The past few years has seen a revolution in home gaming, sparked in 2006 with the release of the Nintendo Wii. This has created a whole new market for games, with gaming becoming a more accessible passtime through the use of motion detection to interact with the game rather then a sometimes cryptic controller. Games such as Wii Sports and Wii Play create a great sense of involvement and get you into the game, while titles like Wii Fit expand the appeal beyond gaming to fitness and exercise. Now, just in time for Christmas, the remaining two key players in the market, Sony and Microsoft, have launched their movement controllers to get you off the couch and up and moving.

Sony’s addition to the PS3 is called the Move, and this works very similarly to the Wii – you hold a controller in your hand, and this controller is tracked by a camera attached to the PS3. This allows very accurate placement, and by using different coloured controllers, the Move can support up to 4 players at the same time. There’s a good range of titles available at launch, with all the staples of the genre available.

Microsoft, however, has gone for a different approach – where you become the controller. Rather then tracking a controller you hold, the Kinect is a camera system that tracks where you are in 3-dimensional space, allowing you to interact with the game without having to carry a controller. This opens up a whole new range of possibilities and it will be very interesting to see where it develops.

So if you have a game console, or are looking to getting into games, look at the new world of gaming and get up off of your couch!

It’s amazing how technology has got to the stage where it can transport you to events happening on the other side of the world. Not via some Star-Trek-like teleportation device (at least, not yet), but by using the various media that travel well over the internet, one can quite easily plug in to something taking place very far away.

Take the recent canonisation of St Mary of the Cross MacKillop. While the actual canonisation ceremony was taking place in Vatican City, if you were not lucky enough to be one of the thousands of pilgrims who were physically present, you could have followed the whole thing online. Not only were various social networks like Twitter and Facebook abuzz with all the details of the event, but there was live streaming video available at www.marymackillop.org.au so you could watch the whole thing live, for free.

To take another example, the recent state visit of the Pope to the United Kingdom. With plenty of furore kicked up in the local and international media, you weren’t short on options to experience that event either. Large news organisations like the BBC and CNN broadcast coverage of the various events online and much of the footage is still available – either on the site of origin or on YouTube.

Gone are the days of waiting for the morning newspaper, or the evening news bulletin, before you could get a taste of an event that was taking place so far away. Now you can connect to the world stage from almost anywhere, on many different devices, at nearly any time. The question then might be what about Catholic events in New Zealand? Well, if you’ve got a camera and an internet connection, then you very well might be the answer! Journalists of the future, everywhere you look!