Parents might be happy to know their kids can get a head start in the competitive slipstream of computer programming by doing something they already enjoy — playing video games.

That’s the goal of Server Design 1, a new online course rolled out Tuesday by Youth Digital, a tech education company that teaches kids to code, develop apps, and design 3D modeling. The company’s new program allows kids to create their own worlds, with their own rules, all while playing the popular video game Minecraft with their friends.

“You get to add things that you would never ever, ever, ever be able to do without a programming interface,” said 10-year-old Ronan, an early adopter of the new tech tool who’s become well-versed in developer lingo while not losing that kid’s perspective. “You can create skeletons wearing iron doors. How weird is that?”

The interface he’s talking about is a unique Java server, part of a yearlong subscription (for $250) to curriculum, tools and a hosting service with Youth Digital, where kids custom-code their own Minecraft environments, characters and scenarios.

Minecraft, a “virtual Lego” video game that’s a runaway hit with younger players, is made by Mojang, a Swedish game maker purchased last year by Microsoft for $2.5 billion. The game provides an infinite digital sandbox where kids can dig and build different kinds of 3D blocks. Or, as Ronan explained in a Youth Digital video: “I can turn a blank screen into a virtual playground.”

With the burgeoning programming and development job market, code literacy has become an increasingly popular part of higher education curriculum. Parents, schools and future employers have been pushing to integrate the developer’s languages — JavaScript, HTML, CSS — as early as grade school to give kids a head start. One stumbling block is making the methodical, typing-intensive learning fun for kids.

But Justin Richards, founder and CEO of North Carolina-based Youth Digital, says there’s a natural connection between kids’ penchant for creativity and the complex world of computer programming.

“If you tell 9-year-olds that coding experience will help them get a job in the future, they might not be too interested,” said Richards. “But if you ask them if they want to create a video game, they’ll answer yes every time.”

This isn’t the first time Minecraft has been repurposed for the classroom.

The Australian government funds a competition for school children that challenges participants to design their “perfect national park” using Minecraft as a design medium. And MinecraftEdu, which makes a custom edition of the game specifically for classroom use, offers discount licenses to schools.

But the Server Design 1 program puts the kids, ages 8 to 14, right in the driver seat. “This matches science and storytelling into a singular project,” Richards said. “It’s exploratory and just plain cool to actually get to modify the code and change the game that you love.”

The simple concept behind this and all of Youth Digital’s programs, he said, is to “turn the youngest consumers of technology into its creators.”

Teaching kids to code, using Minecraft’s building blocks

Thorlar Thorlarian describes himself as a “Pixel Art King,” and that’s not an empty boast. Witness his recreation of this BlizzCon 2010 wallpaper in Minecraft: It’s made up of over 1.1 million blocks, and took him more than 23 weeks to create. Even crazier, he did the entire thing by hand, without the aid of any external software or other artists.

“Pixel art, when it comes down to it, is just like drawing with pen and paper. So with enough practice, it’s easy to know what blocks have what color, such as black being best represented by by black wool, coal blocks, etc. At that point, no matter the size of your project, all you need to do is know what block would be most suitable for what area,” he told us. Of course, you also need the time and the tenacity to see it through to the end. “It took over 1000 hours, so it’s not something you just plan to do overnight or in a week,” he added.

A video of the final moments of the image’s creation, followed by a flyover, demonstrates just how massive it really is. Even with the render distance set to maximum, we don’t come close to seeing the whole thing until he zooms out to a world map view. Thorlar claims that the 1,128,960 blocks used in the image represents an actual world record as the biggest Minecraft pixel art ever, with thousands of Twitch witnesses to confirm the legitimacy of the accomplishment.

Livestreaming the creation of the image also earned roughly $3500 for charity, including $1337 in one hour on the final day, most of which went to Make-A-Wish Ireland. In fact, he’s raised roughly $11,000 for charity since March 2014, shortly after he became a Twitch partner.

“I told myself, ‘If I ever get so much support I get partnered, we’re doing charity as much as we can.’ As we’ve kept growing, the effort has too,” he said. “The bigger we’ve grown, ever so steadily, the faster we’ve been able to raise money, and it makes me happy to see how much of a difference games can make for charity and the less fortunate… I love seeing what games can do for people. Not just cheering people up on a bad day, but giving people clean water, helping research cancer, etc.”

A closer look at what went into Thorlar’s amazing creation may be found in this Reddit AMA posted earlier today, which also includes a link to the Dynmap for those who’d like to check it out in all its humungous glory for themselves.

Insane million block Minecraft pixel art sets world record

There are robot insects bursting in through the walls. Everywhere I look, the plaster is cracking, then suddenly, out they spew, their metallic claws aimed at my jugular. It sounds like the sort of techno-hallucinogenic nightmare that filmmaker David Cronenberg may concoct in one of his woozy sci-fi horror flicks. But it isn’t. This is a demo for Microsoft’s Hololens, a forthcoming “mixed reality” headset. The future is terrifying. But also sort of amazing.

