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Mixed-Reality Party In DC and Second Life
Jerry23 writes "This Saturday The Happening will bring Second Life to first life. The Electric Sheep Company, a new metaverse developer, has virtually recreated R&B Coffee in Washington DC for use in a mixed-reality party and benefit for the DC art scene and several local nonprofits. Real people will mingle with avatars via realtime video projections in the real and virtual R&B spaces, and MAKE Magazine's Phillip Torrone will be on-hand showing off his homemade Virtual Reality headsets and gloves. The whole world is invited to attend in DC or Second Life, whichever's closer for you." This is just conceptually a weird idea to me.
I hope its better then the virtualboy from nintendo.. (Heh 1st one to post!)
Since I live near DC, I can actively ignore, with extreme prejudice, both the online and the real-world pieces of this simultaneously! We live in amazing times.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
we are getting closer and closer to meat/meta-space duality. assuming you have read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowcrash.
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For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
Too bad this "happening" is in a corner of town most people wouldn't set foot in at gunpoint...or if they did, likely would be. Sorry, twenty-five bucks to loiter around a coffee-house next to a shooting gallery to watch someone's laptop screen projected on the wall?
LAME.
It would be more interesting if it was WoW, or something similar. Instead of the sole purpose being socializing, you could actually get to bash some skulls in with an axe... virtually, and for real.
This is a sig. It is appended to the end of comments I post.
"The whole world is invited to attend in DC or Second Life..."
I don't know how many people can fit into the real world show area, but Second Life has a limit on how many users can be logged into one area at any given time. Not to mention that as it approaches that limit lag increases.
...I mean, virtually, these people are not obese, smell horrible, or live trite, meaningless lives in their parents' basements. Why would you want to show up in person and shatter your suspension of disbelief?
Things transpiring now remind me a lot of the first couple chapters of snowcrash. Soon we'll be living in U-stor-its.
This is just conceptually a wierd idea to me.
Maybe so, but your kids will love it.
Second life is a free MMO in which the players create and trade content for in game currentcy which is called Linden dollars. Yoou can also buy and sell the in world currency for U.S. dollars.
I got on and played around with it for about 2 hours last night. While it's an interesting concept and neat to explore and talk to people. I havent really found anything yet that would want to make me place a huge time investment into it. I'll probably try it out a bit more and see if I find anything look me up if you get on my name is Darthmalt Demar.
1) What's "The Happening"?
2) What's "Second Life"?
3) What's "The Electric Sheep Company"?
4) How are they developing Stephenson's "Metaverse"?
5) What's "R&B Coffee"?
6) What's a "Mixed Reality Party"
This could very well be the most pretentious article posted to Slashdot I've ever seen, and that's saying a lot.
This reminds me of an article i read somewhere and it talked about the next generation of MMORPG where people would go online to watch a movie (stream) shopping (Amazon/eBay) using their avatars, and meet and social like they would in real life instead of yelling "LFG Emperor run1!!11". Walking down the virtual isle of amazon, hitting on another hot avatar and going to watch a movie at iTune theatre, is it really that hard to imagine?
Okay, it is, but who knows, when we turn 60, that maybe the social norm.
1) What's "The Happening"?
Click on the link.
2) What's "Second Life"?
Click on the link.
3) What's "The Electric Sheep Company"?
Click on the link. (I suppose they should get brownie points for the Blade Runner/"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" reference.)
4) How are they developing Stephenson's "Metaverse"?
See the link to Second Life for more info.
5) What's "R&B Coffee"?
Damn good question.
6) What's a "Mixed Reality Party"
RTFSummary.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I believe this story is mis-categorized as 'games'. Please create and move to the new "society-is-going-to-hell" category. There should be plenty of similiar stories to fit into this new section. Thanks.
No less surreal than the stuff happening in the White House or Congress.
