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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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).
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...
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.
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:
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
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."
Mind you, this thread has been interesting -- it reminded me of the days people on BBSes were discussing why they should download a "graphic Web browser" for connecting to the Web, which had, at that time, only a tiny fraction of the content (and the interest!) of BBSes...
I still find it amusing to watch how difficult this concept is when explained to people who are at the forefront of the technology (slashdotters) and who have been reading Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Tad Williams, and similar SF authors for the past decades, and most definitely have seen the Matrix and all its sequels.
Maybe it's hard to understand that all those concepts are now "true" -- people can live and work in virtual realities these days, they have companies for doing work with virtual realities, they do mixed meetings (half of the attendance is physically present on the conference room, the other half attends virtually from the comfort of their homes and with a computer in front of them). Ok, so, it sounds like science fiction. So what? In 1980, if you'd tell your friends that one day, the whole western population would have a cheap (US$ 25) cellular phone in their pockets to talk to anybody at any time, without wires, people would laugh at you or even try to get you into an asylum...
Current virtual realities are not photorealistic, neither do they require goggles or bodysuits, and the neural interface, while on the works (yes, really!) is still too clumsy to be taken seriously. So what? Things have to start somewhere. So the best you can do these days is 30-40 fps on a 2000x1500 screen, and not yet ray tracing for photorealism? Hooray! It's a first step! Tomorrow, it'll be bigger; in ten years, you'll have ray-tracing chips on your Pentium VII @ 1 THz and 20 TByte RAM, for perhaps US$1000 (complete with goggles). Or perhaps it'll be in twenty years -- who knows? The point is, current virtual realities still feel like the BBSes from the 1980s -- but they're here, they're working, they have hundreds of thousands users online who understand what you can do with them... you have to start somewhere!
Imagine Marc Andreesen in front of a 1980s BBS and dreaming about a graphical browser. Imagine that he had given up and said "it's hopeless, all we have now to chat is a text-based interface, computers/networks will never evolve fast enough to give us nice graphics on a browser". What would the world look like?
To go towards the ultimate goal -- virtual realities as commonplace as cellular phones -- you have to start somewhere. Events like "The Happening" are a stepping stone towards that goal. Yes, you can now attend conferences/meetings using virtual realities and two-way, in-world video. 10 years ago we cheered having people doing conferences on IRC! Look at how far we have gone -- now our "IRC" includes a 3D world, avatars, and video/audio streaming, all at the same time! Still, it looks and feels IRCish. But that's fine! We "accused" IRC to look BBSquish as well...
"I'm not building a game. I'm building a new country." -- Philip "Linden" Rosedale, interview to Wired, 2004-05-08
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.
"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.