Here’s something fun coming on the heels of those morphing architecture posts from last week. Wired has a brief story (Link) on Mixed Reality Lab of Singapore’s effort to bring people and their pets together on the playing field, so to speak. From the Wired article:

Computerized movements in Mice Arena are mapped to and from the real world, where an actual predator (your hamster) gives chase to a digital avatar (you) by pursuing a real piece of bait. The avatar’s movements in the virtual environment direct the bait around a small tank fitted with actuators that mold and twist an elastic latex floor into the changing terrain of the game map.

Not quite as exciting as “giant” pets chasing miniature owner-morsels around a cheesy b-movie set, but still pretty neat.

{Image source: Mixed Reality Lab, Singapore}

Raph Koster has posted something of interest, a post titled “What the Web and games have to teach each other” (Link). Interesting to me especially given my post yesterday (reLink) which makes mention of both in their relation to Product Lifecycle Management software (PLM).

For his part, Koster starts to look at the shared elements between videogames and internet-related applications. This is where I wish I had a better handle on the current state of PLM software. As I commented over on his entry and hinted at in my earlier post, I believe PLMware is wrapped up with both. A deeper understanding would be helpful. I could then take his list and see how PLM relates. Unfortunately, that will have to wait until later. In the meantime, we can at least read comments discussing two of the three.

A little late, but via a post over on the MIT Technology Review website (Link), I found this bit of interface design. Neat demo. Makes me wonder what kinds of 3D interactivity we’ll be seeing in the coming days.

For those of you who have noticed, over the past few weeks I’ve been refocusing this blog. While advertising inside games was once new and interesting, it is – to me – now mostly old hat. I have no interest in blogging the latest moves of that industry; the technology is in place and the word is out. Let others worry about which brand signs what deal with which intermediary to stream ad content into which games on what platforms. There might be something on occasion that I find of special interest, but generally that’s not what this blog is really about. Recognition of this sort is only the first hurdle afaic. There are other areas to watch.

What you should have noticed was an increased number of posts dealing with those other elements that are part of the overall equation – especially fabbing technologies. Of course news in that field is less dynamic, so overall anyone who bothers to read this blog should expect a decrease in the number of posts … at least until the technology adoption rate really kicks into gear.
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Picking up from where we left off (reLink), the Interactive Architecture blog has another entry, “Topotransegrity – Non-Linear Responsive Environments – Robert Neumayr” (Link), on morphing architectural structures. Very cool stuff.

When I look at the images, I can’t help but think that my most recent post discussing printed biological organs is related. Walking on a morphing structure must feel like walking on the heaving chest of a titan; a living, breathing thing.

Now imagine a structure not of pneumatically-controlled trusses, but of some biological mass, or maybe some material derived from the work being done at UT Dallas (reLink). Wicked.

You know, where else could you test something like this but in a virtual world where users are sufficiently immersed to make a proper judgement as to whether average people could stomach the ride… before they got on.

{Image source: 5subzero.org}