Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
...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."
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."