Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

Anticipating Halo 3

Halo 3 is being touted as not just the biggest launch for a video game, but also the biggest launch of anything. Have a look at a comparison of the Halo brand with mentions of Resident Evil (the top release from last week) and The Bourne Ultimatum (one of the largest films of the summer).

Next up: beating the iPhone?

 

Game Time

Wired has a nice article about Halo 3 focusing on the testing regime being used. Of the tools used in testing, I like the look of this time stamp map which is explained in the article:

In early tests, players wandered lost around the Jungle level: Colored dots showing player location at five-second intervals (each color is a new time stamp) were scattered randomly. So Bungie fixed the terrain to keep players from backtracking. Sure enough, the dots clustered by color, showing that players were moving smoothly through the map.

As well as being a great way to debug levels it acts as an interesting visual representation of the linearity of the level. In the above, there is basically one way through the terrain. 

Playstation 3 European Launch, Discussion

Clearly my psychic powers were all the way at 11 yesterday when I wrote this post on the discussion in the blogosphere about the Wii and Playstation. Since then, as the BBC reports, the Playstation 3 has launched in Europe leading to a sudden burst in mentions on line.

The BBC reports:

The company trails Microsoft and Nintendo in sales of next generation consoles and the launch has been beset with problems in the last year.

But the PlayStation brand remains strong with gamers and one million PS3s will hit shops on day one.

At the London launch everyone who bought a PS3 also received a free 46-inch HD television and a taxi home.

In total, the giveaway amounted to £250,000 worth of televisons to more than 100 gamers.

It is interesting to see on BlogPulse how searching for 'playstation or ps3' brings up lots of non-English posts. I'd love to see a tool like BlogPulse which could give you the search results with a graphic of the distribution of languages.

Wii, Playstation Discussion

This piece of news, which asserts Nintendo's Wii is out selling Sony's new Playstaion 2-1, is the excuse I've been waiting for to post this graph:

I like this graph becuase it shows activity around the launch representing expectation, followed by clear differences based on, most likely, unites sold. Finally, levels of discussion are equalizing with some suggestion of a change in the dynamic to follow.

Where is this going?

If you have ever played (or watched) the game Half-Life 2, you will be familiar with state of the art urban modeling, physical models in an interactive context etc. Now have a look at some of the images from Google Earth, which includes data describing the shape of buildings, mix in some of Microsoft's Virtual Earth, which has high resolution data of buildings taken from a 45 degree angle and imagine the possibilities (taking a good does of geocoded data, GPS, RFID and so on).

You search for a hotel, a map tells you it is in striking distance of your business meeting or conference, so you flip your rich client in to walk-around mode and walk around the neighbourhood. It turns out there are just too many broken windows, and what is more, the pool of the hotel is constantly in the shadow of  surrounding buildings. So you explore - just walking the streets, guided by your local search which tells you which way to head for other hotels. Finally, you find one you like. You walk up to the door and interact with an online receptionist to book your stay.