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(un)Wise Adventures in Virtual Worlds
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| | Subject: | Philips Design laucnhes Innovation Quest in SL | | Time: | 07:32 pm |
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Philips Design will re-launch its presence in SL today, starting with an Ideation Quest with the residents. The Ideation Quest is an "innovative and playful way to engage people in the creation of ideas and concepts, and a logical continuation of Philips Design’s ongoing exploration into virtual worlds as a platform for co-creation and innovation".
"In this version of Ideation Quest, people will explore the topic of sustainable living in the future. They will follow a route of five playful and creative steps, inspired by the design concept Off the Grid: Sustainable Habitat 2020. This concept looks at possible solutions for energy and housing issues predicted in the year 2020. Off the Grid is part of the Philips Design Probe program and is a continuation of the SKIN Probe which was listed as one of "the best inventions of 2007" by TIME magazine".
"The Quest will begin at the new Philips Design Co-creation island in SL on Monday June 16th at SLT 12 PM (CEST 21:00) and will continue for 4 weeks (Philips Design). The Ideation Quest is a collaboration between the University of Innsbruck, Avaty and Philips Design."
See also the livejournal of Philips Design. | comments: Leave a comment   |
| | Subject: | Philips Design relaunches its island in SL, starts with Innovation Quest | | Time: | 06:58 pm |
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I was rather silent lately, not because I lost an interest in SL (I didn't), but mostly because I would rather write here about something 'fresh', that is, something new and original happening with me (and not just merely rebroadcast somebody else's stories.
Looks like there is a good reason to re-start writing again :) Philips Design, which start working in SL last year, has also announced a fresh re-launch of their presence, this time on their own island in SL (Philips Design).
There are great plans, to my knowledge - to continue to work with the residents, to show various visionary projects (most from RL so far, but hey, the time will come). For starter, Philips Design decided to launch an IQ, stands for Ideation Quest.
That's how the endeavor is presented at the official livejournal of the company:
We will start with the ‘Ideation Quest’ in Second Life. This is, we believe, is an innovative and playful way to engage people in the creation of ideas and concepts. We see at as the logical continuation of Philips Design’s ongoing exploration into virtual worlds as a platform for co-creation and innovation.
In this Ideation Quest, Philips Design invites people to participate exploring the topic of sustainable living in the future. Participants at the Philips Island will follow a route of five playful and creative steps, inspired by the design concept - Off the Grid: Sustainable Habitat 2020. This concept looks at possible solutions for energy and housing issues predicted in the year 2020. Off the Grid is part of the Philips Design Probe program and is a continuation of the SKIN Probe which was listed as "best inventions of 2007" by TIME magazine.
The Quest will begin at the new Philips Design Co-creation island in SL on Monday June 16th at SLT 12 PM (CEST 21:00) and will continue for 4 weeks (Philips Design). The Ideation Quest is a collaboration between the University of Innsbruck, Avaty and Philips Design.
Sounds quite exciting, and I am eager to see what will be created by people (and how everything will evolve with such initiatives to use playfulness of virtual worlds (the topic I explored last year).
I am sure more pictures will follow :) | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Playful Edward | | Time: | 10:32 pm |
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As expected, this was a start presentation; Castronova is smart, is witty, and is refreshing, even if you know the main points of his talk by heart. It was a pleasure to listen to him, and to the people who were listening to him and asking 'right' questions.
The announcement presented it as "the provocative thesis that a continual migration is now happening between physical reality and the alternative realities offered by open virtual worlds and massive online games, and that the two modes of existence will henceforth co-adapt, competing for the attention, time, and money of users".
But more specifically, he was talking about fun, and how important to consider fun in decision making, and how - and why - the governments and firms should do it, and how they don't do it, and how badly it can all end up because of that. Or, rather, he was saying that he still hopes that the governments (as well as other bodies) will eventually learn to take into account the 'fun factor' (i.e., they will learn how to play). Ok, let's hope. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | On wonderlands | | Time: | 08:22 pm |
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Nicole Yankelovich, from Sun Microsystems, was presenting yesterday their Project Wonderland - a "3D Toolkit for Building Virtual Worlds". In reality, it was less about a toolkit, but more about Sun's own 3D Intranet (MPK20) and its new functionalities. And in fact, there was not so much new in this talk, I have a feeling that I've see all this stuff before. I am sure they added lot of geeky things, like directional sound, 'innovative telephony' and what not. But, as Shania Twain sings, 'that doesn't impresses me much'.
The only really coll thing (besides the fact that Sun does endorse these experiments) is its name, Wonderland. However, this very name points to source of my mild disappointment: while referring to this magical, experiential and deeply transformative space, they 'just' extend the existing practices into virtual worlds, merely replicating the 'reality' in 'virtually', without much efforts to sense what are the new dimensions and opportunities these wonderlands reveal (or can reveal).
