Architecture +

Share 2008 & The Share Prize 2009

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 10:55:00 +0000

Great video:
mms://stream10.top-ix.org/toshare/2008/two_architectures.wmv

Share Prize 2009

July 7th, 2008
Share Festival 2009, at his fifth edition, will be in Turin from 24th till 29th of march 2009.
Also this year the hearth of the festival will be the Share Prize 2009.

Inscription since 15th of june till the 30th of september 2008 at www.toshare.it

The main requisite for participating in the competition is to create a work in which digital technology is applied as a language of creative expression. There is no limitation to shape and format, combinations with analogical technologies and/or any other material (eg computer animation / visual effects, digital music, interactive art, net art, software art, live cinema, audiovisual performance, etc.).

A short list of no more than six finalists will be announced within November 2008.
The award candidates are invited to participate in the 5th edition of Share Festival in Torino that will be from 24th till 29th march 2009.
The six competitors, chosen from all the participants, will exhibit the work they have entered in the competition, during the Festival.

A Jury will award a prize of Euro 2,500 to the work (published or not) that best represents experimentation of arts and new technologies.

The jury is:
Andy Cameron (creative director department Interactive Design Fabrica) - president of the jury
Bruce Sterling (writer and journalist, Austin)
Emma Quinn (curator at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London)
Giovanni Ferrrero (president Accademia delle Belle Arti, Torino)
Rosina Gomez-Baez (director Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijon)

UCLA study identifies mechanism behind mind-body connection

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 10:40:00 +0000

Public release date: 15-Jul-2008

Explains how chronic emotional stress ages the immune system

Chromosomes (stained blue) end in protective caps called telomeres (stained yellow) that are shorter in the elderly -- and in persons suffering chronic stress. A new UCLA study suggests cortisol...
Click here for more information.

BACKGROUND:
Every cell contains a tiny clock called a telomere, which shortens each time the cell divides. Short telomeres are linked to a range of human diseases, including HIV, osteoporosis, heart disease and aging. Previous studies show that an enzyme within the cell, called telomerase, keeps immune cells young by preserving their telomere length and ability to continue dividing.

FINDINGS:
UCLA scientists found that the stress hormone cortisol suppresses immune cells' ability to activate their telomerase. This may explain why the cells of persons under chronic stress have shorter telomeres.

IMPACT:
The study reveals how stress makes people more susceptible to illness. The findings also suggest a potential drug target for preventing damage to the immune systems of persons who are under long-term stress, such as caregivers to chronically ill family members, as well as astronauts, soldiers, air traffic controllers and people who drive long daily commutes.

AUTHOR:
Rita Effros, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and a member of the Jonsson Cancer Center, Molecular Biology Institute and UCLA AIDS Institute, is available for interviews.

"When the body is under stress, it boosts production of cortisol to support a "fight or flight" response," explains Effros. "If the hormone remains elevated in the bloodstream for long periods of time, though, it wears down the immune system. We are testing therapeutic ways of enhancing telomerase levels to help the immune system ward off cortisol's effect. If we're successful, one day a pill may exist to strengthen the immune system's ability to weather chronic emotional stress."

The Future? - One slice

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:38:00 +0000

The 3D Internet Will Change How We Live

By BENJAMIN DURANSKE
In The Wall Street Journal
July 17, 2008; Page A13

clipped and quoted from the The Wall Street Journal

"
The financial marketplace, of course, hasn't missed this opportunity – $345 million was invested in 39 virtual world-related companies in the first half of 2008. Last year, Gartner Research predicted that 80% of all active Internet users will have a virtual-world presence by 2011.

Bandwidth and processing power are constantly growing, leading to several convergent trends. First, interfaces are moving closer to reality. Over the last 30 years, we have gone from punch cards to typed commands to drag-and-drop folders to Windows Vista's 3D panels. Second, hardware that makes 3D immersion possible – from motion-control devices like Nintendo's Wiimote to $90 Webcams that track face and body movements – is now reaching average consumers' homes.

Finally, we are becoming an increasingly networked society. Eighty-two percent of American homes now have Internet access, up 11% percent from 2006.

The allure of the 3D Internet is easy to see. What auto maker would be content to put 2D pictures of a new SUV on its Web site when it can offer buyers a virtual, first-person drive down a snowy mountain road? What sculptor will want to display 2D photographs of her work when she can invite collectors on a guided tour of her virtual sculpture garden?

No privately held virtual world is going to end up in sole possession of the 3D Internet, just as no early 2D "walled garden" network provider like Prodigy, Compuserve or AOL owns the 2D Web today. A number of industry groups are working on open 3D standards. As soon as one of these gains widespread acceptance, anyone will be able to build a virtual world that is connected to any other similarly coded virtual world – just like HTML now allows anyone to create a 2D Web page that is connected to any other 2D Web page.

