Comic-Con: Once Upon a Time Creators Take Fans to New Worlds

Once Upon a Time creators Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz were indeed busy Saturday morning, presiding over back-to-back panels before a rowdy Ballroom 20 crowd. Kitsis and Horowitz insist that viewers need not know anything about the original series to get the most out of their Wonderland spinoff, though the pilot does start things off in Storybrooke.

First, the audience got to see a 19-minute sneak peek of Once Upon a Time in Wonderland. The visual effects were quite stunning, an encouraging sign as not-so-hot CGI has often plagued the original series. The presentation focused on a young-adult Alice (Sophie Lowe) and her star-crossed romance with Cyrus (Peter Gadiot), a dreamy genie with whom she travels the world before they're tragically separated by the Red Queen (Emma Rigby). Alice is aided in her quest to reunite with her lover by the roguish Knave of Hearts, played by Being Human's Michael Socha.

Based on the footage we were shown, the tone of the series seems slightly more earnest and less irreverent than that of the parent show. In the early episodes of Once Upon a Time, Emma greeted Henry's insistence that magic is real with kind skepticism, while Alice is thrown into a terrifying asylum for saying the same sorts of things. Once character that didn't appear in the Comic Con preview but who looks to play a major role in the action is the evil genie Jafar, who will be played by Lost's Naveen Andrews.

You won't need to know what's happened in Storybrooke to follow Wonderland, but they do exist in the same universe. Kitsis and Horowitz left the door open to the return of Sebastian Stan's Mad Hatter, and said we'd see what Wonderland was like after Regina's cursed was unleashed. The first season of Wonderland will tell one entire story and will end. If it's a success, the second season would tell an entirely new tale.

After a short break, Kitsis and Horowitz took the stage again to preview Season 3 of Once Upon a Time. Most of the action will take place in Neverland, where the show's heroes and villains have all banded together to find the kidnapped Henry. When asked whether Peter Pan would be the season's main villain, the creators said that Pan's motivations are "complicated" but allowed that many will find him to be "frightening." Tinkerbell will be introduced and will have a 'surprising connection" to one of the following characters; Snow, Charming, Emma, Hook, Gold, Regina, Neil or Belle.

The producers were happy to announce that Season 3 will air its first eleven episodes on consecutive Sundays starting in the fall, take a winter hiatus, and then resume in spring with its final eleven episodes. A hilarious Jane Espenson-penned "Good Morning Storybrooke" video with spoof commercials was also shown, and included Community's Yvette Nicole Brown as Goldilocks, a role she tweeted about yesterday. Just as the panel was breaking up, the audience was shown a brief teaser in which Grumpy encounters a a red-haired mermaid with an interest in human cutlery. Yep, it looks like Ariel will be arriving in Storybrooke soon.

Season 3 of Once Upon a Time begins September 29th, while Once Upon a Time in Wonderland will premeire on October, 8th, both on ABC

All the World’s a Game, and Business Is a Player

If this made-up award makes you feel good about yourself, then you are on your way to understanding gamification, a business trend — some would say fad — that aims to infuse otherwise mundane activities with the excitement and instant feedback of video games.

Many businesses are using these game tricks to try to get people hooked on their products and services — and it is working, thanks to smartphones and the Internet.

Buying a cup of coffee? Foursquare, the social networking app that helped popularize the gamification idea, gives people virtual badges for checking in at a local cafe or restaurant.

Conserving energy? More than 75 utilities have begun using a service from a company called Opower that awards badges to customers when they reduce their energy consumption. Customers can compare their progress with their neighbors’ and broadcast their achievements on Facebook.

“I’m not going to lie — I hate those online game apps on Facebook. I delete them,” said Brett Little, who works for an environmental nonprofit group in Grand Rapids, Mich., and has been known to share his energy-saving progress online. “This one I really enjoy.”

Of course, people and businesses have long added game elements to parts of regular life. Parents reward their children for household work with gold-star stickers. Business travelers pump their fists when they hit elite traveler status on an airline.

But digital technologies like smartphones and cheap sensors have taken the phenomenon to a new level, especially among adults. Now, game concepts like points, badges and leader boards are so mainstream that they have become powerful motivators in many settings, even some incongruous ones. At a time when games are becoming ever more realistic, reality is becoming more gamelike.

