The Yale Law School blog, LawMeme, has a good entry posted (Link) concerning the thinning barrier between virtual world banks and real world legalities. In this case, the post centers its crosshairs on activities that have been occurring in the massive EVE Online virtual universe. The case involves the player-created Eve Intergalactic Bank and how, after accumulating what must have been a fair chunk of change – transferable to real life currency – the player/owner abruptly shut down the operation and made off with the… something.

I’d heard of EIB, but only through some peripheral reading. However, I do know that similar activities may be occurring in less game-like virtual environs; namely Second Life. This is all fascinating stuff which has ties to something of particular interest to me: 3D data that is portable from real production to virtual worlds and back again. Money issues will likely set the precedents, but money is not the only thing of real world value.

Anyway, check out the entry and maybe head over to Terra Nova where they’ve been discussing this as well (Link).

via Techdirt and Blue’s News

This could only be creepier if William Shatner, who was in Kingdom of the Spiders“, did a spoken word piece for the soundtrack. The video clip does bring that old b-movie to mind, doesn’t it? It also reminds me of those creepy reconfiguring polybots I mentioned last year (reLink). Only now I want to build one for myself.

If you like this video, be sure to check out the other videos being uploaded by robots7.

{Update: I didn’t know you could buy this thing via a kit – Link. Surprise, surprise. A bit pricey, but still…}

Remember those animorphic urban vinyl-consumer packaging pieces I found over on Vinyl Pulse back in June (reLink)? Well, after that post got picked up by the MIT Advertising Lab blog, it seems everyone fell in love with them (and I have the blog traffic to say that the Japanese really dug them). In any event, someone who saw Sket One‘s vinyl blends took the initiative to interview him. Check out the Q&A on the murketing blog (Link) (I was wondering why the show was in New Haven; now I know).

via PSFK

I read about this new combustion engine design early last week, but I just caught something on Wired (Link) that I didn’t know: “So far, the engine exists only as a computer model.” Nice.

The YouTube video is excellent. Give it a look.

I happened across a link on CGTalk that took me to a machinima for Unreal Tournament 2007 (Link). Of course there’s been quite a lot of talk about Epic’s game engine(s) over the past year or so (you might recall my previous comment about it – reLink), so I had to take a look for myself.

I’ll confess that it’s not quite as nice as I’d hoped. The technology demos looked more impressive to me. However, that may be because I find the game design itself repetitious. All that computing power just to make another capture the flag. Once I get past that, I start thinking about what I always think about: convergence. To that end, let me show a couple screens and post links to some things that come to mind when I see what a videogame can now do.
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I’ll confess to not understanding how so many Industrial Designers can be blinded to the potentials of this technology. I don’t hear anyone discussing this stuff in the design community. I recently asked the designers on Core77 if any of them did any game design… y’know, for fun. Not a single positive response. Now that’s unreal.

{Images source: Epic Games‘ video}