PS: Ok, not fully true - I did notice their new musical browser; may be it is also old, but I don't remember seeing it before. Below are a few pictures that give some impression on how it looks/works:
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| | Subject: | Social Nets | | Time: | 08:19 pm |
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Oh, I know now what they mean when talking about 'social networks'... | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | On real gems in virtual spaces | | Time: | 09:47 pm |
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But what was the real treasure is to meet Soph (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sophrosyne_sl) at this conference! During my drop-out from Second Life their sim Extropia (or should I write sin?) was one of the very few places I tried to visit from time-time. They are amazing, and I plant to write more about this community.
Soph was sweet enough to offer a Grand Tour through the place (accompanied from time to time by Vidal (vidaltripsa) and dandellion).
The space 'space' they created is really fantastic, I will surely will come back to play 'Yuri Gagarin'; speaking of who, I need to remember to gather some pictures of Baikonour for the Soph's party at April 12.
And few other fantastic views:
Finally, we tried to do underwater racing; truly entertaining, I even managed to take one turn without crushing into the walls!
Thank you, Soph! It was a real (sic!) pleasure! | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Gazing at the gazers | | Time: | 09:20 pm |
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The second presentation was by Nick Yee (mostly known as Deadalus man) who recently started studying social interactions of avatars; I missed most of it, unfortunately, and returned closer to the closure. But it was all his too familiar talk about how avatars 'gaze' at each other, and how much can we learn from studying it.
I was always quite skeptical this twist; of course, behavior of avatars does reflect behavior of the person driving them, but... first, the 'behavioral reactions' of the former are medicated by so many factors outside the scope of science, but most importantly, I am less interested to see how these avatars behave similarly to the people behind; in is much more interesting to see what are the differences created by the medium, and how, and what these differences can tell us about the 'drivers'.
The only real news was that Nick has apparently moved to PARC and is now affiliated with Xerox' PlayOn group (see their blog); before he was all Stanford man (Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab).
PS: The picture has not much in common with Nick Yee and his virtual research; it portrays two other virtual researchers I met last year in Vancouver - Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins and Mark "Typewriter" Bell; it was nice to hook up with these two 'For Dummies' .
Some other 'gazes':
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| | Subject: | Second Life of Second Life - re-starting with second Life 2.0 | | Time: | 08:30 pm |
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I nearly abandoned SL, and definitely this blog was not a 'very' lively one since last October. Speaking about living, and life, it's interesting that the last postings were from the previous Life 2.0 conference in SL. And it was the next Life 2.0 that my reunion with SL so serendipitously coincided with.
A lot of things changed there (here?) in the virtual world, and everything stayed the same; surely, the problems with lags and rez-ing are those 'staying' with us, as the above pictures vividly demonstrates.
My first visited lecture was (symbolically) about the 'Future of Immersion', and given by Mitch Kapor, chairman of Linden Research (aka MitchK Linden inworld).
Semi-naked-rezzed Mike talking...
... to the audience of more than 100 people, quite impressive, in fact.
I was very pleased, and disappointed at the same time, to see all the same old buddies there; disappointed because it seems that the world is still a very tiny village where everyone knows everybody.
Below is how the Mike's talk was announced:
"Deeper, more satisfying immersion hangs fire on the emergence of a new generation of interfaces, which harness gesture both to project identity and assist communication, and to enable simpler, more vivid means of interacting with objects and people. Continuing the thread begun at Davos and Metaverse U., at Stanford, Mr. Kapor will describe and chart the implications of one such device, nearing introduction."
I was somehow disappointed with talk too, in fact. It was all about 3D cameras, and photo-realistic avatars, and more 'intuitive' interfaces, the usual technocratic bla-bla-bla. I don't think that the 'future of immersion' is about that. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | OnRezzing | | Time: | 07:09 am |
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Trying new SL viewer, from OnRez. Perhaps, nothing stunningly new, but the movement and navigation seem to be quicker and smoother. I also like few interface improvement, and button placement make more sense compared to the default one from LL.
As a bundle record, just came back from a week-long trip to Canada, where I attended a conference by the Association of Internet Researchers this years called Let's Play, including a pre-conference workshop entirely on Second Life. The workshop, and many other presentations and conversations, including with Pathfinder Linden who was also one of the keynote speakers, triggered lots of thoughts and ideas, which I do hope to put in writing here, well, one day. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | What is Smell + ? | | Time: | 07:13 pm |
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To learn the answer in the subject, please come to the Philips Design's site - guess where? - in Second Life, the least smelly place on Earth!