“We have a tendency to be dismissive about games, but what we’re learning is that games in general are wonderfully powerful tools that can be applied in all sorts of serious contexts,” said Kevin Werbach, an associate professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, who teaches a course on how businesses can use games and recently wrote a book on the subject.

The adoption of games has found particular resonance in the workplace, where games are no longer just a way to goof off.

Employers like Reed Elsevier, the publishing company, are using a Web-based game service from a company called Keas that encourages workers to stay healthy by grouping themselves into teams of six and collecting points for achieving mental and physical fitness goals. Among the challenges Keas assigns: laughing randomly for 30 seconds. The members of winning teams at Reed each get $200 gift cards.

Restaurants are using a service from a Boston start-up company called Objective Logistics to rank the performances of waiters on a leader board, rewarding the good ones with plum shifts and more lucrative tables. The company plans to add “karma points” that waiters can earn for picking up shifts from colleagues or otherwise being good teammates.

Even the Israel Defense Forces has embraced the concept as it tries to rally global support for its operations. Recently it raised eyebrows with a system that awards points and badges to visitors to its Web site if they share its messages on social networks, passing along blog posts like “How Does the I.D.F. Minimize Harm to Palestinian Civilians?”

Some tech bloggers criticized the system when they discovered it after the beginning of Israel’s recent military confrontation with Hamas, saying war and games did not mix.

Capt. Eytan Buchman, a spokesman for the I.D.F., said the game system was introduced in July, months before the conflict. It was intended to “expand the vibrant community of followers who are actively engaged in sharing and promoting I.D.F. content,” he said.

Doling out badges and points has its skeptics. Ian Bogost, a game designer and professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says the increasing use of games is little more than a fad promoted by marketing hucksters.

“It’s a concept being invented and mastered by speakers, conference organizers and business consultants in order to provide them with a short-lived burst of success,” said Dr. Bogost, who last year wrote an essay that, in its off-color title, bluntly dismissed gamification.

Gabe Zichermann, a gamification consultant and conference organizer, says he likes Dr. Bogost but, unsurprisingly, has a different point of view. He says making activities more like games is a kind of “homeopathic remedy” that, for example, can engage children who might otherwise be distracted by traditional video games.

“Games have made it hard for kids to focus to some extent and to do things like their chores,” Mr. Zichermann said. “We use game concepts to get them to focus on things.”

Kyle Kroll fits that description. After graduating from high school, Mr. Kroll said, he was unhappy, overweight, living at home and playing World of Warcraft at least six hours a day. He turned things around after starting to work out at a gym regularly with the help of a fitness app on his iPhone called Fitocracy, in which badges are awarded by a robot named Fred.

Mr. Kroll, who has lost about 75 pounds, says he plays video games less frequently now, but he still enjoys the gamelike challenges that the app sets for him at the gym. He said the game gave him “the same satisfaction of getting points and leveling up” that he gets from games.

Sheli Snawder and her 9-year-old daughter, Emma, also know how well embracing games can work. Ms. Snawder signed up for a service called Zamzee to encourage Emma to be more physically active.

Throughout the day, Emma wears a small motion sensor that records her activity level and rewards points for a brisk walk, an impromptu dance party in the living room and any other activity that gets her pulse thumping.

In her home in Salem, Ore., recently, Emma showed off the digital treats that the service’s Web site uses to inspire her, including a Persistence badge and Level 3 bronze medal status.

She can also use the virtual currency that she earns through exercising to get tangible rewards, like a video game system, from the site. “It’s very, very effective,” said her mother, who is studying to be a nurse.

Jesse Schell, a game designer and assistant professor of entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University, said game ideas were creeping into “every nook and cranny of everything” because reward systems are satisfying. “Our affluence has allowed us to move to a place where we tend to make things pleasurable, as opposed to efficient,” he said.

Israeli Success in Downing Hamas Rockets Has World’s Attention

But even ardent supporters of a continent-size missile shield to guard the United States and other NATO members acknowledge the limitations of Iron Dome, which is a tactical system designed to shoot down unsophisticated rockets — basically flying pipe bombs — with a range of less than 50 miles.

