An acquaintaince of mine passed this along: billboards that customize their message based on the electronic gadget a user is holding. I’d mentioned something similar to him when we were discussing how virtual worlds can function like crystal balls in helping designers to forecast what might develop in meatspace. I’d also suggested to BW’s Heather Green, over on Blogspotting some time back, that this sort of thing was coming.

The best/worst part of this story though, depending on your point-of-view, is the thought that software agents are going to bickerbid over which ad gets shown in the event certain conflicting situations arise. From the New Scientist article (Link):

If more than one person is standing in front of the screen, however, the system must try to choose material seen by as few of the current audience as possible.
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Earlier in the week I was reading a forum post about the next Peugeot automotive design competition (an annual affair). Surfing to the competition website (Link) I was surprised to learn that it’s going transreal. Here’s the pitch:

P.L.E.A.S.E. innovate !

Re-invent the ‘Drive of Your Life’, Peugeot style:
• Discover a LIFE size version of the car at the Frankfurt 2007 Motor Show and
• Drive it in the XBOX 360 VIRTUAL world!

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A week or so ago I asked Vik Olliver (the same guy who made the “meccano glue gun” fabber – reLink) to post images of his latest device, Zaphod. I didn’t get any pictures, but we do now have a nice clip of the device in action over on YouTube. Excellent.
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Interesting post on New World Note (Link) discussing the spike in new accounts after the recent Second Life security breach (reLink). While I don’t track statistics, I did find myself watching the SL front page stats, and also noticed that active logins were relatively high following the breach; usually over 8000. And by virtue of my new Google custom page (which I’m still not sure I like), I was seeing a whole slew of articles on the breach – from MSM to never-heard-of-’em press (reLink). That story did have some legs.
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This one seems rather intuitive for anyone who has spent time in Second Life, but an article over on nature.com (Link) reports on findings which suggests that people using avatars appear to behave in much the same way in the virtual world as they would in the real world. From that article:

With thousands of people using Second Life at any one time, Nick Yee and colleagues at Stanford University realised it presented a chance to assess whether users interacted in similar ways to people in the real world.

After using a computer program to monitor the behaviour of over 1,600 avatars in one-on-one interactions, they conclude that the answer is ‘yes’. Male avatars (whether created by a man or a woman) stood further apart than female avatars, for instance, and were more likely to avert their gaze. And when an avatar gets within a few metres of another, the user reduces eye contact by moving their character to face slightly to the right or the left of the other ‘person’.

I guess the social scientists are all giddy over this news. I just got this to say to all the researchers out there: Anyone a youse touches my stuff… I’ll kill ya. Anyone a youse touches me… I’ll kill ya.

via VRoot