I’m standing in a quiet room, upstairs from the E3 Expo in Los Angeles, with two staff from Microsoft’s Hololens development team that’s based in Redmond. They’re going to show me a couple of demos: the robot shooting game, Project X-Ray, and the one I’m really desperate to see, Minecraft Hololens – basically, the game that stole the show at Microsoft’s pre-E3 press briefing.

Announced in January, Hololens is Microsoft’s entry into the growing arena of immersive interactive technologies. It’s a self-contained, standalone headset, featuring two transparent HD holographic lenses. When you put the headset on, the device is capable of projecting computer graphics into your field of vision – so it looks like these digital objects are part of your real-world. This seamless integration of graphical elements into your normal view differentiates the technology from virtual reality headsets like Facebook’s Oculus Rift and Sony’s Project Morpheus, which immerse you in a digitally constructed world. Confused? Um, the coming world of immersive entertainment is maybe not for you.

Hololens also features an array of sensors so it can work out where you are, how you are moving, and what’s happening in the environment around you. It has a basic understanding of the objects in your field of view, too, so it recognises doors, windows, chairs, tables – elements it can use when overlaying visuals. Plus, there’s a mini-computer – or holographic processing unit – built in, so you don’t have to plug it into a computer or games console. Hololens can go anywhere with you.

The device itself looks suitably futuristic. The visor is attached to a high quality plastic band, which also contains the sensor array and the self-cooling computer processor, as well as built-in speakers with 3D spatial sound. Within this is another band, which fits over your head, with an adjuster wheel on the back to tighten it up. I slip it on carefully, and it’s surprisingly light and easy to set in position. I’ve heard some people say it’s either too tight or too loose, but for me, the lenses stay comfortably in place, directly in front of my eyes and I can move my head without it wobbling. Hololens is a work in progress and it seems some re-designing has been carried out since the original protoypes were shown in January.

They start me off with Project X-Ray. A simple menu screen is projected onto the wall in front of me, and to select the demo, I just have to lift my hand up in front of the device’s sensors, raise a finger then make a sort of clicking gesture, like pressing the button on a mouse. This selects the demo and it starts running.

Now I’m in the game, a sort of first-person sci-fi shooter. A voice tells me that there’s an invasion of robots coming and I have to prepare myself. I have an Xbox One controller, which acts as my laser gun trigger, and it fires wherever I’m looking. Suddenly, I hear a sort of digging noise and cracks start appearing in the wall in front of me, then chunks of rock burst out and I can look into what appears to be a tunnel. A tunnel behind the wall of an E3 demo room. Then robot scorpions start running out crawling onto the wall and firing at me. They scuttle about, some launch into the air around me. Their projectiles are reasonably slow, so I can dodge them, but later enemies fire waves of bullets, which I have to duck underneath to survive.

It’s surprisingly physical. As the attack heats up, robots start bursting into the room from behind me, and either side, so I have to listen out for the tell-tale scratching noises – already I’m imagining how terrifying this would be in a horror game like Resident Evil. Some robots even burrow along the interior walls so you see masonry cracks spreading out along the entire surface. It’s weird, but incredibly involving. By the end, multiple robots are firing at me, so I use a power-up on the pad’s left trigger that slows down time, allowing me to shoot multiple scorpions, earning a combo bonus. By the end, I’m almost breathless having darted about the room firing wildly for five minutes, completely immersed and almost unaware of the two Microsoft coders watching my every move.

Certainly, I’ve played basic “mixed” or “augmented” reality experiences in the past. In 2003, an early mobile phone game called Mosquito Hunt overlaid its graphics onto the camera display, so you could jerk your phone around blasting at imaginary insects. Nintendo’s 3DS console came with a range of interesting AR demos that let mini-game characters appear out of your environment. But this is different. The fact that the screen overlays your visual field, that the computer graphics are contextual and high definition, and that the tech is using the actual walls in the room as props, all heighten the experience immeasurably.

“We knew from the beginning that Hololens would need to have an understanding of the user’s real environment – we knew it would make the gameplay unique for each person, based on where they play,” explains Microsoft’s corporate vice-president Kudo Tsunoda, just before my demo. “However, as we started building more character-driven narrative experiences, we didn’t fully understand the level of emotional engagement and intensity that you can create with somebody by having the characters and the story play out like right there in their real world.

“One of the great things about gamers is that you get so attached to your favourite characters and stories. So when you start seeing those characters coming to sit down on your sofa or interacting with different parts of your house, there’s a level of immediacy and intimacy that goes beyond anything you can experience while sitting in front of a television screen.”