Some American technical experts also say they want hard evidence before judging whether Iron Dome knocked out as many rockets as Israel has claimed. Iron Dome’s most salient feature, according to American experts now examining after-action reports from Gaza, may well be its software: The system rapidly discriminates between incoming rockets that are hurtling toward a populated area and others not worth expending a far costlier Iron Dome interceptor to knock down.

The conflict between Israel and Hamas focused global attention on missile defenses, and came as the United States and its Arab allies have undertaken a costly effort to knit together a regional shield in the Persian Gulf to protect cities, oil refineries, pipelines and military bases from a potential Iranian attack.

“This will ratify the common-sense notion that these systems can play a role in defending you,” said Eric S. Edelman, a former under secretary of defense for policy in the George W. Bush administration. “It will be especially relevant as we move into an era in which there will be more countries with small inventories of rockets and missiles — and more countries that will want to defend against them in a reasonable way.”

The effort in the gulf is envisioned to include advanced radar as well as sets of two antimissile systems with accompanying radar: Patriot Advanced Capability interceptors and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense. Those weapons would be linked with the radars and missiles carried aboard American Aegis warships in nearby waters.

There is a similar effort in the Pacific centered on radars in Japan, Aegis warships at sea and land-based interceptors in Alaska and California.

The Obama administration’s more recent focus has been the system to protect NATO allies in Europe with advanced radars based in Turkey and long-range interceptors to be based first in Romania and subsequently in Poland. American officials have emphasized that the limited number of interceptors in Europe are all about Iran, and would be inadequate to blunt Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal; but the system remains an irritant in relations with Moscow.

During the conflict with Hamas, Israeli officials report that Iron Dome knocked down more than 400 rockets on flight paths to populated areas, with a kill rate of 85 percent. Hamas is said to have fired off more than 1,400 rockets in all, but Israel was able to limit Hamas’s ability to launch more of its arsenal of 12,000 rockets with pre-emptive attacks on the storehouses where they were kept.

But some antimissile experts have expressed doubt about Israeli claims for Iron Dome, which is built by Israeli defense firms but has received about $275 million in financial support from the United States. Bright flashes can create a visual impression of overwhelming interceptor success, when in fact they may represent nothing more than the interceptor warhead blowing up, these skeptics warn.

“I’ve met the guys in Israel, and they’re smart,” said Richard M. Lloyd, an antimissile expert with more than a dozen patents and two major textbooks on warhead design to his credit. “But I’m not seeing the things I want to see” to prove that Iron Dome actually succeeded to the extent described by Israel.

Mr. Lloyd, who works for Tesla Laboratories Inc., a defense contractor in Arlington, Va., said he had studied dozens of publicly available photographs of spent rockets that landed on Israel. Few of them, he said, showed signs of damage from Iron Dome’s exploding warhead and the specific mechanism by which the interceptor is designed to make its kill — a dense spray of speeding metal fragments.

For Some Drivers, Electric Motorcycle Could Be the Best of Both Worlds

What if you got rid of the bad parts of both?

You might end up with something like the C-1, an electric motorcycle that looks as if it came out of the movie “Tron.” For protection, the bike is encased in a metal shell, and it is controlled like a car, with a steering wheel and foot pedals. Two big gyroscopes under the floor are designed to keep it from tipping over, even when a car hits it from the side. The C-1’s top speed is 120 miles an hour, and it can travel 200 miles on a full charge.

A small start-up called Lit Motors is developing the C-1 in a three-story warehouse here. Its 33-year-old chief executive, Daniel Kim, was tinkering with a biodiesel sport utility vehicle eight years ago when a 500-pound chassis nearly crushed him. The experience got him thinking about cutting out the bulk.

“Most people drive alone,” Mr. Kim said in an interview. “Why not cut the car in half? I was really into bicycles at that time and I thought, Why can’t we have the efficiency of a bicycle and motorcycle but all the amenities of a car?”

Fully electric vehicles have long been a dream among environmentalists and technologists, but companies have found it hard to deliver affordable and practical vehicles to the mass market. One of the biggest names in this field is Tesla Motors, which makes expensive sports cars and has had trouble increasing manufacturing.

