There has been lots of excitement about Second Life becoming a more ‘evocative’ engine (visually speaking) for at least 18 months with lots of posts and short demo videos.
Recently the Illclan’ers (who appeared in our machinima seminar) posted an item suggesting we are quite close to having an official Linden Lab release here, Dynamic Lighting and Shadow Engine Coming to Second Life. They like us are also very interested in the ‘controlled’ lighting effects using artificial (isn’t it all?!) light sources vs the ambient ’sun’. But for starters here is a quick ambient test video from the writer of this post…
A quick exploration of some of my old builds which may not be there much longer! Using the Space Navigator and running Windlight in Day cycle mode (the sun and moon take a minute or two to do a full rotation) to produce lots of moving shadows across the landscapes, people and builds. Rather than just show shadows I was keen to tie some ‘psych trance’ music into fast moving space navigator footage hence the constant movement - all shots took into account the timing with the shadows too.
Medium resolution download 152MB MP4 available here
The whole process was about 1 hour of capture, 1.5 hour edit and 2 hours on music track. Music was composed on Logic Pro mostly using Spectrasonics Omnisphere plug-in software ‘processor-eating’ synth.
I had access to a top end NVidia GTX280 high spec graphics card and quad processor machine so I put all SL graphics settings at max for once! The video was captured at PAL resolution using Fraps and the raw files edited using Adobe Premiere.
To have a go at this yourself make sure you have a top flight graphics card from NVidia or ATI and then download the Shadow Viewer client from Kirsten here or I believe a more recent one (that I used) from Boy Lane here. I am not sure of the widespread use of shadows given the grunt your computer needs to handle this, windlight, voice on top of all the usual networking issues - but for those with computer horsepower it definitely brings the place to life.
Published & created under creative commons - attribution, non-commercial, non-derivative, 23 May 2009 in Sydney, Australia
Second Life sim builds included: Esperance (AFTRS), ABC Island, Melbourne Laneways, Thursdays Fictions, Deakin, The Pond and others. (I would have loved to show some more commercial & arty builds but non-disclosure and all that!)
YouTube have just put a deal together with major studios including CBS, Starz, Sony, Lionsgate and the BBC to show full length movies online. An interesting article examines the details an can be found on The Wrap here.
YouTube have upgraded to HD widescreen capability and some brand re-alignment has been going on to diversify from a decidedly low brow ‘user created’ public image. The YouTube Orchestra is one recent initiative which garners credibility for the service from association with some of the international high culture elite.
But how much is this brand re-alignment worth? It seems like the terms thrashed out with the movie studios sacrifice a level of control over advertising and traffic in order to avoid sticky copyright issues which have become a hallmark of the YouTube brand. The big question is, will this help to devise new advertising models, or even pay per view or subscription services that will help to pay YouTube’s massive overheads.
I remember having long conversations with colleagues at the BBC in the mid 90s about automatic script-to-edit and how the ‘words’ themselves would eventually control the whole post production process. I have been following XtraNormal for a few months now as part of my ’storyboard, machinima mix” and great to see it is finally in public beta. It’s slogan is
“If you can type you can make movies”
So I sat down for fifteen minutes and typed a simple script, directly into the great flash tool, added a few expressions to the text and voila, the system renders it up a few more minutes later in glorious 3D cartoon’0′vision (especially like the auto cam - which does a reasonable job of the two shots). Other great features are the ability for others to remix it post render, embeddability (spreadability) and one button re-publishing to YouTube.
What do you think of the results? Remember this is 15 minutes work!
Described as the “Sundance for independent game developers” the Independent Games Festival kicks off next week in San Francisco and runs from 23 - 27 March at the same time and in the same town as the Game Developers Conference. The festival was established in 1998 by Think Services producer of Game Developer magazine, Gamasutra.com, and the GDC - hence the GDC and the IGF run concurrently and share events and spaces throughout the week.
The IGF has been responsible for the success of a number of (nearly ) household names including 2005 Student Showcase finalistNarbacular Dropreworked into Portal and Jonathan Blow’s Braidwhich has had considerable success on Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade. What is more exciting is that this competition appears to be open to new forms and true experimentation including flat-out spoofs of the whole game culture which mainstream game culture does not appear to allow. You have to Burn the Rope is a silly but enjoyable parody of the notion of “choice” in classic video games, while Machinarium (created by the makers of equally gorgeous indie web-games Samorost and Samorost2) is gloriously illustrated feast for the eyes. Tehre are also a number of semi-abstract flow-like games including: Dyson a real-time strategy game about self-replicating mining machines in an asteroid belt; Osmos where your objective is to grow by absorbing other motes; and PixelJunk Eden where you move around organic physically simulated “alien” plantlife.