If current trends hold, the Internet will evolve into a 3D space, and virtual worlds will become an integral part of human communication. Real life will never be the same.

Mr. Duranske, a writer and attorney, is the author of "Virtual Law: Navigating the Legal Landscape of Virtual Worlds" (American Bar Association Publishing, 2008).
"

The Future?

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:18:00 +0000

Oil Production

Work Continues on Patches and Alternative Viewers

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 09:42:00 +0000

There are some great programmers working on many problems with the SL viewer. It is hard to imagine why anyone runs the standard client anymore. To give a few examples, here are a few quick clips from across the blogshere.

fight those freezes!
Barney Boomslang, 2008-06-23

Not everybody seems to be targeted by this problem, but for those that are, they will know the effects: roundabout every 10 minutes, your machine comes to a grinding halt, the CPU usage will go through the roof and for 10 - 20 seconds you won't be able to do much with it. This might just happen in some regions for you - for me it mostly happened in the Avaria sims for example.

Someone documented on the dev mailinglist and on Jira how to fix it and what the actual reason is: the memory gets fragmented into lots of small memory blocks and the function that sends memory usage data to the lab for statistic reasons traverses that list of thousands and tenthousands of blocks to calculate the memory consumption. The fix is to just disable this part of the statistics.

Well, I added this one to the Cool Viewer and ran it for the last days and I have to say: wow. This definitely fixes this dreaded freezes completely for me. And it has another sideeffect: it fixes the "pause before teleport" that I get in the same regions. I guess the same function is called at that place, too.

Well, head over to the cool viewer patch download page and grab the newest patch installer there and give it a try - for me it made SL much more enjoyable. Thanks to Nicholaz to point me to this little gem on the dev list!
http://radio-boomslang.shacknet.nu/~bb/articles/nicholaz-edition-mac/
http://radio-boomslang.shacknet.nu/~bb/articles/cool-viewer-mac/
and
Release: Eye Candy EC-f
Nicholaz "The Mad Patcher" Beresford, Nürnberg, Germany, May 12, 2008

Last week's experimental Eye Candy worked well, so I am also calling it good. The change log has a bunch of changes since the previous EC-e version, which should make the upgrade worthwhile. Mainly the separation of settings files between Bleeding Edge and Eye Candy, the fact that the New IM tab is now gone from the communication window. There are a bunch of fixes/changes by other contributors as well: Aimee Trescothick, Gigs Taggart, Henri Beauchamp, Squirrel Wood and Teardrops Fall (again see the change log for details and JIRA numbers).

I also added (quite literally) a last minute patch. Yesterday Able Whitman posted a patch on the sldev mailing list about the creation of megaprims (see discussion on sldev near the bottom and also check this forum thread). After some mulling over the pros and cons and after a bit of testing on the beta grid, I decided to give it a go and implemented that feature (it's just done in a slightly different way, i.e. via Ctrl+Alt+S debug settings rather than patching the official dialogs, see comments to this post for details).

Reason for the implementation is that there are already ways to achieve this via legacy megaprims and via libsl and slproxy. Also, I found that the Haovk4 sims do limit the size of prims on the low side (H4 still does not allow true microprims, i.e. no scales under 0.01m) and with that and with the megaprim discussion a while back and even H4-megaprim fixes, I seriously doubt that this is an actual server side bug. To me this "bug" looks more like something which is tolerated but not actively supported. My implementation however limits the creation to max. 100m, which should cover most legit uses for megaprims and which is well within the bounds of which the Linden™s say that they are safe.

http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/2008/05/release-eye-candy-ec-f.html
http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/

Great Builds [Flickr]

jeanricard.broek — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 03:37:36 -0500

jeanricard.broek posted a photo:

oh la la - foret noire

Pelican Crossing's Blink 3D

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:17:00 +0000

Image from PelicanCrossings.com

Check out the quick tutorial at:

http://www.pelicancrossing.com/VideoTutorials/Basic/QuickStart/QuickStart.htm

Virtual Birmingham Briefing Hub

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:05:00 +0000

Found by reading the great blog of Digado:

Showcasing Google Maps within Second Life. This particular Hub was developed for Birmingham City Council as part of their Digital Birmingham initiatives and lets the city explore the potential of virtual worlds technology in areas as diverse as planning, regeneration, health, education, tourism, marketing and environmental and infrastructure management.

Fundraiser for SL Shakespeare Company tomorrow

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:03:00 +0000

Reblogged from:

The Click Heard Round the World by rikomatic

The SL Shakespeare Company has begun an ambitious fundraising campaign to raise 14 million linden dollars (~US $56,000) to support their performances of the Bard in the virtual Globe Theater in Second Life. This Friday, July 18, they kick off their campaign with a “Twelfth Night MegaFundundraiser” hoping to raise the first L$1 million:

The Electric Sheep Company Releases WebFlock

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:18:00 +0000

Clipped & reblogged from TechCrunch 7-17-2008 <- Read it all here

"

Sibley Verbeck is moving past Second Life. The CEO of the Electric Sheep Company has made a lot of money creating virtual islands in Second Life for big brands such as CBS, Showtime, and Intel. But now he is ready to bring those virtual worlds to the Web in regular browsers. Today, he is releasing WebFlock, a Flash-based 3-D virtual world application he is offering as a hosted software service.

