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The Looming Dark Horizon: When the IP Mess Hits Industrial Design & Co.
{Temporary Note, 6 October 2009: Core77 visitors might want to read “Update 2″ at the bottom of this post. And by the way, “the (uncredited) writer” is me.}
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: my primary interest in tracking the intellectual property issues currently plaguing the music and movie industries, waiting in the [...]
Kinset: “Straight Retailing” 3D VR
{The embedded video is not longer available, so here’s a direct link to the video on Boston.com (Link)}
I’ve just given Kinset, a 3D virtual shopping application, (Link) a spin. Before I offer my opinion, let’s start off with what it’s supposed to be. From the website:
Kinset is for those of us who like to shop. [...]
Virtual Earth Building Momentum
Shortly after all the buzz surrounding rumors concerning Google Earth, I posted a Twitter telling people to watch for news on the Microsoft Virtual Earth front. Sure enough, things started popping up on my screen. And now add what I consider the most interesting news courtesy of C|Net, “Microsoft Virtual Earth offers 3D building [...]
Design News Noticing Second Life
It wasn’t too long ago I was taking upFront.eZine/WorldCAD Access writer Ralph Grabowski to task (reLink) for what I considered extraordinarily subjective (and, by extension, myopic) comments regarding the potential of Second Life and social applications that, like it, allowed for immersive 3D content creation. Not that Grabowski is alone; from my experience, most people [...]
Transreality Interfaces: From Whiteboards to Grey Matter
After I first saw the above video on the The Weekly Squeak blog (Link), I immediately did a search on prices for interactive whiteboards. That is a seriously cool combination of technologies. And I’m not the only one who thinks so; Julian Lombardi has been posting rare updates to his blog (Link 1, Link 2, [...]
Sustainability Scapegoats: Industrial Designers?
There’s an opinion piece over on BusinessWeek penned by Geoff Vuleta that got my attention a few days back. In “One Vision for the Future of Chrysler” (Link), Vuleta discusses how embracing sustainability initiatives could be good for Chrysler. So far so good. It’s easy to buy into cost-reducing initiatives that also happen to promote [...]
Design. Community. Awareness
Something recently made me aware that there seems to be a dearth of Industrial Designers involved in online communities centered around intangible media and discussing the issues they’re currently facing. I suspect there are plenty of designers huddled around car websites, sneaker sites or other tangible product-centric communities, but there don’t appear to be very [...]
Where Now, Portable Avatar?
By now I assume that those of you with an interest in the virtual world topics I cover here have read about the announcement made at the opening of last week’s Virtual World Conference and Expo; Fall 2007: Linden Lab and IBM have joined forces to push “avatar portability”. Those of you surprised by this [...]