Metaverse Territories

Test Post Number 2

kliger — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:25:52 +0000

Bionic Arduino is a set of four 3-hour classes in November 2007 hosted by Machine Project and taught by Tod E. Kurt. It is an introduction to microcontroller programming and interfacing with the real world using the Arduino physical computing platform. It focuses on building new physical senses and making motion with the building blocks of robotics, using Arduino as a platform. In the class, participants are shown and experiment with the Arduino’s capabilities and learn the basics of common microcontroller interfacing, such as: digital output to control lights and LEDs, digital input to read switches and buttons, analog output to control motor position or LED brightness, and analog input to read sensor inputs.
I also think it’s important not to wax nostalgic about a “lost” public space. If public space was once considered the geography of the public sphere—as the physical embodiment of the sphere where private people come together as a public (Habermas)—today the two operate within increasingly separate domains. Today, notions of “the public,” “publics,” and “public opinion” are formed more through cable and network news channels, internet blogs, and websites than on the sidewalks, streets, cafes, parks, or shopping arcades of the contemporary city. Online social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have replaced the street or the mall as the preferred place to “see, be seen, and connect” for today’s youth. Sociable web media such as Flickr enable forms of media sharing and exchange previously unimaginable in physical space. Ultimately, looking forward, I think we need to loosen our grip on categories of public space, the public, publics, etc., if we are to apprehend some of the new possibilities afforded by technologies such as mobile phones.

3d, architecture, art, build, built environment, secondlife

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test post 1

kliger — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 13:20:58 +0000

Scripts in SL are written in Linden Scripting Language, or LSL. They are associated with objects (i.e. doors, spheres, clothing, etc.) and are state-based — that is, the bulk of the script writing involves reacting to changes in the state of the object and/or changing the state yourself (it’s very FSM-ish). The code to remotely control the Nabaztag was pretty simple, and I’ll include it here:

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Updating site

kliger — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:28:04 +0000

It’s about time… getting Wordpress up to date, changing the theme and seeing where that will engage things…

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You haven’t heard ‘Poème Électronique till you’ve heard it streamed over the Internet in a virtual world

kliger — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 07:34:44 +0000

is from the NYTimes article “Watching a Cyber Audience Watch a Real Orchestra Perform in a Virtual World.” That enthusiasm was tainted by the following observation:

“the medium may be cutting-edge, but tastes remain rather conservative.”

A tragic and paradoxical truth, I’m afraid, concerning making art in Second Life. An interesting point is made concerning the access to content. “Classical music is not very accessible where I am, so I really appreciated it.” Second Life as a delivery platform… I just never thought of it in those terms.

BTW, as a dedicated reader of the NYTimes, I just saw that the “Times Select,” their attempt to charge for content using a subscription model, has been abandoned for the “free” model. This is a good thing. As a subscriber I never really felt like I was getting my money’s worth.

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metaverse, secondlife, stream, music

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Animoto fun & games

kliger — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 20:53:35 +0000

I’ve been wanting to try ANIMOTO since I stumbled across is a couple weeks ago. By simply uploading images and an music, the webapp cuts a video for you in a couple seconds. Ok, mine took 15 minutes, but I’m impressed by the seamless way that it synchs the images to the music’s beat. But the transitions and montages start to get a bit redundant so I’m going to try again to see how far their algorithms can be pushed. This is the 30 second free trial; I’m going to sequence the images a bit more coherently and pay three dollars for the full length version and repost it tomorrow.

BTW, I used the song “Memories” by Public Image Ltd [PIL] from their 1979 disc, Metalbox. Good stuff after all these years.

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stream, video, images, webapps, web2.0

animation, images, video, web, web2.0, webapps

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Now that’s good news (on an otherwise slow day…)

kliger — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 19:42:48 +0000

Finally. Something that will definitely change the way I work: Google Reader has search. GReader is the most important tool I have for organizing real-time online information; information that is being created almost at the same time that I’m reading, listening or watching it. I buzz through over 15,000 items a month in over 300 feeds. Until now, felt it was a one-way process. Now that I can intuitively rediscover things that I might only have a fleeting memory of, the process becomes two-way.
After working with it a bit, I definitely had every right to be excited about Google’s implementation of feed searching. The reason is the efficient way you can drill down into specific tags or feeds using the drop down menu. This assures the results come back quickly and the content’s context is what was intended.

Technorati Tags:rss, google, news, information, stream

Google, information, internet, media, news, RSS, web, web2.0

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Nothing’s working like it was before

kliger — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 15:08:24 +0000

Twitter is down (”suspension of disbelief,” LOL), I can’t log into Second Life and I haven’t blogged here for about two and a half weeks (the first week, I was on a road trip and effectively off the grid. Since then, I’ve been in ‘catch-up’ hell). But at least I’ve been working, building, writing and things will trickle out slowly onto this site.

Anyway, it looks like Twitter is back online. Sweet.