This becomes obvious in our second demo, the one I’d been waiting for: Minecraft. Once again, the program projects a 2D menu screen onto a wall, which lets me select a Minecraft world and load it up. Then, I’m told to look at the table behind me and ask the application to place the world right there. Suddenly, the surface of the table seems to drop down, and out of it rises an entire Minecraft landscape, jutting up into the room, looking as solid and colourful as a Lego model. I can walk around it and peer down at the sheep milling about; I can look into the windows of a house. One of the demo staff is controlling a character and I can watch him run and leap about the scenery. With a series of simple voice commands, I can ask the camera to track the character’s movement so I can look in right behind him and follow his actions more closely.

Cleverly, Hololens also comes with an array of physical commands, like a touchscreen phone. To move the map around, I simply make a pinching motion in front of my eyes and then move my hand – the Minecraft map moves with me, up and down or side to side. If I pull it up high enough, I can see the subterranean environment, the tunnels and caverns, the flowing streams of lava. I can ask for a marker to be placed where I’m looking, so interesting spots can be explored later, I can even request for a signpost to be placed in specific areas, and then “write” a message on it using a speech-to-text interface. (Though this doesn’t seem amazingly accurate right now – I want to write “there’s gold in them there hills”, but something about a “nice weekend” comes up instead.)

It’s rather beautiful, and it suggests that Hololens could become a creative tool, allowing gamers to easily modify and create their own levels. “Most people don’t have an inherent understanding of how to create in 3D – it can be very complicated on 2D screens,” says Tsunoda. “This is one of the places that Hololens and gaming come together in a very interesting way – allowing a lot more user-generated content, not only as part of the gameplay but also involving players in the creation of the game and how the gameplay evolves. I think we’re going to see more communities adding to and customising the games they play. That will be very cool.”

The main downside right now, is the restricted field of view that the graphical elements can appear in. There is a rectangle in your immediate vision, where digital content is visible – look away from that, and you lose it. Unlike virtual reality technology that completely surrounds your vision, Hololens is only active in this one central sweet spot, it’s not peripheral.

This is fine in demos like Project X-Ray where you have limited, discreet areas of action – i.e. small robots coming through your wall. But with the Minecraft demo, it was a little frustrating, viewing this vast and beautiful 3D model, but having to keep moving your head to keep it in the centre of your vision so that the whole thing didn’t disappear. Tsunoda has said that the field may be increased before release, but not by much. I think this will very much dictate the sorts of experiences we can expect, especially in games.

Other than that, three key questions remain: price, release date, battery life. Microsoft is saying that Hololens will appear “in the Windows 10” timeframe, so late summer or early autumn, then. But we’ll see. There’s no clue on the other vital elements.

But clearly this is a fascinating new technology, not just for games, but for many areas of science, education and the arts. It will be interesting to see more from rival mixed reality solution Magic Leap which is being backed by Google; it will also be intriguing to discover what happens when these augmented reality solutions go up against the virtual reality visions of Oculus, Sony and HTC.

“VR and mixed reality are complimentary technologies,” says Tsunoda. “However, the more you can allow people to interact with their real world and real people, the more that you get everyday use cases for a technology. It’s this that can take a product into the mass market.”

Minecraft on Hololens: the future of gaming is right in front of your eyes

Minecraft console game developer, 4J Studios has confirmed Title Update 25 is now available for download and leaked superflat worlds, stained glass windows, and various fences to the delight of the box game fans. According to the new statement from the studio, Xbox 360 users can turn back on option to share screenshots straight to Facebook.

Minecraft debuted on the PC platform from Mojang, however, the game’s massive fame called for console versions under the care of 4J Studios across the PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. Title Update 25 is the newest update to be released specifically for Xbox 360 edition.

Via Twitter, a demo has been posted to show how Minecraft Xbox 360 owners can go back on sharing screenshots to Facebook from the game including an image of the game’s next update plus a sneak peek of few new features arriving.

Such features mentioned are superflat worlds proven by the skyline, stained glass windows, and new fence types. 4J, however, hasn’t confirmed these details officially, although, it is assumed that that the new Title Update 25 will be launched soon on PS4, PS3 and Xbox One editions of the sensational Minecraft game.

Share To Facebook is working again for #MinecraftXBox360 😉 pic.twitter.com/1L8xGw8XFN

– 4J Studios (@4JStudios) June 11, 2015

Meanwhile, PS4, PS3 and PS Vita version gamers in North America and Japan will be receiving the new Minecraft Update 1.16 that is currently available in Europe.

Contrary to the last patch, 1.16 features are quite offering small changes where new Alex female skin is added. Alex who is the first female character in the game is said to be just as skilled as Steve.

PlayStation players can also get a brand new soundtrack in the creative mode as well as the trial version for The Simpsons Skin Pack which adds skins from the popular adult-orientated cartoon series, The Simpsons.