Make your own Exxon Sign

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:51:00 +0000

http://atom.smasher.org/gas-station/?p1=%249.79&p2=%249.99&p3=%249.99&l1=CocaCola&l2=99+cents&l3=for+&l4=2+liters&l5=Merry+XMAS+2008

New Babbage - A Steampunk City in Second Life

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:04:00 +0000

Virtual Dress Auctioned To Benefit American Cancer Society Sells For USD$1,700

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:57:00 +0000

Clipped from: New World Notes

An evening gown that could never exist outside the virtual world has been sold to fight a Disease that's all too real: metaverse artist Eshi Otawara donated her spectacular, gravity-defying fishook dress for an auction that's part of Relay for Life in SL, a community-run campaign sanctioned by the American Cancer Society. After fierce competition, two Second Life models, Kay Fairey and Clarabelle Cazalet, combined their bids and put up L$460,000-- roughly $1700 on the open market. This isn't the very largest virtual item purchase (to my knowledge, that was for a pink muscle car which went for L$600K to benefit SLRFL 2006), but of course, it's still substantial. Bettina Tizzy of NPIRL has the story behind the purchase.

The supreme irony, of course: though she's helped the American Cancer Society tremendously, Eshi is still fighting a law that threatens to deport her from America. Read the latest news about her struggle here.

Radiohead - House of Cards

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:56:00 +0000

In Radiohead's new video for "House of Cards", no cameras or lights were used. Instead, 3D plotting technologies collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects. The video was created entirely with visualizations of that data.

Directed by James Frost
From the album IN RAINBOWS

'Warcraft' maker wins round in exploit 'bot lawsuit

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:41:00 +0000

Clipped from from C/net.news.com

July 15, 2008 by Declan McCullagh

"
A federal judge has sided with the maker of World of Warcraft in its attempt to shut down a third-party application that allows players to advance more quickly in the game than they normally could.

Blizzard Entertainment won a partial victory on Monday when a court granted its request for summary judgment on copyright infringement grounds. Blizzard is suing Michael Donnelly of MDY Industries, which sells the WoWGlider (or MMO Glider) utility for $25 and has sold some 100,000 copies.

U.S. District Judge David Campbell ruled that because using the Glider 'bot is prohibited by Blizzard's World of Warcraft license, "Glider users therefore infringe Blizzard's copyright."
"

EA Grabs Your ‘Spore Creature Creator’ IP

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:32:00 +0000

At the Electronic Arts E3 press conference in Los Angeles Monday, 'Spore' creator Will Wright explained that users had made more than 2 million creatures since the company put out its free creature creator last month. Among them have been series of robots, which has impressed the game's designers, since they hadn't given users the tools to make robots yet.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

& from: Clickable Culture

Talk about harshing my buzz. Electronic Arts is going to let us design creatures with its long-awaited Spore game and stand-alone Creature Creator, but in using the game and creator, we agree to hand over all rights in our creations to the megalithic publisher, including the right to "further modify" the creations. So much for using Spore as a sketchpad for creature concepts.

In my legally-ignorant view, EA should have no IP rights in how I assemble the building blocks it supplies. That's like LEGO claiming ownership over everything we build, or Adobe claiming ownership over images run through Photoshop. The way I see it, creature designers are creating new IP with a tool set they paid for--why should we give EA our work, except for the exclusive purpose of sharing with other creature creators in the way the game was designed?

Here's the relevant legalese from the EULA:

(b) Spore IP Rights. EA owns all of the right, title and interest in the Spore Creature Creator, the assets included in the Creature Creator for building and animating creatures and for creating backgrounds and video clips, and all derivative works comprised of those assets, including the Spore creatures that you create, animate, and capture in screen shots or video clips using the Spore Creature Creator. You may use only the assets supplied with the Creature Creator to create Spore Creatures. You may not further modify Spore Creatures with any other materials, tools, or software programs. All rights not expressly granted herein, are reserved by EA.

(c) Your Contributions. In exchange for use of the Spore Creature Creator, and to the extent that your contributions through use of the Spore Creature Creator give rise to any copyright interest, you hereby grant EA an exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, fully transferable and sub-licensable worldwide right and license to use your contributions in any way and for any purpose in connection with the Spore Games and related merchandise, including the rights to reproduce, copy, adapt, modify, perform, display, publish, broadcast, transmit, or otherwise communicate to the public by any means whether now known or unknown and distribute your contributions without any further notice or compensation to you of any kind for the whole duration of protection granted to intellectual property rights by applicable laws and international conventions.

