New World Notes

R2D2 Creator to Judge a Machinima Contest - And Explains the Pros & Cons of Machinima for Filmmakers

Tony Dyson, the veteran film effects creator who built the original R2D2 model, is judging a machinima contest, The Machinima 48 Hour Film Project. Known as Azar Shelman in SL, Dyson designed the original R2D2 for Star Wars, then built eight copies of the beloved droid for The Empire Strikes Back. And speaking as a veteran filmmaker, he's now interested in machinima as a new platform:

"I think 'machinima' has the same untapped potential that we found when we switched over from early animated films using frame by frame drawings to Computer Generated Images (CGI)," he tells me by e-mail. "[T]he secret is not only to spot and learn what new potential this platform may open up to the film maker, but to also identify exactly what are the negative aspects of this new media, only then can we really move forward."

The benefits: "[L]ow investment and production costs plus speed of production will open up a vast new market place in today's digital world, for example in Education, Entertainment and Advertising fields..." The challenges: "[L]earning about the differences in camera techniques involved... [and working] in a totally new world, a 'virtual world' that has a very strong culture of its very own. This brave new world... has a very steep learning curve for many, but the rewards are and will be truly amazing for any one that has the imagination to meet this challenge.

Read all the details for the contest here, and more background on the blog of Chantal Harvey, who's running it.

Update, 9/12: Corrected original description from "Second Life machinima" contest, as machinima from other platforms are also accepted. Apologies for the error. See more details in Comments.

Brain-Computer Interface for Disabled People to Control Second Life With Thought Available Commercially Next Year

This is an awesome use of a brain-computer interface developed for disabled people to navigate in the 3D virtual world of Second Life, using a simple interface controlled by the user's thought:

Developed by an Austrian medical engineering firm called G.Tec, the prototype in the video above was released last year, but since New Scientist wrote about the project recently, and since it's one of the few real world applications of Second Life that's already showing tangible, scalable, incredibly important social results, I checked with the company for an update:

"The technology is already on the market for spelling," G.Tec's Christoph Guger tells me, pointing to a company called Intendix. "The SL control will be on the market in about one year." I imagine there are many disabled people in SL right now who would benefit from this, and many more not in SL who could, once it's on the market. (A Japanese academic created a similar brain-to-SL interface in 2007, but to my knowledge, there are no commercial plans for it as yet.)

Guger shared some insights on how the technology works, and the disabled volunteers who helped them develop it:

Second Life Project "Deep Down (The Virtual Mine)" Gets an Emmy Nomination!

Here's some cool Second Life news: "Deep Down (The Virtual Mine)", a TV documentary with a major component developed in SL, just received an Emmy nomination, in the category "New Approaches to News and Documentary Programming". Produced by PBS' Independent Lens, the documentary by Jen Gilomen and Sally Rubin is about the hard life of Appalachian coal miners in Eastern Kentucky. As part of the production, Gilomen and Rubin created a virtual experience in Second Life to simulate coal mining in a kind of role playing game framework. A lot of well-known SL developers were involved in the project, including Qarl Fizz (aka Karl Stiefvater), who tipped me to this excellent news for SL as a real world work platform. (Qarl did its coding.) When the project was first announced, I was skeptical that SL was really ready to convey what the documentarians intended, but I totally agree with the Emmy judges that it represents a promising new approach to conveying news stories. (And this is the second Emmy nomination for an SL-based project. In 2007, the SL site for The L Word got a nomination in an interactive marketing category and won the award.)

See more about the documentary here, and see more about the virtual mine experience here. I've included a video of Jen Gilomen and Sally Rubin talking about the virtual mine experience after the break too -- click to view!

Second Life Used for Augmented Reality 3D Modeling in Remote Collaboration

This is a pretty impressive prototype of an "Augmented Reality Process Modeling Tool" (as the developer calls it), using Second Life to create and share 3D content:

I especially like how it allows the augmented reality viewer to see Second Life content dynamically created in 3D without having to actually be in Second Life -- I think applications like this have the best chance to gain wider adoption for real world applications in architecture, design, etc. It's lead-developed by Ross Brown of New Zealand's Business Process Management Research Cluster at the Queensland University of Technology, using the ARToolkit. You can read more about it here.