In related news, Microsoft has presented a demo of Minecraft built especially for the company’s VIrtual Reality device, Hololens which according to reports, creative world-building game is a perfect fit for the futuristic hardware. The demo first showcased controlling the experience with the use of Xbox One controller.Subsequently, the player just maneuvered the game with his hands in the air to play and look around through his creations in real space.

Microsoft promises that more information will be revealed at the Minecraft’s MineCon event this July 4th. In the meantime, fans can enjoy their Minecraft experience with the latest TItle Update 25 for Xbox 360 and Patch 1.16 for PS4, PS3 and PS Vita.

Minecraft Title Update 25 COOL Features for Xbox 360, Xbox One Ed. Leaked; Patch 1.16 for PS4, PS3 and PS Vita Now Live

‘Minecraft’ meets ‘Grand Theft Auto V’ in space

Available now in Europe, and later today in North America and Japan, the latest Minecraft update (1.16) for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation Vita is a small one, with the biggest change being the addition of Alex for free.

Here’s the full list of patch notes for today’s update on PlayStation, as well as the one for Xbox:

PS4, PS3, PS Vita

• Added the Alex skin and some variations of it to the default skins.
• Changed music tracks played in Creative mode and on front-end menus to match Java version.
• Added The Simpsons Skin Pack trial content.
• Brought forward change so that shrubs can placed in flower pots.
• Fixed an issue stopping the Steampunk Texture Pack working. (PS3 only)

Xbox One, Xbox 360

• Added the Alex skin and some variations of it to the default skins.
• Changed music tracks played in Creative mode and on front-end menus to match Java version. (Xbox One only)
• Added new achievements. (Xbox 360 only)
• Added new music. (Xbox 360 only)

As 4J Studios revealed last week on Twitter, while this update may be a small one, “we’re currently working on something a bit bigger for the update after that.”

How big of a download was today’s update for you?

Minecraft Update Today on PS4, PS3 & PS Vita Adds Alex Skin, Changes Music Tracks

Microsoft demoed a version of Minecraft during its press conference by shooting footage through the Hololens hardware connected to a camera.

The result was a magical look at the future of augmented reality, and the internet all but exploded when the footage was released. You can watch below.

The demo was legitimately amazing, and Microsoft is proving themselves to be the king of augmented reality. The hardware and software needed to deliver high-quality virtual reality is quickly maturing but according to many people I’ve spoken with in the development community, augmented reality is a tangled mess of unsolved problems that may prove much harder to fix than virtual reality.

Microsoft deserves a ton of credit for creating this technology and showing onstage that it is, in fact, real.

All that being said, you may need to rein in the hype-train just a bit. That demo was incredibly misleading.

What is HoloLens?

HoloLens is a self-contained piece of equipment that paints the world around you with what appear to be holograms. You can see and interact with virtual objects as if they were real. Imagine a technology that allowed you to cover a wall with a virtual screen, or create three-dimensional objects out of thin air to manipulate in real time.

The videos all show a version of reality that seems to wrap around the viewer, covering your field of view with the augmented reality display. The illusion seems to be complete; you can surround yourself with holograms!

The reality is a bit more limited. This is a hands-on report of what it’s actually like to use the technology from our sister publication, The Verge.

That video is interesting in general, but take a look at this visualization of the actual field of view in the current HoloLens hardware.

This field of view issue is brought up in nearly every hands-on with the hardware, and we were able to check out the hardware at E3.

“The virtual screen was about the size of a deck of cards if you held it in front of your eyes with your arm half-extended,” our own Brian Crecente wrote. “It sounds small, and in some cases, including once you first put it on, it looks small. But once you get into the experience of playing a game with it, the size issue seems to fade away.”

Crecente didn’t have a big problem with the field of view, but almost every other write-up of the technology also brought up the tiny field of view.

“The one disappointment for me in trying HoloLens was that the field of view was very limited,” TechCrunch stated. “This was not a totally immersive experience because objects would get cut off long before you would naturally expect them to drop out of sight. Some of the writers who saw Microsoft’s first demo told me that they felt the viewing angle on these new devices was smaller than during the first demo. I can’t verify that, though.”

Compare these reports and the image above with the videos Microsoft have released.

Here’s another write-up from TechRadar. “The biggest issue with HoloLens’ holographic viewing is the holograph is limited to what amounts to the size of a large monitor in front of you,” the site reported. “You can see the edges of the virtual space where the hologram lives (which are basically the edges of the inner HoloLens frames), and looking outside that space, or moving too close into it, cuts the the hologram off or makes it disappear completely.”

The illusion of HoloLens isn’t nearly as effective as the E3 demo and promotional videos would have you believe, although this is a technology that will be constantly updated before it’s released to the public. For now though, what Microsoft is selling on video doesn’t quite exist in the real world.

