sometimes hard to reach, and we also thought if we introduce this element of playing and gaming through education, it would motivate them as well — and it has.”

Students excited about history class

Photo: Jackson Smith, 13, says he enjoys helping other students with Minecraft in history class. (ABC Capricornia: Blythe Moore)

Minecraft as a learning tool seems to have been unanimously well received by students in Mr Toman’s class.

Thirteen-year-old Jackson Smith said he had not enjoyed history class last year, but that had changed.

“It wasn’t that fun, but this year I’ve always been looking forward to going to history,” he said.

Jackson said he also liked that Minecraft allowed him to take on a different role in class.

“I play Minecraft as a hobby. It was a fun thing to teach other students too,” he said.

“It’s good that I know a lot more about something than other people do.”

Classmate Vincent Ramirez said he was also glad Minecraft was being used in class.

“Last year in history we were just writing and researching about the topic and not playing anything,” he said.

“I’m more interested [in history] because there’s a lot of fun things to do when I research.

“And then when I learn about more things I can add more stuff in my Minecraft world.”

Using Minecraft to help teach history a hit with Rockhampton students

Minecraft Pocket Edition: 0.15.0 Update Release

by Stone Marshall | Mar 31, 2016 | Minecraft News | 1 comment

Minecraft Gear VR Edition – How The Players Described It

by Stone Marshall | Mar 30, 2016 | Minecraft News | 0 comments

Oculus attended the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and held a special event, where the company has presented almost a complete version of the Minecraft game running on Samsung’s Gear VR headset. The participants were allowed to explore the game and some of them shared their impression through IT websites.

Samsung has released its Gear VR mobile virtual reality headset at the end of November 2015, being manufactured in collaboration with Oculus. Minecraft doesn’t need any introduction, as this sandbox video game was launched in 2011 by Mojang, but three years later, Microsoft has purchased it for 2.5 billion dollars. The game can be played on smartphones running on Android, iOS and Windows Phone, on computers running on Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux or and on Raspberry Pi, and on consoles such as Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita and Wii U. Soon, Minecraft will be played in virtual reality, and sometime later this year, it will be available for the Oculus Rift and Gear VR.

Those who were curious to play Minecraft on the Gear VR had this opportunity at the Game Developers Conference and they were impressed with the effects, saying that they were able to walk around and fight off enemies without struggling too much. While playing the game, the participants at the GDC have stood in a swivel chair, being able to spin around and to do a 180-degree turn. Likewise other VR games, Minecraft uses a snap-turning function, but many players get motion sickness when jumping the camera quickly.

Overall, the players loved how the huge mountains look in the virtual world and they felt like they were part of a magic landscape with deep valleys flowing with water. One of players remembered how Iron Golems were walking around and had a face-to-face moment with a creature. After this experience, that player started digging a hole in the ground, but he became claustrophobic when he had his body crammed into a small and dark pit. He didn’t like the low-resolution textures and when he was about to panic, he used the torches and calmed down.

Minecraft Gear VR Edition – How The Players Described It

Minecraft for Gear VR in 2 words: pixelated claustrophobia

by Stone Marshall | Mar 30, 2016 | Minecraft News | 0 comments

A few minutes into exploring a Minecraft world in Samsung’s Gear VR head-mounted display, I started digging a hole in the ground. After getting a few meters into the earth, I faced dirt in every direction. Despite knowing in my heart that I was in a safe room with Oculus representatives and dozens of media professionals, I started to panic.

This is Minecraft: Gear VR Edition. Oculus VR held a special event during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week to show off a nearly complete version of the block-building phenomenon running in Samsung’s phone-holding virtual reality device (it’s also coming to the high-end Rift). I spent around 30 minutes exploring the game, and that experience made it clear that this is an application that could instantly show people the promise of VR. Minecraft is notoriously simple looking, but that didn’t prevent it from giving me moments of exhilaration and panic, and that’s something a lot of people will respond to. Analysts are already expecting mobile VR to generate $861 million in spending this year, and it should also keep pace with console devices like Sony’s PlayStation VR as well as PC peripherals like HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. By 2020, research firm SuperData suspects mobile VR will represent $15.6 billion of a $40.4 billion virtual reality business worldwide.

