The Playful World: How Technology Is Transforming Our Imagination

The author was space crazy as a child. He imagined a future among the stars. Children are accompanied by toys. This has been happening for seven thousand years. Toys now represent the science of materials and digital communication. Our relationship to information in the world is changing. Edison invented the first talking toy. Nolan Bushnell, Atari, fathered pop interactivity. All interactive toys need sensors and affectors. The Furby was an enormously engaging toy. It seemed to have facial expressions and a capacity for about one thousand utterances in pidgin--Furbish. In Artificial Intelligence studies Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky, and Terry Winograd were pioneers. AI encountered roadblocks as researchers grappled with characteristics such as intuition. Robots appear in the world of toys including Lego Mindstorm, 1998, half of which were purchased for use by adults. Richard Feynman accurately predicted miniaturization in a paper published in 1959. The author cannot imagine doing his work without the world wide web. Ted Nelson invented hypertext. He didn't have access to a computer. He befriended Any van Dam. Nelson's text and van Dam's code came together in a simple application. Englebart of Stanford had a more mature hypertext product. Each innovation helps humanity do more with less according to Buchminster Fuller. Connectivity can enhance citizenship, among other things.

"The Playful World" is a fascinating tome by author Mark Pesce, one of the foremost practical techno wizards of our time. The creator of VRML (virtual reality mark-up language) Pesce's visions are creating a new immersive society and info-mediaries for today and tomorrow. Pesce helps you learn how to pretend again-- how to make believe and use those skills to build new bridges to the future whether you're involved in tech or whether you just want to understand the next generation of anything -- people, places and things. Pesce tackles tough topics and adds an amusing presentation to help you understand such concepts as distributed intelligence, engineered structures and yes, toys. Pesce maintains it started with the FURBY -- you remember those little gremlin like creatures form Tiger Electronics a few holiday seasons ago don't you? He says they are the beginning of being able to embody human intelligence into the machine world (at least the beginning of what we can see on our store shelves). IA -- intelligence augmented is probably more likely than AI artificial intelligence but as our devices get smarter and our phones know where are kids and colleagues are, it's comforting to think that you can learn to USE technology not have it replace YOU!. Pesce is optimistic that the new 'synthetic worlds will create a gateway to a living planet'. It's all just a few years ahead-- this book will serve as a bridge of knowledge to tomorrow and make you think about ordinary objects in extraordinary ways.

This is a book I wish I had written. When I picked up this book, I was amazed at how many subjects Mark covered that I was interested in too. Everything from Lego Mindstorms, Eric Drexler's Nanotechnology, Richard Feynman's talk on "More room at the bottom" that was the inspiration for Nanotechnology and many more. This book covers so much ground and describes many very interesting ideas and technologies. Pesce was the designer of VRML, Virtual Reality Modeling Language, which enables web pages to display 3D scenes and has been involved in the forefront of emerging technology for a while, so he is very qualified to give us the whirlwind tour of these "Mind Toys".He takes off from where Seymour Papert's Mindstorms left us with technologies that create toys that help us to develop our mental models of the world. Toys that make us think.As a generation of children grow up playing with Lego Mindstorms, Furbys, AIBO's etc.. they will develop their mental faculties that will come into play as they define the future.I grew up with a BBC micro and started programming adventure games in BASIC, which opened up a whole new world to me. As a generation we played computer games while growing up. These were rich interactive environments that left us feeling unchallenged in a schooling system, which was still geared towards to old teaching techniques. These techniques seemed totally inadequate in coping with children who could solve complex mathematical problems at home whilst programming. So I am not sure how the schools of today handle children who are building robots and playing with toys that they can not only interact with, but ones which can learn and change as they are interacted with.Do we need to change the way we approach education? Instead of complaining that children have MTV (Short) attention spans, we should be creating an education system that can cope with the speed at which these young minds are working at. I think we should be encouraging children to be thinking faster and day dreaming and using their imaginations, instead of trying to get them to fit an out dated model that will leave them totally unprepared for an ever more complex world.I digress, but these are thoughts that come to mind while reading this book, as you whisked off on this tour of future mind toys.If you can't tell, I love this book! Anyone interested in toys that can help them or their children think, should read this book.

Thought provoking and engaging -- my copy is now filled with underlines and highlights! This was one of the rare non-fiction books where I just couldn't put it down. I've recommended this to many friends and felt it was about time I put a review up here. The author also generously shares his research on his web site. Worth checking out.

This book clearly deserves far more than five stars. Your imagination will be stimulated by this book . . . perhaps even more than by any other book you will read this year.The book begins innocently enough by explaining some of the newest technologies that are affecting toys and games. You begin with Furby, an interactive toy that "comes alive" and requires care. Furby can learn language, and responds to its owner. Next comes Lego's Mindstorms kit for making robots. These toys have a computer in them that allow them use sensors to take purposeful actions. Soon, adults were writing software for this so you could program in more actions.You move on from there to see how these toys are built around a model of how children learn, by trial and error. Simulations then become a powerful technology for helping create more capable learners, by accelerating that learning process. You are introduced to a new product, the Sony Play Station 2, which will offer simulations with learning capabilities in complex games. Then, the author takes to off into the Web and points out that youngsters are sharing their experiences with Furby, robots, and simulation games so that they all learn faster. You begin to see the possibilities of a whole different paradigm for learning, that will proceed much faster and advance both individual and human development in more fundamental ways. This could be the big payoff from information technology.He then takes you over the rainbow into the future with the potential of next generation toys and technologies. Virtual reality will be at full potential with the next generation of Playstation in 2005. Electron microscopes will allow us to peer routinely and inexpensively at the atomic level. Nanotechnology will have developed to allow us to manipulate atoms and molecules to create molecular machines. If you then create convergence of artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, and the Internet, you can have a society where the most advanced problems can be attacked simultaneously by hundreds of millions of people sharing their experiences and insights. That's where he lets your imagination take over.Obviously, the potential for good and harm is magnified in such an area. The harm can come from overdeveloping technology without putting in sufficient limitations required to overcome its potential dangers. I prefer to focus on the good. I hope you will, too. Although the author exhorts us to encourage our children in this area while upholding important human values, I think that we need to get involved with the new technology, too. Playing with your child is good for you both! It's also going to be even more fun for you, with these neat new capabilities. Your child can teach you how to use them! Here's how the book leaves it: "If we fail to listen to our own children, how can we expect them to listen to us when we try to teach them of older, but still essential, human values?" Whatever you conclude a