That’s not saying the technology isn’t impressive. “It was captivating to stand at the edge of a table and watch a diminutive square-headed figure, sharp in its precision and color, ride a minecart down a steep hill and out of my view,” Crecente wrote in his preview of Minecraft. “I was also able to pull the world up by its trees and rocky landscape, peering into the underworld of the map and then use my finger and voice to mark a target.”

It’s fine to get excited, our collective jaws dropped when we watched the Minecraft demo as well. Microsoft is clearly leading the charge with what’s possible in augmented reality, and the company is solving very complicated problems better than anyone else today.

But it’s also important to realize the current state of the technology isn’t nearly as effective as Microsoft would have you believe.

HoloLens is amazing, but that Minecraft demo was misleading

The Final Fantasy VII Remake, announced at Sony’s E3 press conference, could deviate from its source material.

When asked if the remake, in development for PlayStation 4, will follow the Final Fantasy VII narrative exactly or feature new elements, director Tetsuya Nomura gave GameSpot an ambiguous answer.

“We’ve announced an HD port version on the PlayStation 4, and then we have the remake coming to PS4,” Nomura said through a translator. “You’ll have this extremely, very, very pretty FFVII existing on the same plane. We feel that if that happens, it’s like, why have the same exact game?

“We think that if a game is on a certain platform and that platform becomes obsolete, then we’d recommend playing the new port version,” he added.

Currently, all we know about the Final Fantasy VII Remake is that it is now in production with key members of the original game’s staff on board, including producer Yoshinori Kitase and scenario writer Kazushige Nojima. Other developer details are unknown.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s Story Could Deviate from the Original

Minecraft is coming to the real world – and in 3D. Just don’t hold your breath.

Microsoft delivered a convincing press briefing at E3 2015, revealing a muscular line-up of exclusive titles and features.

The show was stolen by the appearance of Minecraft on the company’s Hololens augmented reality (AR) hardware. On stage, Microsoft Studios manager Saxs Persson, showed how the block-building game can use the forthcoming device, which overlays computer graphics onto the real world to create a tabletop Minecraft landscape that players can model and interact with, through voice and touch commands.

No release date was given for the tech or the game, but Microsoft made clear it has big plans for both mixed and virtual reality. Corporate vice president and Hololens head Kudo Tsunoda also announced that the company would be working with Valve, co-developer of the HTV Vive virtual reality headset, to make Windows 10 the de facto platform for virtual reality (VR) technologies on the PC. With this and the recent announcement that the Oculus Rift VR headset would be shipping with an Xbox One controller (together with the ability to play Xbox One games streamed via PC), it seems Microsoft is making a land grab for both the VR and AR sectors, while competitor Sony concentrates on its own virtual reality technology project, Morpheus.
Xbox E3 Rise of the Tomb Raider
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Rise of the Tomb Raider artwork at Xbox’s press conference at E3. Photograph: Michael Nelson/EPA

Away from futuristic immersion platforms, Microsoft revealed a generous range of new titles, showing footage from Halo 5, Forza Motorsport 6 and Gears of War 4, as well as the latest Lara Croft adventure, Rise of the Tomb Raider, which will appear first on Xbox One this winter, getting an as-yet unknown headstart on PS4. From Software’s Dark Souls III, another much-anticipated sequel, was also shown for the first time, with a spring 2016 release date.
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As anticipated, legendary UK studio Rare revealed its latest title, Sea of Thieves, a typically bright and brash multiplayer pirating adventure, described by studio head Craig Duncan as “By far the most ambitious game that Rare has ever created.” Rare also has a collection of 30 of its classic titles such as Perfect Dark and Conker’s Bad Fur Day coming to Xbox One.

Elsewhere, Dean Hall, creator of cult open-world zombie title Day Z, popped up to show his latest project, Ion, an intriguing adventure based around deep space colonisation. Recore, a new title from Japanese game design legend Keiji Inafune and the team behind sci-fi classic Metroid Prime, is due in Spring 2016, and features two of this year’s seemingly on-trend elements: a female protagonist and a dog companion.

There were some key service announcements too, not least limited backward compatibility with the Xbox 360. Classic titles will start showing up on Xbox One’s online store soon, but players who own the original versions will be able to download the digital versions for free. Xbox chief Phil Spencer showed the original Mass Effect running on Xbox One, where classic titles will be supported by new features like screenshot sharing and game streaming.

Microsoft is also launching the Xbox One Preview service which allows players to download and try incomplete games before they are published. The concept is similar to Early Access on the PC games platform Steam. Players will be able to trial each game for free, then decide whether to commit to a purchase. Two titles Elite: Dangerous and Long Dark are already available and more are coming throughout the year.