Interview: Linden prepares for an OpenSim future

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:22:00 +0000

Clipped from Reuters:

Fri Jul 11, 2008 10:46am PDT
By Eric Reuters

SECOND LIFE, July 10 (Reuters) - A future where the Second Life Grid is a minor player in a sprawling Metaverse of thousands of competing virtual worlds sounds like a bad outcome for Linden Lab. But company executives say that’s exactly the plan.

In the wake of the recent first avatar teleport between Second Life and an OpenSim region, Linden VP Joe Miller, better known to Second Life residents as “Zero Linden,” spoke to Reuters about Linden Lab’s long-term strategy.

Linden aggressively pushed to develop a set of working protocols to allow interoperability across divergent virtual worlds. “Standards groups in general take forever to reach agreement,” Miller said. By working with partner IBM, Linden wanted to take a leadership role in getting OpenSim regions and Linden Lab’s Second Life talking to each other.

Challenged by competitors on all sides, including the recent entry of Internet giant Google into the virtual worlds space, Linden is banking on OpenSim to bolster its strong position in the virtual worlds industry.

“We want to broaden the market for virtual worlds as rapidly as possible,” Miller said. “The sheer size of the market needs to be several orders of magnitude larger than it is today.”

Italy In Second Life

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 09:46:00 +0000

Lucien

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 09:46:00 +0000

Lucien, originally uploaded by keystone1111.

Google Lively

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:23:00 +0000

A Real Life Project is Built in Second Life

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 04:39:00 +0000

Snapshot_006, originally uploaded by jeanricard.broek.

On July 9th 2008 I was invited to a presentation, along with a number of other Architects and builders in SL, to tour a real life project planned for Berlin.

To see more snapshots of how this project was modeled in Second Life for real time walkthroughs by people from all over the world goto: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeanricardbroek/

Re$$able

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:46:00 +0000

Straight from them: Clipped and reblogged
"The End of the World As We Know It
Tue, 07/01/2008 - 19:57 — RightAsRain Rimbaud

ok, maybe not the end of the world--but a big change from our perspective...we are starting to introduce paid admission to our sims. We have been experimenting with how best to handle this over the last few months and now think we have a reasonable approach. The Black Swan sim is the first entire sim to be tied to paid admission via the purchase and wearing of an object--a nice watch, that even tells your rl time.

We will be looking at this area and rolling-out more paid admissions schemes in the future--why? We are still exploring the right revenue model for virtual world content. We have merchandise that contributes some revenues. However,we have seen the interest in corporate sponsors (like L'Oreal Paris) evaporate. We think the best way to go forward is to charge for an object that can then be used many times for admissions. We realize that this may limit the number of visitors to the sim, but hope that high-quality areas are considered worth paying a little to see, explore and hang-out with friends. The Black Swan authorization device is $L199 (about $0.75)

Initial reactions have been mixed, some people don't mind paying the small amount. Others used to freebies and free access to sims have claimed either price is too high or that they object to paying anything at all. From our perspective we need to have revenues tied to use and swamping this type of sim with advertising would ruin the whole point of it.

We appreciate any comments here or inworld."

Linden Lab and IBM announce a new Open Grid Protocol

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:00:00 +0000

~ w00t ~

Linden Lab and IBM Achieve Major Virtual World Interoperability Milestone

Open Grid Protocol Enables Avatars to Teleport Between Second Life and OpenSim Virtual Worlds

For information see the following links:

Dusan Writer's Second Life Ui Contest Finalists

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:02:00 +0000

| View | Upload your own

One little thought I have is to make a universal size for the images in the current UI: This is the current list:

# Aspect ratios of profile, place, etc. pictures — all of these were measured at UI size = 1.000:

* Search > All for "Classifieds", "People", and "Places" - 4:3 (256x192 pixels)
* Search > Places and Classified tabs - ~7:5 (398x282 pixels)
* Search > Land tab - ~7:5 (358x252 pixels)
* Profile > 2nd Life tab - ~4:3 (178x133 pixels)
* Profile > Picks tab - ~16:9 (288x162 pixels)
* Profile > 1st Life tab - 1:1 (133x133 pixels)
* Profile > Classifieds tab - ~3:2 (206x137 pixels)
* About Land > Options tab - ~3:2 (178x117 pixels)
* Group Information > General tab's "Group Insignia" - 1:1 (126x126 pixels)

# Maximum texture size - 1024x1024 pixels

RL vs SL

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:28:00 +0000

RL vs SL, originally uploaded by ~ Sab ~.

MediaMaster is back up - ~w00t~

noreply@blogger.com (JeanRicard Broek) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 02:15:00 +0000