The latest and greatest Rosetta Stone release

Smackerel is excited because Rosetta Stone TOTALe version 4 just launched and the world can see some of what has been keeping us very busy this year. And learn a language along the way...

Smackerel designed the user experience of Rosetta Stone TOTALe, in collaboration with our awesome clients at Rosetta Stone. The latest and greatest release, available in 24 languages, combines all the best aspects of the standalone CD-ROM and online editions into one complete package, with many upgraded features and all-new activities. Self-paced immersion based learning is supported with interactive coached sessions with native speakers, as well as language learning games and activities designed to get you talking.



Smackerel has been providing user experience leadership to the Rosetta Stone team for four years, helping create the overall look and feel of multiple generations of their award-winning language learning software. We’re proud of our work with Rosetta Stone, helping shape the skilled efforts of hundreds of people into a great learning experience. Our efforts are a tribute to all of them.

Congrats to the whole team on this huge release!

Please visit RosettaStone.com and try an interactive demo of the course. We’ll be posting more extensive case studies of our work with Rosetta Stone this fall.

Express yourself by changing the world

This weekend I learned of a game called Minecraft. The first I saw was a YouTube video being discussed at Metafilter.

In the video a game player is showing off the house he has built out of giant 3d pixel cubes of a virtual world. As he shows how to use flint to make fire, the fire unexpectedly spreads. He turns to his pool and grabs giant blocks of water to throw on the fire. This effort fails and he flees the burning house.



From the discussion I learned that Minecraft is a multiplayer creative sandbox game where players can mine all kinds of materials and make many different useful things. Oh, and there is a day/night cycle. Night brings monsters. Hopefully you planned for this during the day.

What I also learned from the discussion was that people love this game.
It’s been gaining increasing exposure and fans. For the last few months over a thousand people have been buying the game every day, and in the last weeks it has been five times that (stats). This weekend many, including me, got to try it out for free, and the word is spreading. (As of now you still can at the Minecraft site.)

At first a game of Minecraft seems like an early 3D shooter, but it’s just using a visual language we understand already. This isn’t a premade maze of surfaces with texture maps, it’s a world of building blocks and physics. Every giant 3D pixel – I feel pretentious using the word ‘voxel’ – is an object with properties and rules.

The enthusiasm for this game makes Smackerel smile. Years of graphics improvements in 3D shooters didn’t really make them much more fun. (Marathon is still our fave.) Graphically, Minecraft is barely Castle Wolfenstein, but the world is endlessly interactive.

The simplicity of the graphics makes this different from virtual worlds like Second Life. Your avatar is too low res to really matter; you express yourself by changing the world.

For examples of the creative possibilities check these YouTube videos of rollercoasters made in Minecraft.