A large range of independent titles were shown to add some relief from a lot of shooting and explosions. Steve Gaynor of Fullbright showed its follow up to critically acclaimed exploration game Gone Home with Tacoma, and there was also a brief look at the fascinating Beyond Eyes, an adventure following a blind girl who must use touch to navigate the environment.

It was a strong confident showing, then, with popular glances backward and some interesting platform exclusives. It will be up to Sony, holding its press conference later in the day, to up the ante, especially on exclusive titles. For the last two years the fight between Xbox One and PlayStation 4 has been built largely on technical differences and promise. Now, with plenty of titles looking to fully explore the capabilities of both sets of hardware, the real console war begins.

E3 2015: Xbox thrills with Lara Croft, Halo 5 and holographic Minecraft

We got a closer look at Microsoft’s HoloLens during Build in April, but the company is showing off the gaming aspects of its headset today. Microsoft has built a new version of Minecraft specifically for its HoloLens headset. You can play with a controller as you’d expect, and create or explore worlds using holograms you create with voice or gestures. Microsoft’s demonstration at E3 today involved a full Minecraft universe running on a table thanks to the HoloLens headset, and it was very similar to the experience the company revealed back in January.

The audience seemed impressed, and the demo kept the hologram perfectly positioned on the table while the presenter walked around and interacted with Minecraft objects freely. Most of those interactions were enabled by voice, but the demo also involved Microsoft’s “air tap” gesture where you raise your index finger and tap down. Those might not be great ways to control a game, but sitting immersed in a world of Minecraft around your living room while you avoid critters with a controller sounds like it could be a lot of fun. Microsoft is planning to share more about its Minecraft plans at Minecon in July.

Minecraft for HoloLens E3 2015 photos

Microsoft is building a special version of Minecraft for HoloLens

As a PC-only gamer, I feel an occasional twinge when a bunch of people I know are all playing the same console game. Forced to endure tweet after tweet about Destiny, for example, leaves me feeling left out. I never got to experience the horror of PT, and it sounds like I never will. The most recent example is Splatoon, the Wii U game. Everyone seems to be having fun with it except me. Poor me!

All is not lost, however. Creative block wizard SethBling has created a version of Splatoon you can play in Minecraft.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t a mod. It’s a map and a very clever use of Minecraft’s command blocks. But, hey, it’s a fun creation, and I’m sure it took quite some time and effort, so I’m gonna say it counts for this week’s column. I appreciate a custom game that only requires me to join a server to play it, and it’s a nice excuse to revisit Minecraft, something I rarely find the time to do these days.

I have to admit, despite hearing so much about Splatoon, I don’t really know how it works or what it is because most tweets about it can be summed up thusly: OMG SPLATOON!!! However, after watching SethBling’s introductory video, I get the gist of it. Two teams compete to cover a map with their team’s colored ink.

There are a few different weapons available in SethBling’s Splatoon that you can choose from before the round begins. There’s the Splattershot, which lets you rapid-fire ink blobs. There’s the Splat Charger, which acts like a long-range bow. And, there’s the Splat Roller, which paints a stripe in front of you as you run around. You can also transform yourself into a squid, which lets you slip through the map more quickly, and even climb walls if they’ve been painted in your team’s ink.

The Splatoon map is meant for 4v4 matches, but it can support larger groups, and most of the sessions I’ve joined have had around 10 to 15 people.

As for how to actually play, you can download the map and install it on any server running Minecraft 1.8. You can also simply search for a server that is hosting it and join, as I did. Now, if someone could just bring the Uncharted series to Minecraft, I’d be all set.

No Wii U? You can now play Splatoon in Minecraft

On the rooftops, there are endless luscious gardens, so that the skyline of the city looks almost like the tree tops of a vast rain forest. Beneath them, lining the roads, are multi-storey farms, producing fruit and vegetables for the local populace. There are strange sail-shaped constructions that suck CO2 out of the air, and along the canals, hydrogen powered boats glide silently through crystal clear waters. This is Climate Hope City – and for now, it exists only in Minecraft.

When the Guardian launched its Keep it in the Ground campaign in March, editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, and other senior staff, spoke about the challenge of finding new ways to discuss and report on climate change – to break out of traditional journalism and explore fresh ideas.

“We carry on flogging a load of dead horses, in exactly the same way, with exactly the same whip,” wrote columnist and environmentalist George Monbiot. “We have to constantly be reinventing our storytelling capacity.”

One answer to that challenge is to envisage a future zero carbon city in Minecraft. The hugely successful block-building game allows players to construct complex and fascinating models of everything from medieval castles to giant space cruisers. Climate Hope City is not a fantasy world but a vision of a green urban environment which uses technologies that either already exist around the world or are at the prototype stage.