Cheney jokes are way too obvious here.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
This may be weird now, but get used to it. The future is the virtual overlaid on the real, and vice-versa. The lines are blurring. In twenty years, maybe even ten, it will be considered quaint and old-fashioned to make a distinction between the two.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
Well, most of those are answered in the article links, but;
Second Life is sort of a MMORPG, except without the RPG part. It's a big virtual world, where anyone can create just about anything out of primitive building blocks and scripts (provided you can figure out how to do whatever it is you want to do in the somewhat convoluted Linden Scripting Language). I'd say Second Life is a very close match to Stephenson's metaverse, without any of the rest of what this article is talking about. It's very similar; virtual land owners with shops selling all manner of things, big "Sandboxes" out in the desert where people race huge vehicles and build all manner of crazy things, and people whose avatars resemble just about anything and everything.
Evidently some company is setting up a party, where they've recreated a coffee shop from real life on an island in Second Life. Somehow they're going to make it so people in the coffee shop in real life can see the people in Second Life and vice versa (presumably a big projector and camera in RL, and a streaming video screen and an observer in SL).
I've seen more pretentious stories (usually in Wired), but this one is particularly painful, and would be right at home in Private Eye's "Pseud's Corner"!
I read the summary three times and I jsut can't figure it out. Maybe I'm art challanged or something, but my imagination has live people bumping into each other while where goggles and gloves. Those who distain wearing the accoutremonts of VR will have a great chuckle seeing the "live" folks" trying to interact with VR folks. I hope there is a video of this after it's over for that is the only way it will make sense to me.
This must be the modern version of a masked ball.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
Could you only imagine if the guy from the "YOU STOLE MY F***ING CLOUD SONG!!" audio clip showed up to your WoW party.
It wouldn't be pretty. I'd dare say the neighbors might be calling the cops on that event.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
If they're projecting avatars for SL into a real life place, does that mean we can finally arrest the avatars for indecent exposure?
I'm telling you, the world of Snow Crash is becoming a reality faster and faster. I always forget how old that book is (1992!), it's turning out to be pretty visionary! I'm off to buy my Metaverse deck...
I once went to something like this, at the Alliance Chautauquas Conference, Boston 1999. Neat idea, though a lot of the technology wasn't quite there. There were a series of art exhibits around the campus that were in one fashion or another "linked" to objects in a virtual-world "art exhibit." Some of the cooler ones even had ways that viewers in RL could interact with viewers in the software.
There may not be a lot of direct practical application of this stuff (yet), but it would definitely be interesting to see how this could work out with a virtual world that has a higher population than the one at the Chautauquas conference. (That one was fairly limited, as the only access was through pretty high-end SGI stations.)
I guess it's all in how this is approached, but it seems more like a neat technology demo than "pretentiousness" to me. Certainly, it's not a huge logical leap from "fun" interaction like this to "meaningful" real-life/virtual-world interaction.
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They're charging $20 (advance purchase) or $25 (at the door) to participate in the meatspace-portion of this event. Soooo .... they're expecting to get about $80 of revenue for this thing? The main incentive for participating is vacuous at best. I can watch someone fumble about with a VR helmet on? I might get to see this Make Magazine guy's wifi laptop with some uncomfortable-looking VR gadgets dangling off it?
/.)
The venue isn't large, so chewing up half the available space for the projector will cramp things further. I can't see a NE coffee shop shooing away regular paying customers, so I'd expect a fair number of non-participants to be crammed into the mix as well.
This thing is a train wreck that hasn't left the station yet.
(ps: I should probably have a second cup of coffee before posting to
Traditionally one replies to such questions en masse with the simple one liner "RTFA", rather than creating a 24 line content-free reply.
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
As long as they don't attempt to turn this into the scene from Minority Report, when the tech/hologram guy is showing off the "good clean fun," it's harmless.
Thank you internet for making it possible for me to go to a coffee shop and talk to a projected image. I might as well stay home, get drunk and yell at the tv during a Cheers re-run.
Second life would make a decent app to have VR in, but I wish VR would come down in price and have better resolution.
