To show how Social 3D Worlds are permeating the real world the first ever Congressional hearing on Virtual Worlds was run in April of this year. The then CEO of Linden Lab (Second Life) Philip Rosedale, testified before the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, basically telling them about the likely ‘influence’ that 3D [...]

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 [...]

A lot of discussion at AFTRS at the moment on differentiating between Games and Social Virtual Worlds and this diagram from Fred Cavazza (site, en Francais) is a clear attempt at highlighting the differences. I like the way Fred (who incidentally has some other great ‘emergent media’ charts here) has used four corners of social, [...]

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, [...]

Its been a long time coming but finally the new Second Life client 1.20 has a new advanced feature hidden in its client/debug menus (advanced/character/enable lip sync) - the ability for the mouth to move roughly in time with the live voice passing through the avatar. Combine this with the already included gestures and you [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Following on from the watercooler post last week on Second Life running on a Samsung phone it is interesting how in the last month we have virtual worlds appearing on mobile devices at every turn - iPhone etc: below. Will May 08 be known as the month Web 3.0 (the real time, social virtual world [...]

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” [...]

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 [...]