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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.
we are getting closer and closer to meat/meta-space duality. assuming you have read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowcrash.
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.
I hope its better then the virtualboy from nintendo.
:P) The communications protocol used by the Power Glove had long been decoded, so programming for it was quite easy.
Um, yeeeeaah. Homebrew VR equipment was available in far better quality than the Virtual Boy at the time of its release. As the Virtual Reality Contruction Kit by Joe Gradecki explained, a simple, hi-res Head Mounted Display could be built by canabalizing parts from a portable television or laptop display. Given that homebrewers tended to lack sophisticated tools, it was generally recommended that homebrewers build a single screen device rather than trying to work out the optics for a dual-display device. (One display for each eye.) However, he did include instructions for building such a device, though the optics weren't cheap.
The data glove was easily supplied by purchasing a Nintendo Power Glove and building a NES -> Parallel port adaptor. Such an adaptor was nothing more than a matter of soldering a few wires together. (I still have mine stitched together with electrical tape. I was too lazy to solder it after testing.
His book also contained instructions on how to build a HMD boom for position tracking, and how to code for these devices. All released before the market had even heard of the Virtual Boy.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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'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...
...not that Adams Morgan is much better, but seriously, if they want this to be taken seriously in a town like Washington, certainly if they want to attach themselves to the "burgeoning art community," they'd best locate themselves somewhere remotely near it, say the U-Street corridor or 13th street or something. Hell, Landover has more going on than H street.
Bottom line is that not even people who live in NE (like, me for instance) want to hang on H Street, certainly not those who can shell-out $25 for a "happening." Since there are SOOOOO many locations in Washington that this would work in, this choice of venue makes me think "easy money, no cred."
I don't personally dig the shopping, though the girlfriend of a friend of mine loves that part, but for geeks the platform is pretty cool. I spent a few days playing with it in early January, and while it has a lot of problems it has even more potential. The name is a bit weird, a real turnoff for some, but if you can get over your pre-conceptions about the people in the world you'll find not only a truly impressive piece of technology but lots of perfectly sane, normal and yes even quite attractive people who get a kick out of building things.
Think of it as the equivalent of freenode IRC but for arty types and you're about 50% of the way there.
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
Actually, it's not that bad. There's a $0.30 buyer's fee and a 3.5% sellers fee on LindeX the L$ currency exchange run by Linden Lab the makers of Second Life. Other L$ currency exchanges charge similar overall rates.
I have eMagin's Z800 3dVisor (It is from the company that came out with the borglike EyeBud prototype at CES)
The Z800 is the real deal for $900, with dual 800x600 OLED displays which are much better higher quality than LCDs at that small size. If you have followed HMDs, it is a big leap in quality for under $1000. Stereoscopic 3d with headtracking in First Person shooters and flight sims is really cool. I haven't tried any MMORPGs with it. You can find out more about at their website.