Anyone have any VR head gear units they'd recommend or any news about VRDs? (virtual retina displays) I'd love to get one for the "cool factor" but I don't want to sink money into something that is going to be obsolete in 6 months and gives me a head ache after 15 minutes of use.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I didn't understand any of this. I think I'm getting old.
Oh dear! Only 30 too!
donations in Linden Dollars will be accepted, converted to US$, and transferred to The Happening's funds.
Not a bad idea, but I hope they realize the outgoing and incomming exchange rates are different between US$ and L$. If you're thinking "Ok, I'll give them $5 worth of L$ as a donation" they're only going to get about $2.50 back out of the game. If you really want to donate, better to just send them a check. It's why I can't believe anybody makes any actual money off this game. Between the disadvantageous outgoing rate and the US$50, $100, $200+ tier fee (rent for the land) per month it's amazing anybody breaks even on real-world expenses, let alone turn a profit. Maybe they don't, and just have a bunch of really nice in-game cars! Which are a total PITA to drive, bty.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
This could very well be the most pretentious article posted to Slashdot I've ever seen, and that's saying a lot.
I see Mondo 2000 is writing articles again, making up buzzwords from out of nowhere.
Sounds like a great place to pick up chicks! And at least 50% of the time you'll be able to tell whether or not that hot looking elf is really a 45-year old guy.
Well looks like they got slashdotted again.
/after/ the event in NY.... ;)
I'm one of the guys doing the streaming video. (praying that the bandwidth at this shop is enough to do the job, which we check today in fact.) Thats about the reach of my involvment, show up, hook things up, point the camera so the people in VR can see/hear whats going on, provide the streamer and the bandwidth, etc. They just call us up when they need it done.
We also did the new york SLCC event (which was made problematic due to L3 and cogent crapping on each other at the same time),but it was more or less the same idea at the NY law school. Was actualy quite cool!
It sounds weird from the outside, but it's a neat trick to pull off. It's a very sureal connection when you have a copy of a real place with real people being shown in an exact copy of the same place in VR and vice versa. You have instances where people look back and forth at each other and wave or talk across a digital void. It's just not something you commonly see every day.
Think of it as a RL/VR two way mirror.
It also has its entertaining moments. For example, the VR streaker running by the VR camera wearing black censor bars in the middle of some linden's speech, projected in giant bold clarity beind them.
But aside from that, I just hope this shop isnt running some lame ISDN modem or something like that.
And now, for shameless plugging. Servercave.com, thats us. Yup. We do it for the advertizing, because we can. (Because last time, they didn't get our link up till nearly
My new top secret key -> C>N|KB
After following the link to his home-made VR goggles and gloves, did anyone else find it disturbing that he has a female mannequin in his house?
Ah, but it's so much more fun to drive the point home by repeating yourself. :-P
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I bet most of you thought that WTF? in the subject was for the article but you were wrong it's for the posts. people seem to be really bashing this idea but I think it's great. i do play Second Life a little I get bored quick as there aren't any monsters to bash unless you go get a lot of extra stuff. Anyways I love the idea of blurring the line of MMOs and reality. As people have said this would be even better if it where WOW. you would have to use fake weapons of course but it would be lots of fun. I know I use big clubs that I claim is a sword and bash people over the head every weekend. Check it out http://www.sca.org/, it's a blast if you like clubbing people and drinking a whole lot of liquor. You do have to dress in funny clothes but hey you get to club people and where else can you do that legally. if you live in the south there is a huge event in March, Gulf Wars, http://www.gulfwars.org/, lots of fun check it out. Anyways I hope this starts something and we see more of it. As for the whole ruining of the fantasy part, if you don't know that the really hot girl is probably not really hot or even a girl you need a reality check real bad.
WTF?
I for one am waiting for the mixed reality World of Warcraft party. Can't wait to see what combustion+pyroblast plus epic trinkets will do to a car!
Anybody have the coordinates for their island? I can't find it in 'find'. Site says it should be up this week for exploration. Thanks!
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
Google is your friend: R&B Coffee.
Seriously, it's like people expect Slashdot articles to only cover what they already know. Heaven forbid the click on a link and be horribly exposed to new information.
