PolyBot Politics

pic no worky

When Jeff Goldblum starts explaining insect politics to his love interest during Cronenberg‘s remake of “The Fly“, I visualized this mass of insects swarming over something dead, but somehow communicating and politicking – a hive mind. Creepy thought. That thought returned to me upon seeing this site. Watch the Tricycle demo and also the “Reconfiguration” video. Now imagine tiny polybots… working together… reconfiguring… creepy creepy creepy. Maybe I should have recalled the scene in “Prince of Darkness” where the dead body is animated by insects and talks to the researchers. Brrrrrrrr.

What does this have to do with my blog’s current focus? Nothing. Just creeped me out.

SL Product Design

rebangterminalW

Not actually the first design I’ve created in Second Life. I’ve already constructed a monopod vehicle (that requires some additional code to limit rotations to prevent it from “shoveling”), a hoverpod (that’s sluggish in the turn), and eye glasses that play streaming video (cool, but only a test). And this. It’s actually the second in-world vendor terminal I’ve modeled. The first, unfortunately, had “copy/modify” permissions improperly set (ok, I’m a noob), and as a result may now be in use somewhere in Second Life without my knowledge. It was intended for a virtual world competition, but given its possible… likely… emancipation, I opted to design a second one – the above. That object was entered and soundly defeated (so much for my ego). However, it marks a turning point in my second life, so I decided to document that here. And apart from it’s magical ability to defy gravity, I’d like to see a kiosk like this in real life (it looks better in-world. honest.)

Intersecting Overlapping Expanding Improving

Augmented reality, overlaying three dimensional virtual objects onto our “real world”, continues to be a frequent topic on the sites I visit – including this one over on Setpoint Originator (which I may have mentioned earlier). And yesterday Bruce Sterling posted a link to an AR demonstration video over on MIT’s website. Cool. But fair warning if you’re on a slow connection, the MIT webpage has the Quicktime video embedded so you’re going to get hit with streaming video the minute you get there. Watch it here.