Take a video tour around Climate Hope city:

The project was overseen by expert Minecraft modeller Adam Clarke, who makes his own YouTube videos about the game, as Wizard Keen. Clarke recently worked with the Tate Modern gallery to produce the Tate Worlds project, a series of Minecraft maps based around art works such as André Derain’s The Pool of London. Recently, he has started Wonder Quest, a new educational series of YouTube videos co-written with Minecraft superstar Stampy Cat.

Together with James Delaney and his BlockworksMC team of builders, as well as experienced map maker and designer Dragnoz, Clarke took various real-life urban climate technologies and spent a week constructing them into a Minecraft environment. Features include vertical farms, kinetic pavements that convert footsteps into electricity, driverless cars and green roofs.

“James and his team had recently built a Minecraft map called Tomorrowland,” says Clarke. “We wanted Climate Hope City to feel positive and futuristic yet at the same time rooted in what is going on in architecture and climate change science today. Our research led us to the very latest in building design, featuring radical shapes and forms.

“We also wanted to see some older buildings so that the city felt realistic and built upon. We added the spiral walkway to help players explore the various features as quickly as possible, but its also became a very beautiful design motif too.”

Delaney and his team of five builders, started out by sketching a rough layout, based on emerging technologies and architectural models, before spending over 100 hours building the model itself. “We needed to use existing green technologies and prototypes to create a positive image for sustainable living, which also seemed achievable and not too far off reality,” says Delaney.

“We decided to form the city around natural looking curves and spirals rather than the grid layout of many of the world’s modern cities: Zaha Hadid’s architecture was one inspiration, the new biodome concept for Amazon’s new Seattle headquarters was another. We then proceeded to lay it out in Minecraft and slowly build upwards, adapting and accommodating that plan to the city as it developed.”

The result is a rather beautiful and elegant Minecraft city, filled with intriguing buildings, and criss-crossed with canals and kinetic walkways. Guardian readers will also be able to spot the newspaper’s own office.

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The map is now ready to download and is available for free to anyone who has the PC, Linux or Mac version of Minecraft installed on their computer. It can be found at the Climate Hope City Planet Minecraft page. You can freely explore the city, read signposts and listen to audio recordings that tell you more about what each building and feature represents.

“Despite climate change being the biggest story of our age, journalism has largely failed to get to grips with it,” says the Guardian’s assistant national news editor, James Randerson. “In our mission to tell this story differently and reach new audiences, we have enlisted the help of artists, poets, comedians and composers to name a few. Now we’re harnessing the creativity of some talented Minecraft designers to imagine a future low carbon city – and crucially one that is not far out of reach.”

The Guardian’s Keep it in the Ground campaign is highlighting the global fossil fuel divestment movement. In particular it is calling on the world’s two largest health charities – the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust – to move their endowments out of those firms.

Climate Hope City: how Minecraft can tell the story of climate change

Even in its unfinished state, Lego Worlds is a game that inspires wonder. What sorts of marvelous things might we find in its universe today?

I encourage you to join me as I stream a playthrough of a new Lego Worlds seed—judging from my time with the game, I have a feeling that it won’t be long before we find some really cool unexpected things.

Spoilers: I won’t be spending time building things, because I’m not very good at that sort of stuff. We will be doing a whole lot of exploring, though! The stream below starts at 5:30PM PST/8:30PM EST, which should be ~5 minutes from publication.

Image credit: geedubya

The Monday stream is a weekly variety show that plays everything from the latest and greatest, to the stuff you’ve probably never heard of—all in an effort to make Mondays suck a little less. Follow us on Twitch here.

Watch Me Play Lego Worlds, Minecraft’s New Challenger [Over!]

One of the coolest things about Minecraft is the ability to experiment with generating the world you play in through the use of world seeds. While there’s nothing cooler than discovering a new world through experimentation, there’s a lot of value in being able to check out the worlds discovered by others through whatever methods available to them. Minecraft PE [$6.99] had a pretty decent collection of seeds available online but with the addition of infinite world types back in version 0.9.0 the seed collection has been split in two. We thought we’d focus on the infinite worlds and provide a short list of seeds with some pretty cool starting areas.

In case you’re new to Minecraft PE and don’t know how to launch a seed world, simply tap the ‘Advanced’ button in the upper right corner after getting to the Create a World window and put in the seed number in its text box.

Great Starter World (Seed -495809461)

This is a pretty cool seed that starts out between a desert and plains biome. However, start exploring the plains side and you’ll quickly see a pretty neat giant village that’s a pretty neat place to start out. A few forests, lakes and caves round up the starting area and offer a good opportunity to build up the village even more or take advantage of the flat area nearby to start your own construction.