I read the internet for the articles.
Fry: "Do refrigerators still come in boxes in the future?"
Bender: "Yeah, but the rent is atrocious."
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Second life is an online virtual world. So, what is needed for something to be like the Metaverse? In my opinion that will be a virtual world with photorealistic graphics, realistic physics and advanced capabilities for its users to create the world and in-world services.
t ions) with any programming language that is supported by Mono. This API is still a bit high-level which makes some things impossible to make, but it's slowly moving forward.
Second Life is still a bit primitive is this regard, but it's the best there is. I remember the first virtual online worlds I saw back around 94 or so, they really sucked. A bit later came Active World, in my opinion that sucked too, so much that i wasn't usable. Second Life is the first virtual online world that is starting to get usable. It's not a game in itself, but can be used to make games.
The graphics in Second Life is still far from photorealistic, eveything is streamed over the internet so it's limited by bandwith and also that today's computers are still too slow. Most of the things in-world are created by users. The objects are made of something called primitives, that each has a set of parameters stored on a server. When you go somewhere these parameters are streamed from a server and plugged into some algorithm in the client that will turn them into 3D objects and render them. In many cases this can use less bandwith than meshes, but support for meshes made in software like Maya and 3D studio is eventually inevitable and necessary and has been used in earlier worlds like Active Worlds. It's currently starting to get interesting, but it give 5 more years and it should start to get good.
The physics is the Havok 1 physics engine, it's pretty basic and the collision detection is a bit inaccurate. Havok 3 is currently in the process of being implemented as a replacement for Havok 1, it should improve the situation quite a bit, but realistic realtime physics simulation still requires more horsepower than is available today at a reasonable price. Especially in an environment like this where there can be lots of users on one server who're all interacting with the physics engine in more or less complex ways. Faster CPUs and perhaps physics processing units has the potential to make this much better in a few years. Don't get me wrong, the physics is still good for many things, it's already possible to create simple mechanical devices like catapults, but complex mechanical machines are still a bit off.
Second Life has a built-in scripting language called LSL, the langauge is not very mature and developing complex things takes much more work than would be needed with a more mature language, although it's still good for simple things. Mono is currently in the process of being implemented on SL servers as a replacement for the current virtual machine. It's only in testing stages yet though so it's probably a few months until it's installed on user accessible servers. Mono as the virtual machine will eventually later this year mean that it will be possible to write code in C#, Boo, Python or whatever instead of using LSL(LSL will still be available but won't be developed more as a language). This will basically mean that you can use the publically available SL API (found at http://secondlife.com/badgeo/wakka.php?wakka=func
And that wasn't even from WoW.
This is a sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
how did you know about my mixed-reality Cheers event?
links are hard!
Having attended and having help design similar events for NGO's their are quite a few--er umm 'no no's' here. Not the least of wich is: venue, hosting, and to many "cool" concepts to make it cohsive. It also looks like someone fergot to invite their VC/foundation (also a no-no). As other posters have noted- venue uis the major concern-I have no doubt that a few capital in-kinds so as to include transportation to/from (a must with a bar) and to a major art scene that's acessible in terms of location and clientel would have made it more engaging and 'fun'.
(Heh 1st one to post!)
Not that your post is interesting or contributes substantially to the discussion, but if you hadn't sandbagged your comment with that obvious remark, you might have avoided getting downmodded.
...that this is going on in a city with a very high tolerence for 'Mixed-Reality'.
If you actually want some coffee, you still only have one option.
In twenty years, maybe even ten, it will be considered quaint and old-fashioned to make a distinction between the two.
So in ten to twenty years, computers will be able to directly interface with the human nervous system and stimulate smell, taste, touch, vision, and hearing, as well as detect and respond to motion etc? The only way it could ever be 'quaint' to make a distinction between reality and computer simulation is if computers can do this. Otherwise, you will always be missing something, and reality will always very different.
