Second Life Future Salon

French Machinima to Help Diffuse Genre

It's interesting to watch the diffusion of any technology.  Watching the SL/Bottom-up VW snowball aggregate has certainly been a wicked good time. Machinima seems to be on a similar S-curve.  To date, the most significant  machinima "blips" I've noticed are: 1) Machinima at Sundance, 2) the info that Spielberg's son, Sam, is way into the budding genre, 3) the notion that MTV is FINALLY very aware of the power of Machinima, various sources (tangental note: Viacom has recently acquired Neopets and MTV is hotly in bed with Microsoft), and 4) the awesome Sims machinima commercials that have been airing. (Please respond with any other big blips I may have omitted.)

So here's Blip #5:It appears a Frenchman has used "The Movies" game, designed by the nototious Peter Molyneux, to articulate a political message about the recent riots, and it's getting broad attention.  (Click here for original article.)  Surely this is the first of many such projects.

Other thoughts: 1) SL is right now euipped to TOTALLY DESTROY The Movies as a machinima factory/business platform (due to bottom-up object creation -- SL users can outdevelop any top-down studio a thousand times over).  It just requires a central, simple organizing business model to take advantage of the myriad micro-studios and college students just waiting to externalize their imagination in a better format...  2) Bye-bye storyboard classical storyboard artists and set designers.  Get with the times.  Word up.

SL Yellow Arrow meta-tagging project

I posted this on Community Mobilization earlier, and with therecent conversations with Lyre Calliope and Hank Hoodo I think it is most appropriate to post here as well.
Yesterday I was updating my Yellow Arrow account. Immediately after I went into Second Life and that jump inspired me to try and set up the Yellow Arrow program within digital and virtual worlds.  The system can support the placement of these arrows - for the most part.  There are two key technologies that would need to be developed.
1. A txt message system that could ping out to the cellphone carriers.  Something similar to SMS.ac but done properly.
2. An adjustment to Yellow Arrow to encourage and support Virtual World activity.  The advantages of this type of system grow in line with the size and growth of the physical environment.  The meta-data and user created commentary that gets overlaid on the environment can only enhance the overall user experience.  It could help users find new points of interest, and provide unique perspective and commentary other than that of the original creator. 

At the moment I am in a presentation and this is a  photo of the First yellow Arrow in a virtual world that I know of.  It needs work to look right but  I think it may be an exciting new use of the system.

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Cyber City

2 RW NYC tour guides take a tour of True Crime: New York City

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Ragnarok Online Goes Mobile

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NYT- Ogre to Slay? Outsource It to Chinese

Regisration required

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Windows Live Local

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Google: Ten Golden Rules

Phillip Torrone SL Future Salon, December 16th

Our next SL Future Salon will be Friday, December 16th with Phillip Torrone from 5:30 - approx. 6:30 PM PST on MAKE:land in Second Life.

Phillip, whose avatar name is Torrone Trumbo, is an engineer, artist, inventor, blogger and Associate Editor of MAKE magazine. You can check out video of his recent appearance on G4's Attack of the Show right here.

I first started thinking about a salon with Phillip when he posted about Csven Concord's rocket launcher ripped from Quake 3 into a CAD program. It prompted me to commission Csven and Jeffrey Gomez to push the Quake 3 launcher from the CAD program right into SL, which amazingly they were able to do (post with pics)! I also saw Phillip's post, Messages from the virtual world to a real world wrist watch..., where he says:

"I'm always looking for ways to bridge virtual and real worlds, perhaps to help accelerate the blurring of the lines between them..."

And there we are :-). It's going to be great to have him with us to talk about some of the cool things he sees happening at this intersection.

Also check out MAKE:land featured in this episode of Rocketboom. Some of you will recall Rocketboom host Amanda Congdon's appearance at the SL Future Salon in June.

Phillip's personal website is being updated, but for that close-up Phillip flavor you can check out his sketchbook and Flickr pics.

PS I see Phillip is a fan of the Segway Human Transporter. I haven't seen one of these in SL yet. If someone can whip one up or point the way, that would be awesome! :-)

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Xbox 360 transparency

Anybody who you have come into contact with on Xbox Live can see what your doing at any point in time. Live gaming data for the whole Microsoft world to see.

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Don't call it a comeback

Spyware is your friend.