At AFTRS LAMP we are very interested in Artificial Intelligence as the foundation of NPC or non player charaters. Once you have a good generative scripted character they can interact with ‘participants’ in cinematic games or virtual worlds and drive narrative by having real conversations. So students can also develop AI to automatically create emotional [...]
A hat tip to Dan Taylor over at BBC for pointing out this lovely little viral that allows you the passive, sit-on-the-couch-and-munch-crisps viewer (well fiddle with laptop) to be the star of Spooks. FaceSpook is a personalized video tool where your face is mapped onto a character in an action scene - and all via [...]
Interesting little vignette below featuring Dr. Lisa Dethridge (RMIT lecturer and an ex LAMP participant for an SLCN.tv-like LAMP project called InWorld) with the presenter of ABC’s community focused TV show ‘Can We Help?’. The short video has several clips of ABC Island built by a Gary Hazlitt (whoever he is) and in an earlier [...]
Gary Hazlitt and Gazlitt (aka as me!) take a ‘break’ in over fifty worlds comprising the current metaverse, here is the holiday video…cross posted from Personalizemedia.
“I am doing curriculum development (and other things) on the evolving range of social virtual worlds and have recently ventured into fifty of them to review and sample the culture, [...]
A project that went through the LAMP treatment in 2006, Emergence from the Synarcade production team, has posted a short documentary mostly about the performative aspects on YouTube (embed below). They already had a successful live show but during the LAMP residential they concentrated on a virtual world parallel version alongside the live performance, interactive [...]
The Second Life client is now on Samsung mobile handsets, allowing access to the Second Life virtual world whenever and wherever-without wires! It includes a ‘mixed blogging’ platform that allows users to post their blog simultaneously in the real world AND the virtual world of Second Life. Users can also have ‘mixed world’ experiences by communicating with avatar friends [...]
An interesting insight into the most popular social networkers.
Went to a MySpace developers pre-launch party last night and had nice chats with the Australia MySpace crew and visiting US developer leads (see previous post) who are here to catalyse some really cool ‘widgets’ and apps for a still pretty dominant global Social Network. One thing [...]
We don’t talk about our own home grown, cheap-cheerful, DIY projects on water-cooler that much but this could be classed as cool I think. A ‘amateur’ production flow scenario showing how tools at the disposal of many folk now can do some interesting stuff. The remarkable thing was that this was a quick 5 hour [...]
“There’s no question that all my synapses were firing in the virtual world and in real reality.” Margot Knight, alternate-reality game heroine
OK this is old news as far as Watercooler timescales are concerned, June 2007, slaps wrist. But as I have just stumbled across it, worth blogging about for reference, because not many have - [...]
A cross-post from the main LAMP blog cause this is cool…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTv975gPvow
A mini ARG (Alternate Reality Game) with virtual world parallel components as part of the 8th LAMP residential in Marysville, Victoria Australia.
We have been running LAMP residential workshops for nearly 3 years now and on the first day we normally run a team bond/building game. [...]
I find this really interesting and a portent of the future. I am sure you remember the context to the films Bladerunner, chasing down sneeky renegade bots. Then there was AI with its ‘Flesh Fair’, destroying robots, then the agents in Matrix, what is real and who is not etc: All come from many years [...]
…or so it seems by the constant line of broadcasters (ABC, SBS, CBC, C4 and endless news reports) who deliver so called ‘insights’ into the growing phenomenon of Social Virtual Worlds. The new BBC doco aired a couple of nights ago (YouTube segments embedded below) brought to mind reasons why traditional media companies may want [...]
The other night walking home from the fruit market in downtown Bondi I passed an elderly lady wearing a huge Kevin07 t-shirt draped over her tiny sparrow frame and the thought struck me: what is John Howard up to these days? Has there been any continuation of the YouTube slanging match between Rudd and Howard? Or [...]
Been waiting for a definitive documentary on the phenomena behind the vast swathes of humanity moving into Social Virtual Worlds and MMOGs and this looks like it. A trailer has just been posted on YouTube and already got 23 000 hits in a day, a feat in itself, and it looks like it tackles the [...]