Unlike Rift, Vive, and PSVR, Gear VR is not a high-end device that tracks your body or the tilt of your head. The result is that it is technically “less immersive,” but that’s not something you’re thinking about when digging through caverns in Minecraft.

Instead, Minecraft: Gear VR Edition puts you into its low-fi world better than any previous version. I played with an Xbox-style controller, and I had no issues walking around and digging up dirt and fighting off enemies. Instead of aiming with the analog stick, I controlled my targeting by looking around. This is something I’ve done in other VR games, but it was nice to see how quickly it made sense in a game I’ve already played for dozens of hours outside of VR.

Above: That’s a long fall, and it feels like it when you’re in VR.

Image Credit: Microsoft

At the event, Oculus had me sit in a swivel chair. This mean I could spin around to do a quick 180-degree turn to look the other way. Having a chair that can pivot along with a controller is probably the ideal way to play, but I also tested out what it’s like if you can’t swivel (like if you were in an airplane chair, for instance). And the game uses the standard snap-turning function that you’re going to see in a lot of VR games. This has you changing where you’re looking by jumping the camera in 10-degree increments. You might think that you’d want the camera to move smoothly when you use the right stick, but most people get motion sickness when they do that.

Beyond the movement, Minecraft in VR gave me some incredible sensations I never really had playing the game on PC. When I first started walking around in the world, the scale smacked me right in the nose. I could see huge mountain peaks and deep valleys flowing with water. It made me feel like a tiny person in a sprawling world. The level Oculus had us in had some Iron Golem creatures walking around, and it was something else to approach them and have to look up to see their faces. I have a memory of one standing right in front of me that I’m recalling right now. That’s imprinted on my brain as if it was something I truly experienced.

After my run in with the Golems, I started digging my aforementioned hole in the ground. And I can’t get over the real sense of claustrophobia I was feeling. It was dark, and I could only barely make out the low-resolution textures a few digital inches in front of me. Like with the creatures I met, I have a memory of having my body crammed into a small pit. On the verge of panic, I thankfully remembered the torches I started the demo with. I popped one onto the wall, and that brought me back from the edge. I’m delighted that I did not have to rip off my headset screaming in embarrassment.

That might sound like a nightmare, but I can honestly say that enjoyed it. It introduces a level of immediacy and presence to something that has a million other things going for it. And having the option to pop on a Gear VR anywhere you want is going to make this game an excellent showpiece for early virtual reality.

Minecraft for Gear VR in 2 words: pixelated claustrophobia

Hands-on with Minecraft for the Gear VR, and why it’s John Carmack’s favorite platform

by Stone Marshall | Mar 29, 2016 | Minecraft News | 0 comments

Microsoft and Oculus VR held a press event yesterday to demo Minecraft on the Gear VR for the first time. Oculus’ chief technical officer, John Carmack, was on hand to give his thoughts, and it turns out he’s been strapping smartphones to his face for a while now. But the demonstration showed that the game is still not quite performing up to its potential.

“About a year ago I got Minecraft on the Gear VR and I couldn’t tell anyone about it,” said Carmack. “And it was extremely frustrating because I was playing this game and I could spend hours playing. […] I thought it was the best VR experience that we had available. For anything.”

The reason the Gear VR is the ideal platform for Minecraft, Carmack said, is because there are no wires tethering the user to a computer. With all the processing power built into the headset itself — in the form of a Samsung smartphone — there’s nothing holding the user back from moving in any direction.

“In VR, I want to go explore the world,” Carmack said. “I think that the ability to be wireless, to spin around and have that freedom, really makes this a unique experience. […] Minecraft hits all of those buttons very, very well. It is the quintessential open-world game, and being able to explore that world in VR was what I always thought the core of this was all cracked up to be.”

To enable that kind of experience, the demo space was littered with spinning office chairs and Gear VRs fitted with Samsung Galaxy S7 phones.

But while Minecraft has been up and running on the Gear VR for some time, it still has no release date. Looking at Minecraft: Pocket Edition side by side with Minecraft on the Gear VR, it’s easy to see why; right now, the view distance is remarkably shorter in VR.

The play space designed for journalists to experience was very narrow. While the frame rate was acceptable — I had no issues with nausea — the grand vistas I’ve come to appreciate in Minecraft were almost entirely absent.

