As already mentioned, my host lost yesterday’s blog entries and so I’m re-entering them. I believe this is the last one, but I forgot the headline, it was a bit longer than the others and I don’t recall specifically what I said. And it’s not really all that important of course, so I’ll cut to the chase with something brief.

The lost post included this entry from We Make Money Not Art about a “Chameleon-Object” designed/fabricated by Janek Jonas (see above image) and this comment I made over on a Clickable Culture entry:

There are things I can code into objects that simply cannot happen to real objects. As gaming becomes increasingly immersive, that unreality becomes significant (it’s a little like some new videogame characters that give people the creeps similarly to how the movie “Polar Express” creeped out people).

I’ve started playing with scripting to do things that fall into this. Not over-the-top stuff that people immediately recognize as unreal; subtle things that make you blink. It’s a fun area.

It also included me recognizing I’d stuck my foot in my mouth and being backed up into the one thing I know we can’t do right now in real world product design: llDie().

{Image Copyright © 2004 Janek Jonas}

Another one lost to my host’s hardware problems. I recall this one pretty well so here’s a basic rehash.

BusinessWeek is carrying a surprisingly good article originating from Car Design News (if you recall, I noted that some recent entries seemed not to be up to their usual high quality; glad that might not be the case after all). The article (link) features design firm Motorcity Europe and has an accompanying slideshow (link). I’ll post a small piece of the article here:

With an international base of talent, a high proportion of value creation done digitally, and a network of associate organizations and individuals with specific capabilities, Motorcity Europe is perhaps the pioneer of this type of new leaner, fitter 21st century independent design studio.

Gives you some idea of where I’m coming from when I say my favorite images in the slideshow are the page of rough sketches and the Alias surfacing for the Galaxy headlamps.

Caught a post over on Wonderland about Valve’s interest/effort in creating “cooperative building games”. Hello. PLM, anyone? Like I said earlier, “This is about the convergence of work and games”.

{Note: Ongoing hosting problems caused me to lose a day of entries – this post included. Fortunately, the entire text was preserved on Wonderland’s trackback.}

And in this corner comes news from C|Net on a new start-up called Multiverse Network. It’s an interesting idea. From the article:

Multiverse’s founders think consumers should be able to switch easily between different virtual worlds. And they say their new game developers’ platform, called Multiverse, can make that happen, while giving small online game developers the ability to work on top of an existing network of games and software code.

Multiverse is a lot like the enterprise software developers’ kits used to build back-end systems at big corporations, but with an open-source twist that lets programmers share what they create.

Instead of defining business processes for things like accounting, the game platform provides developers with a physics engine; the basics of a virtual economy; art assets and much more that they can use in their own games. Once a developer has incorporated those elements and others into a new online game, Multiverse links the new title to its network of virtual worlds, all of which share a common entry point for users.

I only have one question though: can I get something I create out to an SLA machine?

I had an excellent (and long) conversation this morning with a former lead programmer for PTC who has been reading my blog and shares many of my interests. Without getting into details, our discussion turned into a brainstorm about a tool for content creation; only the more I think about it, the more I realize it’s really more than just a tool. It initially felt like a mash-up of a number of different apps, but in reality, after turning things inside out, at the core is what may be an entirely new way to think about digital content and the applications used to develop it.

I have a feeling something like this would gain some traction. And it would almost certainly have to be an open source project, so if it does by some miracle move forward, I’ll be posting about it.