Behind the In-World Scenes of My Avatar and Me, the Award-Nominated Feature Shot in Second Life [SLANE]

My Avatar and Me, a quasi-documentary feature film partly shot in Second Life is playing the festival circuit and will soon debut in SL itself. ColeMarie Soleil of Second Life Arts and Entertainment (SLANE) and many other SL content creators helped the filmmakers put together the movie's in-world elements -- read on for a behind-the-scenes look! - Hamlet

Osama Takedown Simulated With Second Life Machinima to Demonstrate SL as Rapid News Reenactment Platform

What you're watching below is a very rough machinima recreation of SEAL Team 6's takedown of Osama bin Laden, quickly shot in the highly accurate simulation of the Abbottabad compound developed by Avatrian Studios, who also made the video:

Not intended to strictly follow now-historical events, Avatrian put it together in a day, CEO Chenin Anabuki explains, partly to demonstrate the ease with which simulations can be staged in Second Life:

"It bothers us that CNN* and major news channels still show re-enactments of the SEAL mission in Abbottabad using grayscale figures and untextured models," as he put it. This video, considerably superior in visual quality to most (or all) of the re-enactment videos featured on international news programs in the days after bin Laden's killing, demonstrates Second Life's strength as a rapid prototyping platform:

Osama bin Laden's Abbottabad Compound Recreated in Second Life from Google Earth Data to Simulate SEAL Raid

bin Laden's compound in real life and Second Life. [Direct teleport at this link]

In under a week, the metaverse development team Avatrian has built in Second Life a scale replica of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottobad, Pakistan, drawing data from Google Earth and other sources. "We've seen pictures on TV and online but it does not really give you a good sense of the place unless you're actually there," as Avatrian's Chenin Anabuki put it, after giving me a sneak preview a couple days ago. The whole spread has improved since my visit, and become pretty photorealistic -- see below:

In My Avatar and Me Quasi-Documentary Feature, a Filmmaker Finds New Identity & Virtual Sex in Second Life

Here's a trailer to My Avatar and Me, a quasi-documentary feature film from directors/producers Bente Milton and Mikkel Stolt, in which a beleaguered filmmaker (played by Mikkel) discovers an alternate world called Second Life. Check it out, looks like fun:

"My Avatar And Me", English trailer from Fenris Film & Multimedia on Vimeo.

I especially like the appearance by former Linden staffer John "Pathfinder" Lester, and the hints of an identity-shifting Catfish-style plot twist. It's been playing the EU festival circuit (click to join the Facebook fan page for updates), and later this month, the filmmakers will appear in-world during the movie's Danish debut:

"The trailer was made for the Danish theatrical premiere on May 18th," Mikkel tells me. "[O]n opening night we are having a Q&A after the film -– with links between the RL cinema in Copenhagen and our own cinema in SL." So look for updates on that.

And yes, Mikkel discovers the joys of virtual sex (when he can get the equipment in place, that is.) Watch a fairly hilarious (and NSFW) clip after the break:

Huge Opportunity for Metaverse Developers: News Event Dramatizations with Second Life Machinima

If you're like me, you spent a lot of last week watching news coverage of Osama bin Laden's killing, which included numerous 3D dramatizations, like this one from MSNBC. Give it a look, it's remarkably assy:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Can you believe a major news corporation paid for this crap? I'm hardly a military expert, but I'm really guessing the Navy SEALS actually didn't look like that, and the building layout isn't very accurate. It strikes me that news event recreations like these could be done far better with Second Life machinima. The huge in-world economy already has almost all the assets needed (costumes, avatars, props, etc.), and there's more than enough talented SL builders able to quickly whip together a scale model of a given news location. (In this case, bin Laden's compound in Pakistan.)

Don't believe me? Take a look at this Second Life action machinima I wrote about a few months ago, rapidly shot with already existing assets:

US Army Project Simulates Real World Afghanistan Terrain Data in MOSES, Military OpenSimulator Enterprise Strategy

What you’re looking at above is an OpenSim recreation of Kamdesh, of Nuristan province in eastern Afghanistan, the site of a fierce 2009 battle that took place at American Combat Outpost (COP) Keating. It was developed by Douglas Maxwell (Second Life name: Maccus McCullough), a federal employee who specializes in modeling and simulation technology at the Army Research Lab Simulation and Training Technology Center in Orlando.

The Afghan terrain is created from unclassified DTED (digital terrain elevation data) databases. “We have developed a tool that will ingest the DTED data for a given region and produce RAW files for SL/OS systems.” He says there's no current plans to release the conversion technology to other OpenSim/SL developers, "but that could change if a compelling reason is made." (I bet someone could use it to quickly simulate the compound in Abbottabad where bin Laden just met his end.)

And while much of the world’s attention is on the firefight in Pakistan that ended with bin Laden’s death, the US Army is sponsoring the use of OpenSimulator to recreate this recent firefight next door, in Afghanistan, for MOSES, i.e., Military Open Simulator Enterprise Strategy. “The MOSES is running on US Army-owned hardware,” Maxwell tells me. “[T]he section of Afghanistan depicted in the 36 regions are a recreation (1:1) of the COP Keating and will create a sample training area for individuals to experience key parts of the Battle of Kamdesh from 2009.

Significantly, the MOSES project was originally developed on Second Life Enterprise, but when that was closed down last August, “We had to find a viable alternative or risk losing significant investments made in time and content.” Which is how it transitioned to an OpenSimulator-based project.