But Lit Motors, which has just 10 people on staff, thinks it can bring the benefits of an electric vehicle even to those who aren’t rich. Mr. Kim says his motorcycle will be money-saving, safe to drive and simple to build.

The main culprit in the high price of electric vehicles is the battery, said Dan Sperling, a professor of civil engineering and environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis and director of its Institute of Transportation Studies. Unlike computer chips and digital storage, which have improved rapidly while dropping in price, battery technology has made slow progress, he said, so vehicle batteries are still bulky and pricey.

The other challenge, Dr. Sperling said, is that most people are not ready to embrace electric vehicles yet. Consumers could be nervous about the reliability and maintenance of such an expensive purchase — buggy software, for example, could lead to more serious consequences than it would on something like a smartphone. That’s why many auto companies have stuck to making hybrid vehicles, which use both gas and electricity and are more affordable, easier to produce and more familiar to drivers.

“It’s not like when you buy an iPhone and you throw it out or don’t use it as much when it gets old,” Dr. Sperling said. “Unlike an iPhone or Windows system, it can’t crash — it has to perform with high reliability all the time.”

Mr. Kim, who dropped out of Reed College and the University of California, Berkeley and later studied industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design, has plans to overcome those obstacles. The motorcycle is lighter than a car so its batteries can be smaller and cheaper. And to improve reliability, the system is equipped with more components than it actually needs, Mr. Kim said.

The C-1’s secret weapons are the gyroscopes that allow it to balance itself, similar to the approach used in the Segway scooter. In a video, the company shows the bike remaining upright as a car yanks it from the side. Only one gyroscope is needed to maintain balance, but there are always two running; each gyroscope has redundant computer chips, controllers and sensors, so if any one of those fails, there are extras to back it up.

The bike is made up of 2,200 parts, or one-tenth the number in the average car, which should make it easier to mass-produce, Mr. Kim said. He plans to start manufacturing the motorcycle in the United States.

There are two main target markets for the vehicle, said Ryan James, chief marketing officer for Lit Motors: motorcyclists between 45 and 60 years old who are concerned about safety but don’t want to give up their two-wheeler and younger commuters who live in urban or suburban areas where driving a car can be a bother or feel wasteful.

Still, Mr. Kim’s start-up, which is on a hiring spree, faces some tough hurdles. So far it has raised just $720,000 from early investors and another $80,000 from family and friends. It will have to get people to buy a vehicle they haven’t had a chance to drive or even see in real life — and spend some serious money on it. Each motorcycle will cost $24,000 for the first production run of 1,000 in 2014, Mr. Kim said, and he hopes to bring the price down to $14,000 by around 2016, putting it in the range of a nice Ducati motorcycle or an entry-level car like a Honda Fit.

The company is already taking early orders and down payments on its Web site. About 250 people have signed up.

Mr. Kim said the company plans to team up with car dealerships in California, San Francisco and Los Angeles, in addition to selling the bikes online. And next summer, Mr. James will be driving an early version of the electric motorcycle to college campuses and conventions to show it to people and let them test-drive it. The company is also working on smartphone apps so C-1 owners can be part of their own social network.

Mr. Kim has his doubters. Kevin See, an analyst with Lux Research, which studies electric vehicles and alternative energy, said the motorcycle might appeal only to a small niche, and the initial price tag would be much higher than most people were willing to pay for a two-wheel vehicle. There are also plenty of more affordable vehicles on the market that perform well and already have a trusted brand, he said.

“It’s very tough to roll out a vehicle of any kind with such a significant price premium versus an incumbent,” he said. Mr. See said the C-1 reminded him of Aptera Motors, a start-up that tried to sell a futuristic car but went out of business in December. (Steve Fambro, a founder of Aptera, is listed as one of Lit’s technical advisers.)

Dr. Sperling of the University of California said the biggest challenge for Mr. Kim would be finding buyers for the vehicle and then finding the means to deliver it.

“He’s got some clever ideas, and it really comes down to questions that all these companies face, and that is can they find a market for the product, and can they actually do the manufacturing in an efficient and effective way?” Dr. Sperling said.

Still, he said he was optimistic about the company’s chances.

“There are people who want to do something to save the world, make a contribution to it, do something both in terms of energy and climate,” he said. “If it’s cool and good for the world, you’ve got a winner.”