Mesa With Shafts  (Seed 2431673)

At the start point you’re at the edge of three different zones. Plains to one side, a forest to the other, and a giant mesa at the other. It’s the mesa you might be interested in, as there’s a bunch of open cave entrances that jump straight down into mineshafts. In fact, one of closest openings to the start zone has a few gold ore right off the bat. As far as starts go, this one isn’t as inviting as the giant village but it’s a good one if you want to go straight into mining.

Mountain Village (Seed 1408106526)

As you might guess, a lot of the seeds that get attention are those with really cool villages or really cool natural landmarks. This seed has both which makes it especially appealing. You start out near a river that goes into a giant mountain. Make your way to the top of the mountain (which should be easy if you’re in Creative mode) and you end up at a pretty cool village perfectly situated at the top. Even more interesting, on the other side of the steep mountain is *another* village situated way at the bottom. As far as worlds with interesting landscapes situated right at the spawn point, you can’t do much better than this seed.

Ocean Village (Seed 1413755523)

No list of seed starts is complete without one that has an ocean village as the restart point. That’s what you get with this seed, which puts you in the middle of the ocean with a handful of buildings connected by wooden walkway. Once you get your bearings, you’ll eventually find a sizable body of land nearby complete with animals, mountains and various biomes. It’s a cool seed if you want to use the start zone as a base of operations while you explore the lands across the water.

Easy Stronghold (Seed 1074879716)

The last seed for this edition puts you near a couple of villages with some cool loot. That’s all well and good but what’s really neat is the stronghold that can be found down the wall in the second village (the one without a blacksmith). Dig straight down and you should eventually hit some stone bricks, signifying an actual structure. Once you see that, digging around on that level will eventually reveal a Stronghold, complete with an end portal. Missing the eyes, of course. It’s a pretty cool seed in that you can get a host of cool items as well as a stronghold within seconds of the start zone.

Five Cool ‘Minecraft PE’ Seed Worlds to Get Ahead Quickly

Humans are really good at deciding what to do next. Robots not so much. That’s changing, though, and scientists at Brown University are using the virtual world of Minecraft to help train robots to “think” in real-world environments.

New research by computer scientists at Brown’s Humans to Robots Laboratory is focusing on how to help robots better plan complex actions, even in a quickly-changing environment. That can be tough, the authors write, because of the “exponential number of ways a robot can affect the world.”

That’s where Minecraft comes in. The game, which has been purchased (by humans) nearly 20 million times and gained over 100 million users since its release in 2009, uses sandbox-style play that lets users build their own worlds to explore. “Minecraft is a really good model of a lot of these robot problems,” computer scientist Stefanie Tellex said in a release about the research. She notes that since it’s cheap and open-ended, the game was the perfect way for her team to test problem-solving algorithms and collect plenty of data in the process.

To put their robots’ algorithms to the test, Tellex and her team created small Minecraft domains and gave characters simple tasks to solve. When the robot algorithms played the game, they had to figure out how to do things like build a bridge or find buried gold — activities that helped the algorithms learn enough to move on to new domains to try out their new skills.

Next, the team tested the Minecraft-honed robot brains in the real world, asking robots to help people make brownies. They found that once they had trained in Minecraft, robots were able to anticipate human needs and do things like hand them whisks so they could beat eggs. In their paper, the team reported that robots showed “improvements in planning.”

In the future, the team hopes to expand Minecraft worlds to help robots develop even more real-world skills. If the robot “minds” are able to master the entire game, says Tellex, they could learn to “do anything.” Hey, maybe they’ll learn to help humans vanquish zombies along the way.

Researchers Are Training Robots Using Minecraft

(Strange Loop Games)

Minecraft is a cultural phenomenon. The block-based exploration and crafting game was snapped up by Microsoft for $2.5 billion last year and has helped inspire competitors from giant toy companies like Lego.

Even the government is interested in building on Minecraft’s success: The Department of Education is helping fund a project known as “Eco” that looks a lot like Minecraft, except with a few added twists: There’s a looming ecological disaster and players must band together to make a community — agreeing on laws and living in harmony with the environment.

If they fail, the world dies forever. Strange Loop Games, the company behind the game, describes it a “global survival game” and says failure results in “server-wide perma death.”

Eco is designed to help teach middle school students about environmental science and was awarded a nearly $900,000 grant from the Department of Education last month. It has completed a test phase where 60 students in five classes tried it out, according to the grant contract. The prototype for that test run also received a DOE grant of around $150,000.

Here’s what the game prototype looks like in action:

The latest grant will help build out new features, including a teacher dashboard, and let researchers figure out how effective the game is by collecting data on 150 students in 10 classrooms. Half of the classes will use the normal environmental teaching plan, while the other half will supplement the curriculum with Eco — letting the developers see if the game actually helps boost students’ understanding of ecology.

Minecraft itself is already used by some educators for things like building replicas of ancient Roman apartment buildings and teaching problem-solving.

The government is helping fund a Minecraft-style game for teaching kids about the environment