April 26, 2006
[via Social Synergy Weblog. Thanks Bryan!]
Clickable Culture has a fascinating article about using Second Life and the World Wide Web as a 3D design platform. In this case the designer is creating a "historically based game-like environment". However, these tools could possibly be used to recreate communities and whole cities, to demonstrate the redesign of public places, for instance. Or , even to give a community, college students, or a design team a sort of "3D wiki" of their community to work with? There are lots of possibilities and potentials here. Perhaps all of the potentials are not currently possible in Second Life as it exists right now. many of them do not seem too far off or out of reach, though.
Here's some quoted text and images from the Clickable Culture post:
In building the sets and props, I first turned to Google Image Search in order to source textures based on the real-life locations to be depicted (locations I've been to in person, I might add). I managed to source an excellent photograph of a suitable historical house that included the entire home from pavement to roof. With substantial manipulation in Photoshop sliced it up into textures. I quickly re-created the house in Second Life using basic primitives and applying the appropriate textures. I isolated the door, window-shutters, and hanging flowers as separate objects so that the house wouldn't look so flat when seen at an angle. This single house formed the basis of all the houses on the inner-city street.
A row of houses turns into a street
I truncated the house lengthwise for some houses, and shortened it to two stories from three for other houses. I then tinted the door and shutters of the houses to further differentiate the dwellings. I added details such as adjoining awnings and a cobbled sidewalk to my row of houses, which was curved inwards to enhance the sense of perspective. Once the row was tweaked to my satisfaction, I simply copied the entire row, and rotated it 180 degrees to form the other side of the street. I added brick pavement and details such as crates. At the end of the street (which was supposed to be in a besieged town), I added a broken-down cart I'd built over a year ago for my own use, and some animated fire objects available freely in Second Life.
Inner-city concept screen.
ls like these might also eventually be able to meld with Steve Mann's WearComp and Eyetap technology concepts.
Steve Mann'sopen source Mediated Reality Toolkit allows a wearer of his Eyetap devices to overlay physical reality with Internet content. Example:
The sign above is overlayed with a web browser when viewed through and "eyetap" device.
So, eventually it may be possible to make a "doorway" to virtual worlds. Or, it might be possible to overlay reality with 3D created virtuality.
I also wonder whether people will eventually want to use these eyetap and Second Life virtual-world-style technologies to start creating personal knowledge bases of both reality and virtual worlds.
We now use the WWW and search tools and "tagging" or personal knowledge base tools, like WebAssistant, del.icio.us, flickr, etc ., to store and taxonomize and map pieces of knowledge and information that we create or find online. Will people also desire to use tools like these to collaboratively store information about virtual worlds, and about an always-on digitized intake of reality itself? My guess is that they will.
My guess is also that peer to peer production and social software will find it's way into mediated realities and virtual world as well.
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unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
Featured Project
Berkeley Conference: Online Video and the Future of Television - Friday, September 30, 2005
This one-day conference brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse – and until now, largely disconnected – specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.
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unmediated is a group blog that tracks the tools, processes,
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