Here's today's dose of smartphone hackery coolness: Jonne Nauha, a developer with RealXtend, an impressive virtual world platform based on OpenSim, managed to get RealXtend's Naali viewer running on a Nokia N900 smartphone. Performance is not super fabulous as yet, but still a pretty cool demo reportedly whipped together in a few weeks:
In the video description, Jonne hints that this might soon be possible on the iPhone.
Chestnut Rau’s weekly round-up of upcoming SL events…
Glyph Graves is one of my favorite SL artists. If anyone's can be called a "Virtualist" he can. Glyph's work reacts to people who view it. It morphs from one form to another. It pulses with light and sound and feels as if it is actually alive. I sincerely love experiencing his art and I think you will too.
Please do check out Liquidity which is Glyph Graves' two part exhibit running now through June 7th. On the ground you will find a landscape to explore. To get the most out of this experience you do have to walk around because things are not as they appear at first glance. Sculpture is hidden and often separate entities will come together to form a sculpture when you come close.
The second part of the exhibit is the Real Life to Second Life project Glyph has done in collaboration with Julian Stadon from Curtin University, WA, Australia. Using digital microscopy Julian captures the movement of a colony of protozoa in a petri dish and converts it into a set of coordinates which is streamed into SL. Glyph pics up this data and transforms it into virtual art .Grab the notecard at the landing point for more information about this innovative and interesting project. In IBM Exhibit C. [SLurl teleport at this link]
Also after the break: Visit China Tang Empire Opening , AvatarStyle 60's Mod Cocktail Party, Wounded Warrior Memorial Day Concerts and much more
In this dark and poignant machinima, an android dreams of better days at the end of the world:
It was created by professional Japanese filmmaker Akira Yamamoto, known in Second Life as Akira Balog, who brilliantly incorporates real video footage and simulated heads-up displays into filtered SL footage to suggest a lot of story in a very short time. The music is by Chouchou, the SL-only music group, and it won an award from the Society for Art and Science, an organization of media professionals. Much thanks to my indispensable Japanese translator Sanny Yoshikawa for this find!
I love this mixed reality portrait of and by Ferocia Fackler, who in real life is a successful game developer. She joined SL in 2005, and has been evolving her avatar over the years to look more and more like her real life owner, for professional reasons.
"For me Second Life is not so much about living a fantasy or stepping into the shoes of a different person," as Ferocia explains it to me. "Instead it's a place where I'm representing myself, merely in a virtual form. I enjoy a lot of aspects of SL, not just the fun stuff, but occasionally use it to meet people from my business network as well, many of whom I've met in real life."
Which is why she aimed to make Ferocia Fackler resemble herself. "[I]t would be very odd to look like a completely different person (let alone a typical SL Barbie Doll)," as she puts it. Then proceeds to tell me how she did it:
Second Life fashion designers and fashionistas, please put aside 15 minutes of your time, and watch this amazing TED talk by Johanna Blakley, who's Deputy Director of a media-focused think tank at the University of Southern California:
In it, Ms. Blakley notes that the real world fashion industry has little legal protection of its intellectual property. Designs can't be copyrighted, only trademarks can be enforced, and consequently, knockoffs abound. Despite -- or rather, as she suggests, because of this -- the fashion industry is on the whole extremely profitable. In fact, to judge by her chart at 12:30, the fashion industry grosses roughly twice more revenue than books, film, and music combined. (All three of which do enjoy copyright protection.) Blakley argues that the very lack of copyright and patents in fashion pushes designers to be even more innovative, creating products that are hard to duplicate, and continual new looks that keep them ahead of the curve.
This video comes to me courtesy of a Second Life fashionista named TheShadow Oh, who sent the link with an observation you've probably guessed at by now:
This is the latest music video from Loverush UK, a British electronica group with a number of hit singles in their country, and as you'll notice, the sensual and throbbing club footage is actually machinima captured in Second Life. With any luck, it'll be broadcast on UK MTV soon, but see it here first:
Loverush regularly performs live sets in Second Life at their own club, Loverush Digital, as the avatars Kinky Roland and Loverush Pennell. This track, "Different World", is actually a remix of a Loverush hit from 2008, and for this new version, the band turned to SL and their fans there.
"[W]e really wanted to give something back to our Second Life fan base," as Mark Loverush puts it, "but also show the real world how much fun Second Life can be."
Loverush was introduced to Second Life a few years ago by Kirsty Hawkshaw, herself a renowned British musician who's made the metaverse part of her creative world. In this way, he discovered Second Life's live DJ scene, and came to admire SL-based DJs already working in it. "As a DJ in the real world I know how hard it is to capture a moment that people will remember when they go out, so to capture a worldwide audience, I really admired that."
The photostream of Japanese Resident bark Aabye is a treasure of jaw-dropping Second Life content, surreal, beautiful, silly, a lot of which she annotates with a SLurl, so you can follow in her footsteps. Watch for yourself:
Here's the results of last week's reader survey on virtual infidelity, with 166 votes received. A majority of 56% believe that cheating is more likely to happen in Second Life, than other online medium. "A 3D virtual environment hits a sweet spot for intimate encounters," as Arcadia Codesmith astutely puts it in Comments. "On the one hand, it avoids the embarrassing literalness of webcams; on the other hand, the visual richness of the environment is more immersive than text."
This tracks to my own observations; I've met many Second Life users with committed real life relationships who went in-world with absolutely no intention of even flirtation -- business people, academics, government researchers and more -- who unexpectedly find themselves swimming in the seductiveness of avatar-driven romance. But if it's true that SL is more likely to lead to that kind of temptation, than other mediums, that also implies Second Life is more likely to provoke other emotions that are also more deeply felt -- empathy, for instance, or inspiration, joy.
The Augmented Reality Event is a conference happening in Santa Clara on June 2 and 3, and it'll feature some keynote speakers with powerful geek kung fu: among them Bruce Sterling, Will Wright, and Carnegie Mellon's Jesse Schell (who gave a landmark talk earlier this year that I wrote about last March). Also, Linden co-founder Cory Ondrejka will be a judge in the augmented reality start-up competition, and I'm fairly sure I'll be there too. Tickets go for $395 at the door, but the folks with the Event gave me a discount code to share with New World Notes readers, to get your tickets for $245.
To get your New World Notes discount, use the code "AR245" when you register. Thanks to Tish Shute of UgoTrade, who's a key player putting this Event together.