James Auger from RCA will be presenting his ideas about smell, design and life (the presentation is modestly titled 'The sense of smell in the 21st century')
The very first round is today, October 3rd, 11 am -1 pm SL time (an hour from now). The talk will be repeated this Friday(5th October 3.00 AM - 5.00 AM SL time) | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Kourosh Dini Live in SL | | Time: | 04:33 pm |
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Somehow in between the lectures at Life 2.0 I stopped by at the Red Rock performance center [will try to get SLurl later] where Kourosh Eusebio was giving live performance. It was a very, very good one! He played few pieces, some pure piano, and some others with a mix of electronic sound, quite diverse, but at the same time very tranquil and soothing.
He has a blog (Mind, Music, and Technology) where you can also listen to few pieces and buy (download?) his CD and MP3s. Apparently, he is performing in SL relatively regularly, I am planning to enlist myself into his funs. | | comments: Leave a comment |
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As I mentioned already, during last few days I was attending multiple lectures and events at the Life 2.0 conference. Never being a very disciplined blogger [could very well be an oxymoron], and also concurrently fightings with a few RL assignments, I didn't manage to write about my impressions and experiences as they go; too bad, and lessons learned (or so I hope).
I will try to compensate it, somehow, by writing few mini-reports on the lectures or presentations I liked most. These will be mostly pictures with minimal comments (also because I often don't have any chatlogs - the site was constantly crashing, whipping them all).
Above is the picture of the very last day (=today), showing a very typical setting of the conference. By the way, the event only confirmed that audio-conferencing is sooo last century, in terms of information transmission. A differentiating feature is that in SL you *can* actually massively multitask during the event, perhaps even more than you usually do during similar gatherings.
Special thanks to sophrosyne_sl, who not only let me know about the event in a first place, but was also an inspiring interlocutor during few sessions which we attended together. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Factz, and Figaz, on AvaStar | | Time: | 07:50 pm |
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IHT, one of the (shamelessly borrowing the term of sophrosyne_sl) hard-core atomic editions of the RL, publishes a HUGE piece on Second Life - Reporting the (virtual) facts: Online papers covering Internet communities mix fictional news with a branding sense (as you will see, in their on-line version the title was changed to AvaStar: Virtual lives, lively gossip).
The article is not so big itself, but it is placed as a lead story of the paper's Media & Communication section, and together with the picture above (enlarged) and few others takes a good half of A2(!) sheet. That's what I call a PR-tanking.
Though expectedly with such not bad a paper as IHT, the article is quite informative and relatively accurate. 'Accurate' perhaps not in a sense that it tells *all the truth* about SL (and who can do that?), but in way it translates all the weirdness of SL into something relatively understandable of the key audience of the publication. So, well done, Andreas Tzortzis! (for some strange reason I still thin it's an avatar name. Hmm).
Because the text will (or at least can) disappear from public access, I am copying it under the cut, with some minor remarks here and there.
So, if you want - ( Read more... ) | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
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Entire evening wasted spent at Life 2.0 (what a posh name!) Despite the name, there was a lot of interesting presentations, and panels, and discussions, questions, answers, conversations, pictures, sim crashes, new friendships, and 64 pages of text (that *despite* all the crashes wiping the chat logs). /me is exhausted, feel like switching to Twitter entirely, to merely survive this information overload.
Tomorrow the pics will be brighter. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Hello, Garbage! | | Time: | 09:58 pm |
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There are many, may more things to discover in the place (I have about 30 pictures ready to post, but I am bit tired already). And - I only talked about Part I! (There are at least II and III, and may be more).
It surely worth to come there and explore this lovely world yourself; I certainly stop by there many more times (also great place to bring your friends to show them SL).
Final (irresistible) posting - to all my surprise I found that this funny garbage collecting car...
...has Dutch number plates!
/me is most intrigued. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | More loops! | | Time: | 09:53 pm |
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There are even more direct loops here (both time- and space-related); browsing the pages of a photo-album, we suddenly see 'familiar places', The Mousetrap, The Vibrator etc; and - we see the new strange places too!
It's a double-cool trick (can we can it hyper-cool then?); not only it enriches the story-line with interesting, (sorry, but) post-modern self-referential loops. It also exploits so called 'user-generated content.
Oops. Should I better call it 'involves people in co-creative process?' Never mind.
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| | Subject: | Time for loops | | Time: | 09:14 pm |
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We spoke about time-stamps a bit, and not to the time-loops; as in every story, there are plenty of them in the grneenies world too. This one is perhaps not so much time-, but definitely a loop, a funny reference to the SL world in general: a book with a title 'SL: Advertise & Market Your Self'.
Well, the guys who made it may very well be authors of such manual!
The next one is a nice 'story-loop': by peeking into the pages of the diary, we may start revealing what is actually happening with the RL-owners of the place, how frustrated they are (and how naively mislead they can be - with the same Alice-Writing-For-The-King kind of question: Wos is actually controlling with writing here?
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(un)Wise Adventures in Virtual Worlds
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