Wired online has a nice write up/excerpt from the soon-to-be released unauthorized biography of Apple’s CEO and pitchman, Steve Jobs. The article is about industrial design, the iPod, and a washing machine. I found the washing machine bit especially interesting since, if I recall correctly, Nissan’s former design guru Jerry Hirshberg went through a similar ordeal. I think he bought a European machine as well.
Monthly Archives: May 2005
RadTag Tech
Last year I did a quick little project (image above) called RadTag for a design competition. Didn’t get any notice (although I may have screwed up my entry) but I had fun with it. Aside from figuring out a business plan around this thing (a radiation detector that is a peer-to-peer networking device and personal locator), I also did a bit of technology research. One piece that saved my hide on this concept was a child location device I came across that used a wireless signal and cellphone towers. Looks like a better option may have surfaced. I just came across an entry on defensetech.org for a radio chip from Rosum Corporation that probably does a much better job, and I expect the intent is to facilitate exactly the kind of device I dreamed up last year. It’ll be interesting to see where all this leads.
In the meantime, I’ve had some conversations with Jerry Paffendorf (of the Second Life Future Salon blog) regarding the integration of augmented reality and services like Google Maps. He’s been following this stuff and has posted an entry that ties Google’s acquisition of Dodgeball into this. And you can read my comment there as well. Assuming you care….
Blog In Game
There’s been alot of “blog talk” the last week or so. BusinessWeek had a big article on it… there were comments and discussions about that… then there was some NYTimes article by Adam Cohen on it yesterday I guess (maybe spurred by the BW thing), that got other people like Chris Anderson over on the Long Tail site talking. I rather liked Anderson’s comment: “The first rule of the blogosphere…is not to generalize about the blogosphere.” Seems that should apply to a lot of things.
Well, after all that (most of which I simply stepped cautiously around), I came upon this entry over on the MIT Technology Review site via the MIT AdLab site about the advertising potential of in-game blogging. It’s not all that amazing an article, but it did remind me that “non-gamish” virtual worlds like Second Life have already embraced this kind of stuff (there’s now an in-world internet of sorts so there should be real blogs popping up any day). Second Life even has a paid in-world journalist who posts entries online on his New World Notes site – and some of what is written is decidely not “game” material. Surprising that Second Life and perhaps other sims weren’t included in that article… almost as if someone else out there doesn’t quite consider them Games. I wonder if, when MMORPGs start churning out real advertising deals and XBox2 players start earning real cash using Microsoft’s virtual business tools, if those too will look less like games and more like regular businesses.
Pearl Dolls
Via Beverly Tang’s blog, I found a curious site called Pearl Children. I don’t read Japanese, but it appears to be part of a handmade doll movement (hey, I noticed that obvious “handmade doll webring” thing on the bottom; nothing gets past me). Though I’ve not heard of this before, it’s not surprising given the explosive popularity of niche items like the underground “designer” vinyl toy industry (just check out a site like www.kidrobot.com to see a good cross-section of that stuff).
What really has me wondering is whether this set of dolls is inspired in any way by the “suicide clubs” or whatever they’re called in Japan. I forget where I first heard of them, but given the zombified look of these dolls, it seems plausible. Makes me wonder what hybrid fusion of industrial design, art and anthropologic recorder we’re creating with all this technology. More importantly, it seems like an uncomfortable decision might sometimes have to be made: profit from something like these suicide clubs, or try to draw attention to them (in order to end the practice) and kill the cash cow. Interesting situation. And this site probably has nothing to do with that trend.
More Mainstream News of the Virtual
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m seeing ever increasing news articles covering virtual worlds. This latest one, over on C|Net, spends most of it’s time talking about Solipsis, manages to get a comment in on the OSMP, and includes Second Life (the article has links to all three). No comment on Croquet though which I mentioned two days ago and which seems much further along than Solipsis. Or any other projects I’ve come across, such as Kerry Bonin’s slowly developing VScape/VML project. Still, might be worth a read.