And what's more, the other distinction between the two is that in 'virtual reality', you cannot make the things you need to survive, because what you are doing has no effects on the real world. Whether or not you like it, we humans are animals, we need food, water, shelter, clothing, medicine, etc. Those things can only be made in the real world. That is why we spend our time in this 'real world' rather than spending all our time fantasising about fantasy worlds, that is why people don't spend all their time playing MUDs or glorified MUDs (i.e. MMORPGs), NOT because they aren't technically sophisticated enough, but because they aren't REAL, and we ARE.
While your post makes a good premise for a dystopian comic book, it bears little relevance to reality.
True, I grant you that.
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
"Not really. No one can afford to live in CA on $80k a year, even in a U-Stor-It."
I know you're just trying to be funny, but REALLY, 70% of California households live on less than $80K a year. Half of them live on less than $50K a year.
It was not flamebait as that implies INTENT. There is a stigma--often deserved--around certain areas of Washington and when you are setting up an event, no matter how much you think said stigma is b.s., you have to consider it when it will keep people away. I find the sorts of people who won't venture past 14th street rather ridiculous, however, I recognize the fact that the demographic they're shooting for with this event happens to be almost entirely populated by such people. For that reason, this venue was a terrible, terrible choice. U Street, 13th Street or Adams Morgan are not markedly "safer" than H street, however, it would have been infinitely more appropriate to hold the event in one of those neighborhoods for all the reasons they state they are holding it in the first place.
Essentially, your comment and mine boil down to precisely the same statement about the situation, yet somehow you take the high ground? Puzzling. I think, perhaps, you read quite a bit into the statement, laying on all the frustrations with pretentious Washingtonians and were responding to quite a different person than the one who wrote the original post, ignoring for the moment that that post was, at base, merely a statement of fact.
Man, why couldn't this happen when I'm in town? I'd pay good money to see Dave finally meet "Francine," and Kirsten meet Icabod. The awkwardness will be palpable, and the disillusion will be priceless.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Almost as if /. has experienced a heavy influx of non-nerds and/or grandparents.
"Seeecond Lieefe? That sounds daaangeris! Do they have prunes there?"
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Now, this guy did do something, don't get me wrong: he showed that it is now possible to build such a rig using completely off-the-shelf components (most of them looked like they were sourced from EBay - I know you can get the HMD and P5 glove from there, and the VAIO), and do it fairly cheaply (which wasn't as possible in 1995-6). He "made" an HMD from OTS components, and got it to "work" (for some value of "work").
I suppose the "state of the art" for Augmented Reality could be advanced by amateurs using rigs like this - same as cheap PCs led to better software for them. This is a good thing. But this demonstration rig does nothing for advancing the hardware behind VR/AR - which is where the real problems lie. For the best experience, we need cheap HMDs with good resolution and a largish field-of-view (FOV) - which I can guarantee his HMD does not provide. We also need better (as in easier and more comfortable to wear) input devices (gloves or otherwise), along with a better and cheaper sourceless (and/or sourced - ie, magnetic, optic, or otherwise) 3D tracker systems (the majority of these systems, which have the speed and resolutions, not to mention the capability to handle multiple tracked nodes - have price tags well outside most user's budgets - take a look at Polhemus or Ascension products, among others, if you don't believe me).
Ideally, the tracker system would be external in some manner, using one or more video cameras sampling the scene of the user, tracking IR marker stickers or silhoettes of the user to determine head, hand, and body position (in the case of a wearable, this kind of tracking becomes much more difficult, as it inherently must be sourceless).
I guess I was just hoping to see something beyond what was presented in issues of PCVR 10 years ago (indeed, some of the stuff from PCVR could still be considered "state of the art" even today)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Google is your friend: R&B Coffee.
That's a very diplomatic response. I belive this;
http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/
is more traditional.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Anyone else reminded of the RPG supplement "Cybergeneration", with its concept of Virtuality? Granted, projectors aren't quite the same as head-implants to see the virtual content IRL, but maybe Bill Newsome can help with that.
"Make cyberlove, not cyberwar!" -Khaed(544779)