“Curiosity – What’s Inside The Cube” (to give it its full title — the subtitle was added to avoid confusion with the Mars rover) is part massively multiplayer online game, part social experiment and completely and utterly insane. The free app is available for both iOS and Android devices and when you first start it up you see a gently rotating cube (rather like a Borg ship), floating in a white room. You can spin the cube, pinch to zoom in and out and a tap will take you right into the surface of the cube. As you zoom in, you start to see the individual pixels of the image on the surface. But then it zooms you in further, revealing the pixels that make up the pixels of the image. And then again. When you are zoomed all the way in, each of these pixels becomes a “Cubelet” and the idea of the game is to chip away these cubelets with a tap of your finger.

Yup, that’s it.

Apparently there are 64 billion cubelets in total, making around 2,000 layers, and each layer must be fully removed before the next layer becomes available.

To encourage participation and not just observation, tappers are rewarded with ‘coins’ for each cubelet removed – sometimes just one, sometimes hundreds.

5,000 coins gets you four ‘Firecrackers,’ which you can chain together to remove more cubelets. The next one is the ‘bomb,’ which gives you more destructive taps for eight seconds – but will set you back 115,000 coins. Then there are three chisels – Iron, Steel and Diamond, each one time-limited again. The iron one clears nine at a time, but costs 300,000 and the steel one clears 25 with each tap, but you’ll have to hand over a cool million for it! The power of the Diamond Chisel hasn’t been revealed, but given that it will cost THREE BILLION coins, I wonder if anyone will ever get one.

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/11/curiosity-killed-the-app/