There are many entry categories - thus many and varied responses to the form including considerable variations in quality. Most entrants however really seem to relish the opportunity to have a go, and it’s great to see a place for Student Entries. Take a look, at the very least it will put a smile on your face.
To start with an incredible mash-up of musical fragments scattered across YouTube. This is the first of a series of seven that Israeli muso/video expert Kutiman (YouTube name) has pieced together. Some of the videos have 1/4 million views in 3 days and rightly so. Second most viewed video embedded at the bottom.
If you don’t believe this was pulled together from until now, disconnected YouTube videos here are the sources
Do Avatars Dream of Human Sleep? Choreographed by Richard James Allen
Do Avatars Dream of Human Sleep? has been developed by The Physical TV Company (Richard James Allen and Karen Pearlman) on a research project supported by Critical Path, Ausdance NSW and The Australia Council for the Arts. The research: to explore the possibilities of dance in “two realities”.
The images and dance, choreographed by Richard James Allen, move seamlessly between the consciousnesses of a live dancing man and a virtual one, stretching the capacities of dance to present extraordinary humans (dancers) shaping time, space and energy in this world and another.
In “Do Avatars Dream of Human Sleep?” a busy dancing man takes a nap in two realities. His live self dreams and his avatar self dreams. Neither reality is quite so simple when they wake.
Second Life is an online virtual world, where you can move an avatar, which you design and dress yourself, through ‘in-world’ 3D spaces, interacting in real time with the architecture, the “nature” and other online avatars. Visit www.thursdaysfictions.com for a quick link into another Physical TV Company production Thursday’s Fictions in Second Life and a chance to explore the virtual world.
KEY CREDITS
Choreographer and Director: Richard James Allen
Dramaturg and Editor: Karen Pearlman
Concept Development: Karen Pearlman, Richard James Allen
Costume Designer: Jacques Tchong
Music/Composers: Michael Yezerski, Christopher Gordon, Nick Wales
Sound Editor: Andrew Plain
Assistant to the Choreographer: Marttaleena Luukkonen
Dancers on stage and screen: Catherine Davies, Cloe Fournier, Fei Lee, Katerina Rajch, Lachlan James Bell, Marttaleena Luukkonen, Rachel Ward, Richard James Allen, Rory Nagle-Runciman, Rui Imizu, Sanna Lundström, Serena Chalker
Special Thanks to:
Margie Medlin, Critical Path
Katherine Blashki, Peter Giles, AFTRS
Larina Hansen, Ausdance NSW
Samantha Chester, Queen St. Studio
Mike Bonenti, Moore Park Gardens
Christophorus Verheyden
Jodie McNeilly
Second Life elements based on the dances, settings and costumes used in this video produced earlier.
A whole new meaning to ‘going down the rabbit hole’…
We have been looking at Artificial Intelligence at AFTRS LAMP for many years now across a range of projects and always looking for ways to go beyond the problems of filling up a big backend database with thousands of likely responses for the NPC or Bot to from input (either as text or voice to text conversions). So it is great to see a firm single step forward out of the woods from David Burden and Daden Limited - a company making statements. The video starts to make sense after the dry introduction when the avatar begins to sense objects around, can interrogate existing social databases such as wikipedia, amazon, in fact any open API - it can potentially have the whole of the open knowledge on the current web/cloud! My favourite element though is its ability to learn and respond emotionally to things put in front of ‘her’ - snakes and rabbits…
A joyous thing for a Monday/Tuesday morning. British band “The Mentalists” demonstrate here that it’s entirely possible to have a band in your pocket, or purse as the case may be. They have covered “Kids” by MGMT (aka musical duo Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden from Brooklyn, NY), using only a lovely array ofr iPhone musical instruments and their own (human) voices. Even better than the orig in my opinion.
In “Do Avatars Dream of Human Sleep?” a busy dancing man takes a nap in two realities. His live self dreams and his avatar self dreams. Neither reality is quite so simple when they wake.