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building, secondlife, architecture, metaverse

architecture, building, Second Life, secondlife

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Keeping Us Focused: Figures In a Visual Landscape

kliger — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 02:18:40 +0000

From a Martin Scorsese essay in the NYTimes, The Man Who Set Film Free, on Michelangelo Antonioni:“Antonioni’s visual language was keeping us focused on the rhythm of the world: the visual rhythms of light and dark, of architectural forms, of people positioned as figures in a landscape that always seemed terrifyingly vast. And there was also the tempo, which seemed to be in sync with the rhythm of time, moving slowly, inexorably, allowing what I eventually realized were the emotional shortcomings of the characters —“Sandro’s frustration, Claudia’s self-deprecation — quietly to overwhelm them and push them into another “adventure,” and then another and another. Just like that opening theme, which kept climaxing and dissipating, climaxing and dissipating. Endlessly.” –Martin Scorsese

cinema, landscape, representation

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On Building the Unreal, a Memory

kliger — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 12:44:45 +0000

My grandparents, the tired, the poor and the hungry of an Old, imploding Europe, immigrated to America between the 1880’s and the early 1920’s. Arriving on its shores with little more than the clothes on their backs and the energy of getting to work to re-build their lives, crafts and tradesmen, they literally started constructed the inner cities, then the suburbs, of their adopted country’s eastern seaboard.

What? & How? to build & organize the young cities and unbuilt territories of America, was done based on the mental images and memories of the lands they left behind. An instinctive memory of a thousand years of cultural artefacts –art, architecture, cities– constructed by their ancestors’, a ghost-image that somehow they felt capable of reproducing, and that would permit them to thrive in their new home. And build they did, though based on the mental images and unreliable memories of that-other-world. And, like all cognitive representations, filtered by emotion, memory and time, they lacked the erudition and technical precision necessary to innovate or even replicate the patterns, materials and models of the Florence’s, Dublin’s or Warsaw’s of their memory. Thus, in place of Venice & Shanghai, we have Little Italy & Chinatown, which somehow made possible, the mind-set for Disneyland & Las Vegas…

I think of them every time I log into Second Life; we are the new arrivals, building with both the naïveness & energy, intelligence & inexperience that gives the real real world the qualitative traction that could never be possible Just like the real world.” There, with “…little obvious relation between a person’s real and virtual homes, and the main real-world function of a Second Life house is as a tool for fantasy — albeit, in many cases, fantasy that doesn’t stray too far from reality.” [NYTimes] The reality depicted in the article A House That’s Just Unreal is far from both the unreality of the immigrant-builder and the new reality of the builder-artist. “Measured looks“, like the one described in this article, blur the lines between Second Life –game or –real virtuality.

architecture, art, building, communities, history, ideas, Second Life, secondlife, syntheticworlds, virtual worlds, virtualworld

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A Reality of Presence States

kliger — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 11:55:04 +0000

Re-reading Vernor Vinge’s 2006 novel, Rainbow’s End, plunged me back into an insistent but unclear reverie concerning the What? & Why? & Where? of the convergence between mirror and virtual worlds. In the book’s first scene, four of the book’s protagonists, 3 government agents of the Indo-European commission and ‘Mr. Rabbit,’ a potential contractor, are meeting in a very real Barcelona. Of the scene’s 4 actors, 1 is actually present on the terrace of a busy Barcelona café, while the other 3 are represented by avatars. Mr. Rabbit is a brown haired hare in a top-hat, last seen provocatively hopping away through busy midday tourists, as the other 3 sat around discussing the meeting:

The three agents sat for a moment in apparently companionable silence, Gunberk bet over his virtual wine, Vaz sipping at his real Rioja and admiring the stilted puppets that were setting up for the afternoon parade. The three blended well with the normal touristy hurly-burley of the Familia district–except that most tourists paying for café seating on C. de Sardenya would have had more than a one-third physical presence.

The scene is grounded by the fact that it unfolds in a real, identifiable location –made possible by augmented reality hardware and software, the communication protocol between the 4 participants, and enhanced by a persistant background of tourists and landmarks which infuse it with the temporal and spatial presence that gives it an air of inevitable credulity. The idea of quantifying the verity of an experience according to the diversity and distribution of the physical presence of its participants is interesting. Would virtual worlds be taken more seriously, in business, educational or artistic circles if, for example, some of its participants could be grounded in real space, allowing the others to congregate virtually? Could it evolve into a social or business norm, that a certain percentage of participants of a technically mediated meetup be ensconced in a real, social context? Could this be the natural extension of the social model of the public square as a mediator of augmented reality and a broker of trust? A diversity of presence states could help establish the ethics of living with the onset of real virtuality." /> [from Diesel’s ‘Liquid Space‘ fashion show [video]]

atmosphere, augmented reality, avatar, built environment, geography, geospatial, immaterial, mashup, metaverse, reality, representation, virtual, virtual worlds, virtualworld

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