The 1968 cult classic, Night of the Living Dead is being remade or “reanimated” in a first for the film industry.
Mike Schneider one of the project coordinaters and lead animator explains:
“Night of the Living Dead Reanimated is a mass collaborative re-envisioning in which artists from around the world select scenes from the original 1968 film [...]

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 [...]

Hat ‘tweet’ tip to Pavig Lok for pointing me at this Tech Crunch for this story and spectacular video over on BlipTV of a new social virtual world that takes real time, multi user worlds to a new level of realism (well minus the smoke and mirrors in this clip). The footage below feels quite [...]

The Thursday’s Fictions cross-media jamboree has been put into the Atom finals awards 2008 as Best Multimodal Production (other 3 entries below).
Award Recipients - Names: Richard James Allen, Gary Hayes, and Karen Pearlman
Award Recipients - Organisations: The Physical TV Company, AFTRS LAMP (The Australian Film Television and Radio School - The Laboratory for Advanced Media [...]

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, [...]

ORIGINALLY POSTED BY GARY ON PERSONALIZEMEDIA
Fed up with your avatar having to live inside a wall-garden world? Want to bring it out into the wider web to play? Well it seems a revolution is at hand, early days and a few notable services listed below, but keep your eyes peeled as virtual characters start to [...]

Although this new soon to be ubiquitous virtual world is not as vastly customisable as Second Life it has some nice useful, linear machinima features such as the rather quaint preset animations and its obvious cartoon aesthetic. I just put together a quick sequence of some of the ’solo’ animations of the toons up onto [...]

I have mentioned several times in this blog about the next big steps in the metaverse and two of my key points spring to mind, 1) Integration with existing online ‘life’ tools and 2) a company with super deep pockets, Google. So without much fanfare or pomp or circumstance ‘Lively - perpetual beta‘ was sneakily [...]

There have been many MMOGs that come and go and initially appear to be contenders out to take a slice of the 65% of the market share that World of Warcraft has in online games arena. Blizzard are making around $500m per year in clear profit from their subscription model and a similar amount in [...]

Literature and New Media: trope – promoting new writing in Second Life
www.trope.net.au
When/where: Thursday, 22 May 2008, 12pm – 2pm, Bangarra Theatre, Pier 4/5, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay

trope is a new space in Second Life promoting creative writing in virtual environments. The roundtable features trope’s creators alongside writers selected for the first iteration, discussing the [...]

As LAMP were presenting in mid 07 during various machinima and virtual world seminars the film ” Molotov Alva” has finally been transmitted on a national cable network, HBO in the US yesterday. Click here to go to HBO site to see a preview (for a week or so) and here is the official web [...]

An interesting video with the creators of the new pilot web site from Carnegie Mellon University, called Spongecell. Spongecell. brings together the interactivity of social networking to product marketing and promotion campaigns. An interesting example was the Yari Film Group in the USA..
Yari Film Group sees 40% opt-in
“We wanted to promote our movie “Final Season” [...]

Some of the UK’s best young novelists are working with computer games designers to create digital short stories, each inspired by a classic work of literature though featuring games, blogs and web tools. Six digital fiction stories are being released over six weeks.

“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. [...]