Once I broke free from the prepared environment and ran off into the world, I immediately noticed how details were only visible out to a stone’s throw away, a distance of perhaps 40 or 50 blocks. Past that, the edge of the rendered space manifested itself as an opaque white wall. Underground, in the pitch dark, that wall actually lit entire caves, meaning I could glitch the game into giving me enough light to see.

RIGHT NOW, THE VIEW DISTANCE IS REMARKABLY SHORTER IN VR

Inside the prepared environment, it seemed as if I could see farther up and down than I could see out into the distance.

Despite these technical issues with view distance, the locomotion system was particularly well-refined. Jumps had been smoothed out, and felt more like mantling obstacles in a third-person shooter than leaping into the air.

That freedom of movement was a recurring theme in Carmack’s short speech.

“Knowing that you don’t simply control your character to turn 90 degrees this way, to move over here and turn around, but instead to actually turn your body all the way around [is powerful],” Carmack said. “You know that you’re 200 meters away this way down the hill and around the bend from where you started, and that sense of being in a big world is wonderful.”

Carmack closed by reaffirming his belief that Minecraft would be available in VR for consumers very soon.

“I said this was my grail for VR, that this was the most important gaming application that I could do, or that I could be involved with, and so I’m very proud for the part that I’ve had and I’m happy to have worked with Microsoft and Mojang to get this at the point that it’s at. I’m excited to be supporting it in the coming years as things continue to improve.”

Hands-on with Minecraft for the Gear VR, and why it’s John Carmack’s favorite platform

Microsoft is using Minecraft to train AI and wants you to help out

by Stone Marshall | Mar 29, 2016 | Minecraft News | 0 comments

Computer scientists at Microsoft have developed a new artificial intelligence platform atop the hugely popular video game Minecraft. Dubbed AIX, the platform hooks into Minecraft and allows the AI to take control of a character and learn from its actions. It’s early days for the project; so far, the scientists have been hard at work getting the the AI to learn to climb a hill.

It’s a simple enough task to program directly, but for an AI that starts out knowing nothing at all about its environment or what it’s supposed to be doing, that’s a big ask. The AI not only needs to understand its surroundings, but it also needs to figure out the difference between day and night, why walking on lava is probably a bad idea, and when exactly it has achieved its goal via a system of rewards.

Microsoft’s AI isn’t quite there yet, but those wanting to program their own can do so this summer when the AIX software will be released for free and as open-source code. Budding programmers and researchers need only purchase a licence for the Java version of the game, which currently goes for £17.95 ($26.95/€19.95). AIX will run on Windows, Linux, or Mac OS, and researchers can programme their AI in any programming language they like. The only proviso is that AI experiments won’t be able to interact with other players online—at least not yet.

“People build amazing structures that do amazing things in Minecraft, and this allows experimenters to put in tasks that will stretch AI technology beyond its current capacity,” project lead Katja Hofmanntold the BBC. “But eventually, we will be able to scale this up further to include tasks that allow AI agents to learn to collaborate with humans and support them in a creative manner. This provides a way to take AI from where it is today up to human-level intelligence, which is where we want to be, in several decades time.”

While Microsoft says it’s entirely possible to program an AI, stick it inside a robot, and have that try to climb a real-world hill, it’s an extremely costly experiment—particularly if (when) the AI fails and the robot tumbles down the hill. Minecraft also offers a number of different AI learning opportunities that aren’t always easy to try in the real world, including combat and building. Sure, the odd physics of theMinecraft world might not be reflective of the real world, but the complex decisions and consequences inherent to playing Minecraft may make it easier for AI to learn similar concepts.

AI research has come on leaps and bounds in recent years, but it typically focuses on having a computer learn a specific task, whether that’s beating humans in Jeopardy, or, uhh, beating humans at the game of Go. Microsoft says that by using Minecraft researchers will be able to create AI that’s more adept at “general intelligence,” learning in a similar way to humans by parsing information from light, smell, sound, and touch.

“[Minecraft] allows you to have ’embodied AI’,” AIX software engineer Matthew Johnson told the BBC. “So, rather than have a situation where the AI sees an avatar of itself, it can actually be inside, looking out through the eyes of something that is living in the world. We think this is an essential part of building this kind of general intelligence.”

This post originated on Ars Technica UK

Microsoft is using Minecraft to train AI and wants you to help out